Nureta sainome is the most accurately descriptive title for a movie we’ve run across in a while. In English it was called Wet Dice. We’ll let that percolate for a bit. The film starred Michiko Tsukasa, and while these Japanese sexploitation films are short (this one is seventy-two minutes), they defy quick summaries. Michiko plays a bar owner in an unsatisfactory relationship who runs into a past lover in a chō-han gambling parlor. Seven years earlier she had tried to run away from her yakuza boyfriend with this lover, but he never joined her at the train station. We find that he had a good reason for failing to show. Michiko has also recently met a young woman played by Misa Aoyama who wants to run away with her boyfriend to Siberia—of all places. The idea here is for Michiko, who has reached a middle age of regrets, to be contrasted with Misa, who has known few true disappointments apart from want, but becomes so desperate for money that she decides to sell her virginity, and may end up with the same jaded worldview as Michiko. The story has other twists and subtexts, but that’s basically the idea.
So back to the wet dice thing. In the chō-han sequences, instead of rolling the dice from a cup, Ai Yoshino drops them out of her vagina. Yeah. When you hear that, if you know a bit about Japanese cinema, you’re probably certain this is a Nikkatsu Studios movie. But it was actually released by Wakamatsu Production, and though it’s clearly imitative of Nikkatsu’s output, we can’t call it a roman porno because that was Nikkatsu’s proprietary categorization for their films. But not so fast, friends. With a little digging we learned that Nikkatsu did in fact make this movie. They funneled it to cinemas via a distribution deal through Wakamatsu. So, it is a roman porno, and the world can continue rotating on its usual axis. Now, as to whether the movie is worth watching, we’d say yes, if only to see Siberia worked in as symbolism for a barren future, but remember that roman pornos show nothing explicit, which means the sex and dice rolling and everything else is accomplished merely by suggestion. Nureta sainome premiered today in 1974.
