room for sex
by Douglas
Messerli
Takehiro
Nakajima (screenwriter and director) おこげ(Okoge) (Fag Hag) / 1992
Perhaps the major film of what is often described as
the Japanese cinema’s “gay boom,” begins on popular beach where Sayoko Morohashi
(Misa Shimizu) arrives with a friend, the friend’s children, and mother as they
spread out their beach blanket and open up their picnic basket.
But almost
simultaneously, the discover that they have accidently transgressed on an
all-male gay enclave, with men of nearly all types and several behavioral
patterns who sit and stand, and preen themselves half-naked and naked. The
friend quickly takes her mother and children off to play in the water itself,
refusing to openly acknowledge what they have witnessed and quite frightened that
the children might notice what is going on around them. Only Sayoko remains,
staring quite openly at the mass of male flesh despite the older woman’s warning:
(Itcha dame; miete no mienakatta no / Don’t say a thing; pretend you’ve
seen nothing.)
Critic
Jonathan M. Hall, in an essay collected in Andrew Grossman’s Queer Asian
Cinema, captures the scene and Sayoko’s reactions:
“While her companions react alternately with denial
and disgust, Sayoko finds herself instead drawn to this exotic space. As the
opening credits roll, the camera slowly pans the top of a concrete embankment
revealing, one after another, figures from a lexicon of gay stereotypes: the
daddy, the dandy, the bodybuilder, the queen. This panning movement, cross0cut
with close-ups of Sayoko’s face, effects and extended point-of-view shot the
rejects the familial injunction….Sayoko does not shun the spectacle of homosexuality;
quite the contrary, through her insistence on looking and her distant, pensive
expression, she appears emotionally moved by this vision of another world. …At
scene’s end, the camera pulls in close on her stare. Cut now to an uncommon
scene for Japanese cinema—the slow kiss of the two gay lovers, revealed in a
subsequent pseudo-point-of view close-up as the object of Sayoko’s deliberate
regard.”
So
engaged is Sayoko with her serendipitous introduction to this new world, that
she even retrieves some of their picnic basket sweets to share with the gay
men, amazed at her appearance almost as much as are the women at seeing them. While her
friend and her mother are outraged by the existence of such beings, Sayoko is transfixed,
clearly sharing a sense of societal outsiderness and marginalization with the
gay men. Only gradually does the film reveal why she might have share the
empathy with the men who isolation has been “transgressed” by these working
class women and children (she has been adopted and evidently molested as a
child). Yet, the reasons for her immediate attraction to the gay men are not as
important as the fact that she simply is drawn to them, like others described
throughout gay throughout gay history, young girls and grown women—often with
problems of self-worth and who face difficulties in attracting the opposite
sex—simply come to align themselves with gay men and befriend then in a manner
which Sayoko’s female friend—who is not only homophobic but, in particular,
AIDS-phobic—cannot and will never be able to comprehend.
Soon
after, Sayoko asks a lesbian friend, Okei*, to take her to a gay bar, where she
reencounters the two men, Gô Yoshino (Takehiro Murata) and Tochi (Tochihiko) Terazaki (Takeo
Nakahara), reintroduces herself, and almost brazenly attaches herself to the
two gay men.
We have already
discovered that these two gay lovers live very separate lives. Tochi’s being
married and, more recently, the fact Gô’s mother, offended by his brother’s
wife, has determined to move in with him has necessitated their meet-ups in
this oceanside community where Sayoko lives. Moreover, they have just found
that their hotel reservation has failed and that other inns and hotels will not
except two men who request a shared bed. In short, now even their transitory
meetings in order to make love are endangered.
Overhearing their predicament, Sayoko
quickly invites them to sleep in her bedroom. The men are a bit reticent to
take her up offer, but having no other choice, and given her insistence, they
quickly agree, enjoying sex as she, almost joyfully, unrolls a bed mat in her
front room, while leafing through a book of paintings by Frida Kalho, now the
patron saint of female bi-sexualism, who when this film was made had become the
almost symbolic cross-bearer of straight male dominance and the patriarchal
culture.
At one
point, peeking in on the two sleeping men, a placid smile of joy overwhelms her
face; there is almost in her ability to offer these men a place of sexual
peace, a sense of her own erotic satisfaction. Sayoko has become a kind of
passive voyeur in her own house, as if what she first watched with wonderment
at the beach has come home to roost in her own formerly empty heart.
Moreover,
as Hall argues in his essay, the gay men offer a kind of sexual freedom, free
from both the restraints of the traditional heterosexual marriage and from the patriarchally-dominated
world in general with which any female in Japanese society (or, for that
matter, in most societies, Eastern or Western) must contend. Since she herself
is not attracted to women, her embracement of gay men is as close to full
sexual liberation as she can get.
Yet,
unbeknownst to her, both Gô and Tochi face other
problems that threaten their “outsider” freedoms.
Gô is
tricked by his family into a special dinner where they have arranged to help fix
him up with a wife. Disgusted by his brother’s
machinations and his mother’s insinuations, Gô
finally comes out to his family. As Austin Chronicle critic Marjorie
Baumgarten puts it: “Their response is to quickly change the subject and his
mother grows crazed with guilt.”
Certainly,
this kind of response is not simply an Asian form of escapism from what the
family perceives as a insolvable problem; in many a gay film discussed in the
pages of these queer cinema volumes US fathers and mothers, when their son admits
to his sexuality, tell him that he’s not old enough to have yet made such a
decision or that he simply hasn’t found the right girl. In some families it is
even hinted that such sexual experimentation is fine as long as it is done discretely
and kept secret from the bride who for them stands as a social symbol of their
and their son’s normalcy and acceptance of his patriarchal role in life. But
for Gô, their
silence performed in front of the girl, is unbearable; and later in the film,
she returns at the lowest point in his life to threaten him to prove himself a
man by fornication, an act which he cannot perform, Gô telling his friends at
the bar that he “couldn’t do it, because she opened her legs too wide,” hinting
that her complete revelation of the female body was for him utterly revolting.
Meanwhile,
however, the two gay men continue to lead a rather idyllic life at Sayoko’s
house, cooking special meals such as Paella for her and joining her at picnic
lunches.
Tochi’s
wife, having hired a detective, however, eventually comes looking for him, Gô attempting to hide as Sayoko denies that she has had
anything to do with the two men. She not only discovers her husband’s clothes
in a closet, but uncovers Gô himself, making it clear that if they meet again
she will tell his boss and sue for divorce, causing her husband to lose both
his job and his house.
A coward,
Tochi breaks up with Gô, who is not only devastated
by the loss of his lover, but must now care for his increasingly deranged mother,
who, at one point while Gô and Sayoko dine with some of his old male bar friends,
suddenly perceives Sayoko as a real woman, pulling her away from the table and
into another room, explaining her belief that an accident with a rusted knife
when she was pregnant was the cause of her son’s homosexuality and begs Sayoko
to marry him.
Meanwhile,
in the other room, the gay friends are engaged in a spirited argument of
nurture or nature, some arguing that homosexuality is in-born and a fact of
nature, while a couple vociferously blame the mothers for their son’s eventual
sexual desires.
In her
innocence, Sayoko is not at all adverse to suggesting marriage to Gô, but when
she proposes the idea to him in front of the group, the entire room full of men
stop their internal arguments and begin to heartily laugh, for the first time
Sayoko having to realize that she is also an outsider in this world, that
simply liking and sharing a room with gay men does not offer her an identity.
In their open guffaws, she is forced, at least momentarily, to return to the
female world that she had presumed she had successfully escaped.
Soon
after, in the bar Gô, discussing his unhappiness
for his loss of Tochi, suggests that he is attracted to a quiet man sitting in
the corner of the bar some nights, Kurihara (Masayuki Shionoya), but is too
afraid to speak to him personally. Sayoko is not only ready to introduce the
two men to each other, but, when that produces no romantic sparks, is willing
to almost court that man who claims he is heterosexual on Gô’s behalf. There is
no question that this is a ludicrous idea, but to the many critics, including
Hall, who argue that lacks narrative motivation, I’d counter that Sayoko sees
this role of “go-between” as the only way to return regain Gô’s special favor
and re-enter the gay world from which she has now basically been ousted.
She
agrees to meet up with Kurihara at her home, planning to arrange that Gô will
soon after visit after she has convinced the dark stranger that Gô would make the perfect lover. The evening ends disastrously,
as once again Kurihara insists he is heterosexual, but now also expresses his
interest in her as a sexual partner. Desperately trying to reach Gô by phone, she
gets no answer, in the end surrendering her own body on Gô’s behalf to the man
to whom he was so attracted, revealing himself now a kind of rapist.
In the abandonment
of her own body to what she believes is Gô’s desire, she has become somewhat of
a sacrificial lamb to the gay cause, and, if Hall is correct, perhaps even a
kind of savior of Kurihara’s deepest desires, through his twisted homophobia,
to rape the gay man. As he soon after admits to her, as a previous member of
the Self-Defense Forces he and his friends had, from time to time, raped over-achievers
(gay men) in the force.
Time
passes, and Sayoko, now burdened with a son and a deadbeat of a husband in
Kurihara, whose debts she has now inherited and who, she hints, also beats her
regularly, returns to the bar in search of Gô. But the bartender hasn’t seen
him in a long while, and it is only another patron who later tells her that Gô’s
mother has become ill and he has had to devote his life to caring for her.
Tochi
also re-enters the story, now involved with a drag queen, bragging to the bar
patrons that despite his attempts to return to a heterosexual lifestyle his
wife has told his boss. Yet, he has not been fired, and has even been asked by one
of his underlings to serve as a “sponsor” to their marriage, formally announcing
the event at a special company tribute. Tochi plays the role but along with
announcing the couple’s nuptials, reveals that he is resigning, that he is gay,
and that his wife is there as well this evening, pointing to his new drag queen
partner. The attendees are outraged, but not more that the bride-to-be who
breaks into a tearful fury that the attention has been turned away from her
affair.
Sayoko,
who has finally left her husband, arrives yet again at the bar with her child.
But Gô is still missing, and she leaves on this rainy night planning apparently
to sleep on the streets.
A bit
like a magical hero of a fairytale, Gô does finally arrive, his mother having
died. When told of Sayoko’s situation, he joins with other patrons and drag
queens in search of her whereabouts, discovering her at the very moment mafia
members are about to abscond with her and her child in retribution for money
her husband has owed them.
Gô bravely
attempts to fight them off, but they come after him as a group, beating him
severely. When the others see what is happening, they join up as a kind of
underground force and successfully overcome the mafia boys, who flee fearing
for their lives.
Gô,
quickly taking to the idea of having a child in his life, invites Sayoko to
stay with him for as long as she might like, the two creating a kind a new gay
marriage in what critics have described as a kind of transformation of the Okoge
into a full-fledged gay man.
Not convinced
at all by this Ovid-inspired ending, many of this film’s gay audience protested
about what they described as “the second act.” As the commentator calling him
or herself Pixote summarizes this reaction, “I'm definitely not the only viewer
to feel that Okoge's final forty-five minutes constitute a melodramatic
derailment of an otherwise solid film.”
And I
too, admittedly, find something disagreeable in having to transform the film’s
two gay heroes into a vengeful truthteller and a man now involved in what looks
to most of us as a normative heterosexual marriage, even if straight sex will
not be required or even welcomed by the bride. But then such things do happen,
even if straight sex is one of the requirements; one need only think of actively
gay actors such as Tony Perkins (who died of AIDS the year this movie was released)
to realize the potential reality of the situation in which this film ends. No matter
what his sexual identity, Gô proves himself throughout as a loving and caring
being. And a rather ditsy fag hag and her toddler are definitely preferable as individuals
to care for that a mean-mouthed dying mother.
If nothing
else, we can be certain that Sayoko and Gô will teach their child, as the trio
trots down the center of the busy gay neighborhood near their favorite bar, to
love and be tolerant of the gay life.
Los Angeles, October 18, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October
2025).
