[At the heart of Nagisa Oshima's "In the Realm of the Senses"] lie impulses quite foreign both to the Western approach to sexuality and to pornography…. [He] is here evoking an uninhibited, joyous sensuality which is said to have flourished in 10th-century Japan as an intrinsic part of an aristocratic culture in which people dedicated themselves to the appreciation of lovemaking, free of inhibition or anxiety; it was a mood reinvoked for the last time in the flurry of pleasure-seeking just prior to the opening of Japan to the West….

Oshima's Sada and Kichizo [are] survivors of a world of sexual refinement long since lost by the 1930's—the period in which "In the Realm of the Senses" is set. Sada and Kichizo pursue the pleasure that was possible in that ancient and more beautiful Japan, heroically unwilling to allow themselves to be repressed by the culture of...