Harakiri on his way to Eden For the first transgression, the forbidden fruit, the pernicious fruit that death brought, and all our misfortunes into this world, the people were deprived of Eden, until the time when the Greatest Man raised us up, the blessed Paradise returned us, Sing, O Mounted Muse! Come down from the peaks of the Mysterious Sinai or Horeb, where you were inspired by the shepherd, who first taught his people by the Emergence of Heaven and Earth from Chaos; when you are dear.
The hill of Zion and the key of Siloam, the verbs of God's region, I call thee from there for help; my song dared to fly over Helikon, To the sublime objects rushing, untouched neither in prose nor in verse.
(John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book One)
An unnamed beautiful Japanese girl in military uniform walks slowly against the backdrop of a gloomy urban landscape of a certain uncertain Japanese metropolis. The colors are dull, the sun shines over her, and everywhere there is only dirt, stench and hatred in flashing faces. Entering an empty room, the girl bares her stomach and with a fierce, truly hypnotic passion, begins to perform the process of ritual seppuku.
Japanese underground films of the subgenre of self-mutilation and seppuku-movi are a spectacle far from for faint-hearted and weak-stomach viewers. Such tapes, the number of which can be counted on the fingers of one hand, even on the territory of the Land of the Rising Sun come out infrequently and can hardly boast of any artistic value, except for the goals of deviant spectator shock or excitement, because in many respects these films are a mixture of outright pornography and expressive visual naturalistic cruelty. Pictures of this original genre can not be called thrash in pure form, as well as pure, that is, dirty pornography, it is not even pseudo-snuff in the spirit of the cult “guinea pig” Hideshi Hino and Satoru Ogura; self-mutilation and seppuku-movi are on the fine line between boottgeraite necrorealism and typical Japanese eroticism and all such creations should be perceived exclusively in the context of pinku eiga, only more perverse and specific.
One of the most successful and interesting pictures of the category of self-mutilation is a series of short works by a cute Japanese woman Yuuri Sunohara, published in the period from the late 80s to the 90s and actually became in opposition to the mountain orgies of Experimental Pigs. The pinnacle of this series, better known as “Onna harakiri”, was released in 1990, a 34-minute psychedelic short film “Paradise Lost” by director, composer and installer artist Masami Akito, but in fact became exclusively the author’s project of Yuuri Sunohara, producer and full performer of the main role in all films of this extraordinary series.
Paradise Lost is an overtly fetishistic movie. Military uniforms are an absolute fetish for some. A beautiful girl in military uniform is an even bigger fetish for males of different ages pouring sweat, saliva and sperm. A girl dressed in a uniform on her bosom breasts and other bodies - la petite mort and fetish not in a cube, but in a square. And the same girl making herself oh-oh-oh, seppuku with frenzy and frenzy - a fetish for deeply unhealthy people.
However, Yuuri Sunohara multiplied these fetishes by many times the extraordinary explicit visual naturalism of the shameless action, filmed by the operator Akio Fuji with a certain amount of love for this unusual process of self-destruction, reinforced it with the soundtrack from Masami Akita, driving the viewer into a state of mesmerizing hypnotic trance and added to the murderous persuasiveness of a certain philosophical background, which consists in the deliberate poetization of death and suicide in the main name of the lost heroine.
The very title of this picture very straightforward way refers to the outstanding poem by John Milton “Paradise Lost”. Yuuri Sunohara’s heroine is Eve, exiled from Eden, experienced in life and in battle. Tired of clinging to life, she seeks at all costs to regain her love and, perhaps, the very meaning of life through ritual suicide, contrary to divine dogmas and principles. But for her, this is no longer important: Heaven and Hell are the same for her, and only death, which appears in the film in an exaggerated form, is for her the salvation of her soul. Paradoxically, from the Japanese underground and do not expect anything else.
"Paradise Lost" is even more bizarre and naturalistic than the whole "guinea pig." Cinema, which is extremely difficult to recommend for viewing and familiarization, but if you are already completely fed up with torture porn and various shockers, including Japanese production, then this creation can definitely please you, surprise and cause a number of indescribable and incomparable emotions.