While most directors in the Japanese soft-erotic genre are male, some female directors have started to utilize the soft-erotic frame to explore questions of love, sexuality, and desire. One of the female directors that has found her way to the genre is Haruhi Oguri.

While the genre of erotic cinema has passed its golden age – sexuality as frame to critically explore society and relational dynamics, the genre is far from death. Oguri’s narrative, sadly, does little to reanimate the genre with something fresh and arouse interest in the possibilities of erotics in the cinema.    

Divorcee Itsuko Ogata (Kanna Misaki) has been trying to recover the time-capsule she buried together with Tamotsu Ogata, she boy she fell in love with during her high-school days, for many months, but fails to recall its exact location in the mountains. Itsuki’s wish to discover what Tamotsu wrote stems from the fact that time – thirteen years have passed – has not erased her infatuation with him. She has hold on to her imaginary construction of Tamotsu, the object that moors her desire.

Unbeknownst to Itsuko, Tamotsu (Futa Murasaki) has moved back into the neighbourhood. He is a married man, but his marriage to Toko (Umi Oikawa), who is hungry for children, is not going well – “Life is long. How many more decades will I spend with Toko?”. By mere chance, Toko applies for a part-time job at Itsuko’s coffee shop. And not much later, Tamotsu calls her out of the blue.

A Love Letter From Yesterday is a narrative that tries to deliver a compelling erotically-charged romance narrative, yet fails to impress the spectator nor deliver an emotionally satisfying denouement. Oguri does, however, show promise by utilizing the erotic moments not merely as visual moments to please the erotising look of the spectator, but also as narrative moments to develop characters and make the logic of certain relationships explicit.  

The thematical worth of A Love Letter From Yesterday lies, in other words, in the sexual encounters, in the contrasts these encounters stage, rather than in the unfolding of the romantic narrative. Via these encounters, Oguri touches upon the divergent ways subjects exploit the sexual act, on the logic of sexual inhibition, and sexuality as a weapon of emotional warfare.

The first erotic sequence, where Itsoku’s former husband (Hirokio Ando) makes love to her, contrasts a man who seeks to sexually repair his phallic fantasy dominance after wrongfully thinking his wife is having an affair – he masturbates himself with her body while demanding a divorce – and a woman who is, at the level of her fantasy, already divorced (Narra-note 1).   

The lack of sexual intercourse and the forced (and quite lengthy) sexual encounter between Tamotsu and Toko corroborates the spectator’s initial feeling that he tries to flee from his wife and her ‘motherly’ desire. Toko is eager to give her body to Tamotsu, the man whom she considers to be the holder of the imaginary phallus – the object-goal of desire, to realize her motherly desire. Tamotsu’s eagerness to do over-time and avoid returning home on days she is most fertile, on the other hand, underlines he fears something. While Haruhi only reveals the truth of Tamotsu’s sexual inhibition later in the narrative, one can already surmise that what holds him back is the strained relationship between him and his procreating power.    

The fourth sexual encounter, the interrupted intercourse between Shin (Ryuta Takeda) and Itsuko, introduces a different opposition.  Shin, whose love is aroused by the pity he feels for her, offers himself to her in the hope to repair her. This act, reminiscent of St. Martin of Tours’ act of cutting his cloak in half to give to a half-naked beggar, is a self-serving kind of love, a compassionate love that satisfies his need to feel as the possessor the imaginary phallus. Itsuko merely seek to exploit Shin’s confession to get back at Tamotsu who called her “a mere friend from old times”. She hopes to use him as an object to antagonize Tamotsu and force him to reveal his true feelings.

The composition of A Love Letter From Yesterday is a straight-forward affair – a simple balanced mix of static and dynamic shots. The same straightforward compositional approach marks the staging of the erotic sequences within A Love Letter From Yesterday. This kind of framing, which shies away from inspecting the encounter of bodies and the resulting flow of sexual enjoyment too seductively, enables him to deliver sexual encounters both as mere visual appetizers – e.g. the fuck-buddy scene between Shin and a female colleague, the passionate sexual encounter between Tamotsu and Itsuko – and as moments that develop Itsuko and Tamotsu as characters (Cine-note 1). The distant way of framing sexual encounter also allows – in all probability intended – the comical dimension of sexual rhythms to come to the fore. 

The low-budget nature of A Love Letter From Yesterday reveals itself at the level of the lightning and sound design. Oguri relies, for example, on the artificial darkening of scenes emulating daybreak. At the level of sound, the spectator can hear a subtly noise when voice-over is applied – a noise that comes, in all probability, from the recording equipment. The main problem of this noise is not that we, as audience, can hear that space where the voice was recorded, but the fact that this spatial indication often clashes with the aural ambience of the scene (music-note 1).

A Love Letter From Yesterday is a narrative that, beyond offering the spectator some titillating erotic moments, delivers nothing that has not been explored in a more engaging and more emotionally satisfying way by other directors. If you are fan of soft-erotic narratives, Haruhi Oguri’s narrative might be worth checking out, but be warned the emotional drama is extremely flat – and even the sexual encounters, despite being well-acted by the female cast, cannot infuse life into the dried-up bed of the film’s emotional river.          

Notes

Narra-note 1: The shot where Itsuko is drawing Itsuko and Tamotsu forever on a paper as well as her dedication to find the time-capsule during and after her marriage heavily implies that her marital life was structured around a deceit of desire – she let a man believe he ensnared her desire, while it was already moored to another image – the fictional construct called Tamotsu.      

Music-note 1: Haruhi Oguri does succeed in extinguishing this aural noise with musical accompaniment.

Cine-note 1: The framing of the final sexual sequence is fundamentally different from the other, exchanging the neutral position of the camera for a camera that teasingly frames the way sexual enjoyment animates the female body.