Dirty Conversation: The Mad Age of Kinbaku: Yukimura Haruki, Women, Rope, and the Life of a Bakushi! Part Three

Translation

Speaker: Yukimura Haruki
Interviewer: Inoue 文 [given-name reading uncertain]

Yukimura Haruki: Women, Rope, and the Life of a Bakushi! Part Three

As I became involved in adult work, I found myself being consumed by the daily grind. As I struggled to make a living, the gap between what I was doing for work and the way a maniac looks at these things kept widening. Those days of conflict, and the twists and turns of a life.

Following Momoe Yamaguchi’s retirement, Pink Lady broke up. As the era of Seiko Matsuda’s overwhelming popularity began, a succession of sixteen- and seventeen-year-old idol singers debuted, including Akina Nakamori, Kyoko Koizumi, Yu Hayami, and Chiemi Hori, each aiming to become the “next Seiko.”

The lolicon boom arrived as well. In the adult market, the readership first cultivated by Shojo Alice from Alice Publishing expanded further, while
“lolicon magazines” such as Lemon People from Amatoria and Manga Burikko from Self Publishing increased their sales.

At the same time, Nikkatsu Roman Porno had become established as entertainment for adults. It was also serving as a kind of rehabilitation
mechanism for television personalities, casting former singer Lucia Santo in Female Teacher: In Front of Her Students, for example. As its momentum grew, the genre was also producing one talented director after another.

Yukimura Haruki was thirty-two. Because of circumstances involving his family, he had left an advertising company and gone into the family business, running himself ragged through Osaka’s entertainment districts.

“Because I liked women.”

Ten years passed. Once the family business had settled down, Yukimura picked up his camera again and left home. He entered the adult-entertainment industry, something he had been thinking about for some time, and steadily accumulated experience.

“I don’t really have many good memories of that period. I was desperate. I made a living doing things like Shashin Jidai and working as a sex-industry writer. I also did television production work. I worked as a cameraman too, but that was ordinary erotic photography. The bondage photographs I shot using my own models.

“There was a magazine called SM Spirits, remember? When they began serializing my photographs, an editor just went ahead and gave me a name. If he’d seen my face, there’s no way he would have given me a neat, pretty name like ‘Yukimura Haruki.’ Hahaha.”

At the time, Yukimura says, questions about his own sexual inclinations were less important than establishing himself professionally as a cameraman.

“I was impatient. I wanted to do the job properly. Eroticism isn’t something simple, you know.”

Having entered this world through the enormous power of the mass media, Yukimura sometimes found it painful when a job forced him into simplistic ways of presenting things for aficionados.

“I wanted to make a name for myself as a professional. But while I kept shooting as work, I started losing track of what I was actually doing. I’d ask myself, ‘How do you photograph something that’s genuinely erotic?’

“But I couldn’t do it at all. Just spreading a woman’s legs and shooting a close-up of her crotch doesn’t automatically make it erotic.

“So while doing the work, I was also trying to make the kind of eroticism I imagined into something concrete. But I could never quite make it tangible.”

The stress caused him to develop a stomach ulcer, and he spent an entire month in the hospital. By then the era name had changed to Heisei, and Yukimura was thirty-nine.

Today the name “bakushi Yukimura Haruki” is well known, but it would still be some time before tying itself became a viable profession. Even after leaving the hospital, he continued through a period of anxiety and frustration.

“I felt like there wasn’t anywhere left for me to go. It was pretty desperate. I was depressed, thinking, ‘So what am I supposed to do now?’

“Then a friend from my television days, who was running an office for pink films in Tokyo, went out of his way to contact me.

“There was work shooting AV for manufacturers. Whenever there was a production, I’d go, traveling back and forth between Osaka and Tokyo.

“I had learned how to shoot through television, so I worked as the director. I wanted to do SM if I could, but mostly it was ordinary AV. ‘Put this in, put that in.’ Completely work.”

Even so, regularly being entrusted with control of a production became an important turning point. Among the companies commissioning work were CineMagic and Taiyo Tosho. From this period onward, Yukimura gradually established himself as an SM-video director.

“Back then I still wanted to be a still photographer. So while directing I would also shoot the package photographs myself.

“Normally a director doesn’t do that, right? A producer or somebody at the manufacturer told me off and said I needed to concentrate on directing.

“Then I just kept getting busier and busier. Eventually I rented an apartment in Ebisu and started living in Tokyo. That was right around the time my SM-video work began increasing.”

From there, directing AV became the central focus of his professional work.

Among the SM works Yukimura directed during this period were:

– Rope Virgin Hunt, starring Miki Maeda, CineMagic, 1989
– Rope Flame: The World of Minomura Kou, featuring Ayano Serizawa and Ruka Mikami, CineMagic, 1989
– Bodycon Kidnapping Story: First Night, starring Riho Kobayashi, Taiyo Tosho, 1991
– Beautiful Captive Slave Girl: Metallic Slave, starring Kasumi Yuka [performer-name reading uncertain], Taiyo Tosho, 1991

Yukimura was particular about his work, and he says each production involved its own difficulties. But among them, Rope Flame: The World of Minomura Kou remained especially memorable.

It was an unusual documentary covering the final years of Minomura Kou, known as the editor Suma Toshiyuki of the abnormal magazine Kitan Club, as the artist Kita Reiko, and as the writer Minomura Kou.

“Until then I really hadn’t had much interaction with other people who liked SM.

“Through that production I met Nureki Chimuo. I met Oniroku Dan too, and I met [name unclear in the source] as well.

“Getting to hear the voices of maniacs other than myself directly was interesting.

“With reader submissions, the users, the maniacs, will say whatever they like. ‘Show it from six angles at once,’ things like that.

“But when a manufacturer commissions you to make something, you can’t obsess over things to that extent.

“If I tie somebody, I’d want to leave her tied for thirty minutes before taking the rope off. But when a manufacturer talks about a work that will ‘sell,’ you can’t spend thirty minutes just doing that.”

“You can’t do that. You have to move straight into the sex scene. That sort of frustration was there too. And in terms of pursuing what I personally experience as eroticism, the people I met through that Minomura project gave me a tremendous amount of stimulation.”

Yukimura had already been strongly affected by the Kinbaku-bi Kenkyukai video series produced by Nureki Chimuo through Fuji Kikaku. He felt that the motivation behind those works was unmistakably different from things made simply as commercial jobs.

At the same time, he was also conscious that if he were able to make SM videos exactly as he wanted, their content would be completely different from Nureki’s.

“I’d been tying women as part of my relationships with them since I was in my twenties. I’d learned rope that way and enjoyed it. There’s something interesting about watching the person you’re with, seeing what she likes and where she likes it. So, in terms of feeling, my ideal was the image of genuinely falling in love in the middle of the work.

“But because I was constantly being chased by the job, things became too detached. My first reflection was that I wasn’t achieving that. I had this sense of danger that if I reduced everything to nothing but the mentality of doing a job, then maybe I wouldn’t be able to continue in this business.

“So I thought I needed to take the model more seriously. Even if it was only for that one day, I needed to become more serious about her and put more feeling into it.”

“If I was going to shoot that way, then in my case it would probably become something like serving the woman through rope. That was how I thought about it.”

In 1992 Yukimura established Sunset Color, his own production office devoted primarily to SM video, in Ebisu, a neighborhood he had become familiar with since moving to Tokyo.

He had decided to present his own particular conception of eroticism to the world in the form of an original label.

Nearly twenty years had passed since the days when he had tied snack-bar hostesses in Osaka’s entertainment districts. It was a new beginning after the age of forty-one.

“As for how I felt… I don’t think I was having fun. I kept thinking, ‘How am I supposed to shoot this?’ That was all I thought about.

“Instead of relying on sex scenes to carry the video, how could I make the bondage itself interesting enough to hold the viewer?

“It felt like a challenge. I had absolutely no breathing room at all.”

The first SM video produced by Sunset Color was Rope Service 1: Wet Reiko Morimura [complete subtitle reading provisional].

At Yukimura’s insistence, it was not shot in a studio. Instead, filming took place in a corner of the office, an ordinary apartment room. The crew was reduced to only about three people: an assistant director, a cameraman, and Yukimura.

The intention was to create an intensely private atmosphere and capture Morimura’s unguarded responses. Reflecting the fashion of the period, her costume was a bright-red bodycon outfit.

“You like this kind of bondage best, don’t you?”

Morimura lowers her refined face and stiffens as the rope is placed around her. The trembling of her dark eyes gives an almost painfully vivid impression of her tension.

The viewer’s anticipation rises still further.

But once Morimura, with her demure features unchanged, is subjected to a major gag, she suddenly displays an expression of erotic intoxication. She slowly begins to move her body, almost as though she has been hypnotized.

“I’d shot this girl once before Rope Service, for CineMagic, and she’d made an incredibly strong impression on me even then. I still remember it. It was a documentary-type project in which she was supposed to experience SM for the first time.

“We took her to Alphain, an SM hotel in Tokyo. When she entered the room, there were all those implements and things sitting there, right? She saw them and started crying.

“I thought, ‘What a wonderful reaction.’ My heart was pounding. There was something about her that I could feel. She probably really did have masochistic tendencies.

“So when I filmed her again for Rope Service, both she and I had this strange sense of suspense about what might happen.”

Morimura is bound with her legs in an M-shaped position. The tip of the riding crop in Yukimura’s hand moves gently between her legs.

Her shapely breasts tighten as she exhales. When the suddenly reversing tip of the crop brushes against a hardened nipple, her slender body jerks violently upward and a sweet cry, almost like weeping, escapes her.

“If you’re getting wet, that’s proof, isn’t it?”

As he says this, Yukimura teases Morimura through her panties. Though embarrassed and made to feel humiliated, she cannot keep herself from moving her full, pale hips in an obscene, coaxing motion. Her cheeks grow flushed.

“I was over forty then, right? She was only around twenty.

“I was conscious of that age difference, and I kept thinking: how do I tie her, how do I torment her, so that, even if it’s only for one day, we can be in love?

“That was what I was thinking as I worked on her. I was completely absorbed.

“This really is a documentary of an actual romance, isn’t it? And I’m the protagonist.

“There’s nothing more embarrassing than that, so you end up becoming more and more desperate about it.”

Morimura, panting and radiating intense sensuality, is pushed further. Her already reddened, wet body is brought to the limits of defenselessness. She is then rebound with her hands behind her, laid face down, and Yukimura straddles her, continuing his heated attentions.

“At that moment, we’re together. We’re lovers.

“For me, even after the shooting ends, I want to make such a strong impression on her that she carries it with her afterward.

“Whether the other person is completely concentrated on what’s happening or not makes all the difference. That’s especially true with SM video.

“I take pride in that.

“I wanted the bondage I did to become more erotic than the bondage somebody else did.

“In the early days I concentrated too much on shooting technique, and there were times when I was physically there but not completely in it.

“But I put my feelings into the bondage. At that moment I’m giving it everything I have.

“I’m competing in a place where I can’t make excuses.”

Only at the very end did they shoot several minutes of an intercourse scene.

Until then, Yukimura had attempted something he had previously wanted to do but had been unable to accomplish: to carry the work all the way to its conclusion using only the image of a woman experiencing sensation through rope.

The result was a production overflowing with Yukimura’s particular aesthetic and determination.

Beginning with this commemorative first production, the Rope Service series became one of Sunset Color’s signature titles and was released regularly thereafter.

“In the end, it’s a question of how far I can reach her.

“Sometimes when I’m tying her, I’m there with the feeling that maybe I’m actually going to stay right here and live with this woman.

“That’s how I feel every time.

“Which means, conversely, that if I don’t have myself together, things can become very serious.

“I’ve learned plenty about what it means to become involved with a woman whose masochism runs deep.”

The voyage of Yukimura Haruki as a bakushi had only just begun.

The footer advertises Yukimura’s live event Y’s Play Bondage, scheduled for August 5, with admission listed as 10,000 yen for men and 5,000 yen for women.