Perhaps his greatest achievement, The World of Geisha (Nippon jokyō den: iro zamurai), takes the keyword immoral indecent relations and turns it inside out. The film is set in the geisha districts of post-war Osaka, but these are not the refined geisha of Hollywood imagination. Kumashiro shows the economic reality: geisha houses as brothels of emotional labor, where women perform desire for men who can no longer perform intimacy.

One devastating scene involves an aging geisha who must service a young salaryman. He is impotent from stress. To arouse him, she recounts a childhood memory of watching her mother die during the war. His arousal returns—not from the erotic, but from the traumatic. Kumashiro frames this as neither perverse nor condoning, but simply factual. The immoral indecent relation here is between the nation’s memory and its present desires. Japan’s wartime trauma, he implies, has been sublimated into the very language of sexual trade.

In the pantheon of Japanese cinema, few directors shine as darkly or as brilliantly as Tatsumi Kumashiro. Known as the "King of Roman Porno"—the Nikkatsu studio’s venerable and often daring "romantic pornography" line—Kumashiro elevated the pink film from simple exploitation to high art. While his film The World of Geisha is often cited as his masterpiece, his 1978 work, Immoral Indecent Relations (released in Japan as Furyō Shōsetsu: Indecent Relations), stands as a quintessential example of his unique ability to blend the visceral with the philosophical.

Far from being a mere collection of titillating scenes, Immoral Indecent Relations is a claustrophobic, psychologically complex exploration of memory, obsession, and the crushing weight of societal expectations. It is a film that uses the language of erotica to tell a story of profound tragedy.

Before analyzing Kumashiro’s filmography, we must understand the loaded Japanese context. The terms futoku (immoral) and futaisaku (indecent) carry legal weight under Japan’s pre-war and post-war obscenity laws. In the early 1970s, when Kumashiro began directing for Nikkatsu’s newly launched Roman Porno label, these terms were floating signifiers for any sexual act outside marriage, procreation, or state-sanctioned intimacy: adultery, incestuous desire, sadomasochism, public indecency, and voyeurism.

Kumashiro’s innovation was to refuse moral judgment. He did not make cautionary tales. Instead, he portrayed immoral indecent relations as the secret engine of everyday life. A salaryman’s affair with a colleague’s wife, a student’s obsession with an older woman, the collective orgies in cramped post-war apartments—all were presented not as deviance but as logical responses to absurd social pressures.

Tatsumi Kumashiro’s work is a sustained, courageous argument against easy moralizing. By immersing his narratives in “immoral and indecent relations,” he does not celebrate sin for its own sake. Rather, he uses transgression to ask a more dangerous question: What if the indecent act is more honest than the decent life? His characters, trapped in a Japan that has exchanged militaristic fanaticism for economic consumerism, find their only moments of truth in breaking the rules. For Kumashiro, the truly obscene is the polite lie, the smiling face of conformity, the unspoken violence of the ordinary. The “immoral” lover, the “indecent” prostitute, the taboo-breaking outcast—these are the only free people in his world. His legacy is a cinema that forces us to confront the unsettling possibility that liberation, however fleeting and painful, lies not in following the law, but in the beautiful, desperate, and utterly human act of breaking it.

The film is part of Kumashiro’s early Roman Porno (erotic) works at Nikkatsu, but he subverts the genre by focusing on social realism, gender politics, and dark comedy. It follows Zōsan, a lazy, cynical "kept man" (himo) who lives off women. The story revolves around his relationships with two very different women: a prostitute and a bourgeois housewife. Rather than pure titillation, Kumashiro examines power, economic dependency, and emotional manipulation in postwar Japan.

To read Kumashiro as merely a chronicler of sexual deviance is to miss his political fury. The 1970s were the height of Japan’s Economic Miracle—a period of conservative family values, corporate loyalty, and relentless social conformity. Kumashiro’s camera despised this world.

In Wet Dream of the Seaside (1979), a group of salarymen on a company retreat hire prostitutes. The sexual acts are mechanical, sad, and often interrupted by the men vomiting from drink. The "indecent relations" are not the hired sex, but the "decent" relation of boss to subordinate. The boss humiliates the junior employee by making him watch; the junior employee then goes home to his wife and cannot touch her.

Kumashiro inherited the trauma of World War II and the American Occupation. His films are littered with background details—a veteran missing a leg, a shadow of a B-29 on a wall. He suggests that the Occupation’s rewriting of Japanese law (outlawing feudal family structures, imposing democratic ideals) created a schizophrenic national psyche. People were told to be modern and decent, but their desires remained feudal and violent. The "indecent relation" was the only bridge between these two eras.

Tatsumi Kumashiro directed over 40 films before his death in 2001. For decades, his work was trapped in the pink ghetto of Roman Porno, dismissed by academics and preserved poorly by Nikkatsu. Only in the last decade has a re-evaluation begun. The British Film Institute and Criterion Collection have begun restoring his films, presenting them alongside Ozu and Kurosawa.

Why now? Because the conversation around "immoral indecent relations" has shifted. In the #MeToo era, Kumashiro’s films are paradoxical. Are they feminist? They feature relentless female nudity and subjugation. Are they misogynist? They give their female characters the most complex interiority—desire, rage, cunning. His heroines are never passive victims; they are active agents in their own indecency.

The American critic Stephen Prince called Kumashiro "the only pornographer who understood that shame is the most powerful aphrodisiac." To watch a Kumashiro film is to feel your own morality called into question. You are not aroused in the traditional sense; you are implicated.