Hisayasu Satō | 狩人たちの触覚 (Hunters’ Sense of Touch) / 1995

troubling sexual desires

by Douglas Messerli

 

Akio Nanki (screenplay), Hisayasu Satō (director) 狩人たちの触覚 (Hunters’ Sense of Touch) / 1995

 

My difficulties with this pinku eiga-like film of 1995 are related to the same problems that I have with William Friedkin’s 1980 rather homophobic conflating of the hunter and hunted (cop and killer) in his film Cruising.

      First of all, I’m not into S&M and bondage, but the presumption that such behavior inevitably leads to murder, castration, and other horrific behavioral patterns is what I can only describe as disgusting. I know that for outsiders such associations must be the first thing that crosses their minds; after all, Jean-Paul Marat’s own writings seem to confirm this. Blood, bodily harm and denigration seem to be at the center of S&M activities. The great poet Guillaume Apollinaire spent a lot of energy on writing deeply compelling tales of the worst kind of sexual horrors imaginable just to bring in some money from a rich sadist.  It is, at least on the surface, what bondage and hard sex appears to be all about: a kind of joy in the sexualized destruction of those themselves suffering sexual self-hatred.

      In this case, Detective Yamada (Naoto Yoshimoto) has been put of the case of the brutal murders of gay men that we quickly perceive are the actions of Ishikawa (Yōji Tanaka), Yamada’s ex-lover of 10 years before.

      The film, accordingly, is not a true detective story in the traditional sense of that word, but a long sensual depiction of their bondage-laden love affair, revealed over the remarkably erotic images that Satō presents us throughout this film.

     Since many of those delights lie outside my own pleasures, I would refer the reader to Perry Ruhland’s quite insightful essay existing on-line at the site, Medium, in an essay titled: “Go Back to the Real You,” which I’ll quote at length:

     

“While most of Satō’s films were made for a heterosexual audience, Hunters’ Sense of Touch is one of Satō’s few films made for the gay pinku production house ENK, and as such, is one of his only examples of out-and-out gay pornography. As a gay man, I may be biased, but I’ve found that Satō’s gay films are consistently his best work. They’re clearly made by a heterosexual director picking up a check, and while he does have an uncanny knack for staging genuine gay eroticism (sex scenes in Hunters’ Sense of Touch, Muscle, and Bondage Ecstasy are among the most erotic things I’ve seen in a movie), he films them at a cold remove, a far cry from the leering camera seen in many of his heterosexual pink films.

     Ironically, it’s this very remove that make his gay films such effective examinations of sexual isolation and need, depicting deeply repressed men drifting from one sexual encounter to another, occasionally finding themselves entangled in bursts of horrific violence.

       In the case of Hunters’ Sense of Touch, the repressed man is masochistic private detective Yamada, and the horrific violence is a string of brutal murders and castrations of submissive gay men. The plot superficially echoes that of William Friedkin’s paranoid homophobic masterpiece Cruising, but while Friedkin’s film is interested in an almost anthropological examination of New York’s leather underground, Hunters’ Sense of Touch is entirely focused on Yamada’s sexual isolation. Thus, no time is wasted in revealing the killer to be none other than the handsome Ishikawa, Yamada’s sadistic ex whose rough touch has occupied his fantasies for the past ten years.

      The narrative amounts to little more than an ambient drone, wherein sleepy investigation and interrogations flow seamlessly into extended sexual liaisons, murder set pieces, and characters’ sudden development of telepathic powers in tandem with their own sexual self-discovery. It’s easy to get caught up on the superficial thinness of the narrative, but to do so would be to miss the point entirely. The inexplicable intrusion of the supernatural into the plot — relayed in a mixture of formally audacious psychedelic sequences and VHS recorded monologues ala Videodrome — serves as the most straightforward example of the film instructing the audience to set aside narrative cohesion and accept the mechanics of the film’s oneiric story as just another texture, no more or less essential to the hypersexed atmosphere as the fuzz of the shot-on-video cinematography or the pink lights dancing across the actors’ eyes.”

      If you leave your prejudices at the door, and perceive Detective Yamada’s and Ishikawa’s former relationship as an agreed upon sexual outlet for their tortured view of their own desires, you might witness this work as an absolutely stunning presentation of troubled sexual longings of the kind intimated in the works of the lesbian vampire movies by Jesús Franco, Harry Kümel, and Walerian Borowczyk or the sublimated gay westerns of the 1970s such as Alberto Mariscal They Call Him Marcado, or, of course, two decades earlier, of Jean Genet; this work, accordingly, is utterly fascinating for what it shows us. Even composer Richard Wagner knew that dying for love could be very sexy.

 

Los Angeles, February 20, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2025).