[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 their own time, one in which Japan has already invaded Manchuria. Oshima suggests that sex in this old Japan was pure, divorced from psychopathology and Oedipal burdens, transcending social class. The body was as important as the spirit. He defies the premise at the heart of [Bertolucci's] "Last Tango in Paris" (to which "In the Realm of the Senses" has been mistakenly compared) that we bring all that we are and have been to the act of love. In Oshima's vision, equality is at the heart of Japanese sensuality.

Sada begins as a maid in the brothel run by Kichizo and his wife…. Later she becomes the dominant partner [in their sexual encounters]…. Social position is of no relevance to the relationship between lovers.

Kichizo first approaches Sada holding a sprig of cherry blossoms, Oshima's signal that we are exploring a last flowering of authentic Japanese culture in which sensuality was sufficient unto itself, sex neither mystical nor dirty. The Japanese, says Oshima, were once capable of love without shame. As opposed to the natural Japan of the past, the modern world in which Sada and Kichizo are called "perverts" because they never cease making love is ruled by militarists; the year is 1936, that of the famous aborted Officers' Coup which finally strengthened the army's stranglehold over the country. This fascism of the 30's Oshima depicts in terms of a denial of the senses….

In its uniquely Japanese approach to love, "In the Realm of the Senses" utterly transcends Western pornography, even though we are witnesses to the sexual act…. [The] love scenes focus on the sexual ecstasy of the woman, the pleasure in which she is an active participant rather than a victim. The male feels no need to exhibit excesses of masculinity in violence. The eroticism is based not on the woman's being humiliated or overwhelmed, but upon mutual abandon….

With reverence, Oshima invokes the Sada who in real life became a national figure precisely because she recreated that old Japan in which nothing about the body was felt to be disgusting and in which man and woman could alternately be givers and receivers of pleasure. In defiance of any pornographic impulse, the camera focuses on their faces or on their full figures, refusing to allow the viewer to play the role of salacious voyeur. Vicarious pleasure would indeed be perverse; such satisfaction can be ours only if we become as uninhibited as are Sada and Kichizo themselves….

The ending, in which Sada strangles and then dismembers Kichizo, is disturbing, but no evocation of de Sade is intended, Sada's name notwithstanding. Oshima imitates the rupture of conventional vision practiced by Bunuel, who, in the opening shot of 'Un Chien Andalou," slit open an eyeball with a razor. But Kichizo's death is freely chosen as a gift to his lover, that she may "be happy strangling me."… Violence has been only one element of a love affair which has also included playfulness, patient good will and joy, and Sada emasculates Kichizo with a carving knife not out of anger or hatred, but to unite herself with a lover now immune to suffering….

Sada and Kichizo are liberated, holy and sanctified, from a Japan which can no longer understand them, free from a tradition which associates sex with shame. In Sada, the sensuality of the old Japan lives on, as the real-life Sada devoted herself to further pursuits of pleasure after her four-year jail sentence expired.

Like the Japanese audience for whom Oshima has made his film, so remote are we from undiluted sensuality that much of "In the Realm of the Senses" becomes almost intolerable to watch. But, at its best it presents a striking picture of that bygone era of Japanese culture in which pornography was inconceivable and sensuality flourished, immune to any sense of sin or shame or guilt.