Yoshihiko Matsui | 錆びた缶空 (Sabita kankara) (Rusty Empty Can) / 1979

cracks, crevices, and keyholes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Yoshihiko Matsui (director) 錆びた缶空 (Sabita kankara) (Rusty Empty Can) / 1979

 

Yoshihiko Matsui’s early film Rusty Empty Can, made up from seemingly clips and film sequences found on some cutting-room floor tells its story in somewhat incoherent fragments. Yet we almost immediately comprehend that the central figure of this work, shot by Sogo Ishii who was famous

for his “pink” films such as Panic in High School (1986) and Crazy Thunder Road, the year after Matsui’s work, is a young gay teen. But instead of opening showing the numerous “obscene” actions of the film, Matsui subverts the attentions of his Japanese censors by presenting his central figures masturbatory acts under paper cones, and other actions through cracks and crevices, and even keyholes.

      Yet, for all that, Rusty Empty Can concerns a rather traditional love triangle, but in this case not among heterosexuals but between a young gay man who in an early scene masturbates to his favorite pop hero depicted in a wall poster, a young male-identifying crossdresser Akira, and his boyfriend usually described as “a violent thug.”

      Accordingly, it is the outsider characters who constitute this disorienting story, not necessarily their behavior that sets this movie apart from other Japanese films of its day.

      Our “hero” encounters Akira one day on the street and immediately falls in love with him, determining to meet up with the long-haired, feminine boy. The young man writes Akira proposing a meet up; but he shares the information with the boyfriend who immediately demands that Akira cut off any possible connection.

      The boyfriend has already noticed the awkward youth following them around the city and into a movie theater, and he takes action in the form of impending violence which the youth escapes this first time. But even that doesn’t end the boy’s curiosity, as he follows them up to a room where they have retreated to talk and make love, watching them through holes in the wall.

 

      When he finally actually attempts to meet up with Akira, dressed in a precious suit, the angered boyfriend goes after him with a knife, finally forcing the young boy down in the public street, the knife poised just inches from his scrotum.

      Akira, angry with the controlling thug who has just previously painfully fucked him, takes revenge in the form of biting off his penis during his demand for fellatio which he claims tastes of shit.

  And the film ends with the thug/boyfriend crawling on the blood-stained toilet floor, as Akira, now gone mad in response to his action, runs madly out of control through the streets, finally falling flat on the pavement, ready to be squashed by any passing vehicle.

      From the very beginning of his work, Matsui manipulates us to feel sympathy for the young man, despite his autre behavior, by also showing us that he is so poor that he can hardly eat, and when he finally sits down to a ramen dish cannot tolerate it and throws it up, while Akiri and her boyfriend dine out at a kind of Japanese fast-food grill on cat and dog meat.

     And by the end of this hour-long film, despite him being a social outcast, we are happy that the young gay boy, who listens to his New-Wave music through a “rusty can” and is so very lonely that he takes joy in a mistaken phone call which he turns into a brief verbal sexual encounter, has been forced away from the rabid couple.

      At film’s end the young gay boy may still be suffering hunger and loneliness, enduring his own kind of mad emptiness by now painting his own lips in the subway from Akira’s dropped lipstick tube; but he is still whole and intact, while the other two have lost the major symbols of an operable male body, the penis and the mind.

      That all of this is expressed so fully in hastily shot frames on 8mm color film is almost a miracle of filmmaking. Little is actually expressed in words, but there is now finally a version with English-language subtitles. But I must warn anyone coming across this difficult-to-find variant since it is highly edited down from the film’s original running time to exclude some of the film’s central incidents, including the later anal sex and implied castration scenes.

 

Los Angeles, July 26, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).