When people say “Nikkatsu SM queen,” they usually mean Naomi Tani (谷直美). She was born on 20 October 1948 in Hakata, Fukuoka. She did not invent Japanese SM cinema. She is the person who carried it from independent pink film into a major studio and made it a respectable, profitable line of work. In the 1970s Nikkatsu’s Roman Porno cycle — high-budget softcore — sold bondage, torture staged as spectacle, and adaptations of Oniroku Dan. Tani gave that cycle a look: very white skin that showed candle wax and the red of a whip, and a maternal glamour in rope, a body that could endure and also handle the scene as craft. Before Nikkatsu she had already been in more than two hundred independent films and was called the Queen of Pink. She left at the peak and refused to age on camera.
The name, and the independent years
At eighteen she moved to Tokyo. A photo layout in Weekly Taishu brought offers from the independent pink companies. In 1967 she debuted in Special, directed by Kōji Seki. The screen name is a literary joke with a body punch line. “Tani” comes from the novelist Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. “Naomi” is the heroine of his early novel A Fool’s Love. Tani also means valley, and in slang it is the cleavage between the breasts. Years later she opened a restaurant called Ohtani — big Tani, big breasts. She knew what the name was doing, and she knew the body and the name were the same brand.
Outside Nikkatsu she played comedy, drama, and war pictures, including a nurse on a China battlefield in Experiments on the Human Body. SM entered the work in the same period. In 1967 Masanao Sakao’s Cruel Map of Women’s Bodies was her first full SM lead: a prostitute pulled back and forth between the yakuza and getting free. That same year she was in independent films by Kōji Wakamatsu and Shinya Yamamoto, and she became friends with Oniroku Dan, later the major SM novelist. Dan was then secretly writing scripts under the name Matsugoro Kuroiwa. His novel Flower and Snake became the literary engine of her Nikkatsu years. One condition of her joining the studio was that Dan would write for her.
Roman Porno, white skin, Black Rose
In 1971 Nikkatsu, already an old studio, entered the softcore market with Roman Porno. Supporting parts for the studio’s existing leading women did not interest her. She went back to lower-budget films where she could star. Even when Nikkatsu offered major roles, she refused for years, because the studio would not put SM inside Roman Porno. She agreed to join only if her first film was an adaptation of Dan’s Flower and Snake. Masaru Konuma directed it in 1974. That was her entry into Nikkatsu’s SM line. The film was a hit. Wife to Be Sacrificed, the same year, was not from a Dan novel, and it became one of the top five moneymakers in Nikkatsu’s history. The two pictures set the commercial pattern of SM Roman Porno. The money was in the combination: Naomi Tani, Oniroku Dan, and Masaru Konuma.
Her body was the instrument. For the twelve years she acted she never went to the beach and never allowed a suntan. White skin was a technical requirement. It had to show red from the whip and from melting wax. Shōgorō Nishimura’s Lady Black Rose (1978) has two scenes that still get pulled as exhibits. In one, gallons of water are forced into her mouth through a funnel and her stomach appears to swell. She later said that was not a special effect: she could suck her belly into a small ball and then expand it. In the other, gallons of brandy go into her vagina and her skin flushes from pale to drunken red. Colleagues remembered that she did extreme SM scenes without complaint. Shinya Yamamoto’s line was “Naomi Tani is a monster,” praise for taking physical difficulty ordinary pink stars refused. She said an actress’s job is to excite the audience, not herself. She worked the torture scenes with directors until they were both cruel and beautiful, so the audience would feel sympathy rather than mere voyeurism.
Besides Konuma she worked with Yasuharu Hasebe, the director people called violent pink, and with Kōyū Ohara and Shōgorō Nishimura. In Fairy in a Cage she plays a wealthy businesswoman tortured by the sadistic head of a wartime Japanese military inquisition. Wartime interrogation plus rope is a device Japanese SM cinema keeps returning to: period authority, and the state imagined as a dungeon master. Cruelty: Black Rose Torture (1975) stuck her with the studio nickname Black Rose, and later films kept using it. Her co-star Terumi Azuma was paired with her in several pictures until 1976, when Azuma began headlining on her own and became one of the successors.
She stops, then a shop and a witness appearance
In 1979, at the height of her popularity, she starred in Nishimura’s Rope and Skin, her last starring film, and Nikkatsu treated the farewell as an event. Then she retired suddenly. She did not want to disappoint fans with an unflattering face. She refused to age on camera and wanted to stay in memory as a flower still in bloom. After she left, the body rules lifted. She could golf and go to the beach. In 1981 a car hit her while she was walking her dog, and she spent three years in rehabilitation. She divorced in 1984. After the divorce she opened the Ohtani restaurant in Kumamoto, and it did well. In 1996, near Hakata, she opened the video shop Yours Naomi, specializing in Nikkatsu Roman Porno, and steered younger buyers from cheap AV toward those films.
In the late 1990s American interest in Japanese SM film reached her. Wife to Be Sacrificed had a U.S. theatrical run in 1998 in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. She was surprised and embarrassed. She had thought American audiences would simply read the films as abusive toward women, and she had not expected the films’ intent to be taken up again. In 2000 she was persuaded to appear in Hideo Nakata’s documentary on Masaru Konuma, Sadistic and Masochistic. It was not a new SM lead. She was a witness for the director who had opened her Nikkatsu reign. Four Oniroku Dan stories first published in Japanese in 1997 came out in English in 2010 from Vertical, Inc., as Season of Infidelity. The last story, “Bewitching Bloom,” recounts Dan’s relationship with Tani and adds notes on three later Nikkatsu queens: Junko Mabuki, Izumi Shima, and Miki Takakura.
She pushed a major studio to accept rope and eroticized torment, trained her skin as a surface for light, and treated pain scenes as something designed rather than something that merely happened to the actress. She received a Japanese Academy nomination for best actress. Critic Ian Buruma called her the Mother Goddess in bondage: a grown woman who could absorb male violence and still look composed. She left while the brand was still worth money, kept the old films in a video shop, and named a restaurant after her body.
