A New Love in Tokyo

IN THE NOCTURNAL GLOW OF a bustling Tokyo bar, Rei (Sawa Suzuki), an aspiring actress and seasoned dominatrix, and Ayumi (Reiko Kataoka), a dewy-eyed call girl, finally ditch the last of many salarymen eager to disrupt their post-shift drinks. They barrel onto the street, launching into a sprint back to Shibuya, as dawn flares over the neon-speckled city streets. Sloughing off the dregs of the night before, together they revel in the possibilities of a new day. 

Lushly shot, explosive, and effervescent, Banmei Takahashi’s criminally underseen 1994 drama, the demimonde-set A New Love in Tokyo, is a testament to pleasure-seeking libertine decadence. It is also a rapturous portrait of rebellion: against patriarchy, against sexual normativity, against the notion that one’s personhood is tethered to their “worker” status. Considered one of the “Three Pillars of Pink” (alongside directors Mamoru Watanabe and Genji Nakamura), Takahashi paved the way for the Pinku Eiga form to take a radically more humanist and emotional approach over mere titillation. A New Love in Tokyo marks a culmination of his work in the genre, where so many Japanese filmmakers (Yôjirô Takita, Shinji Sōmai, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, to name a few) cut their teeth.

Whether onstage or in the dungeon, Rei’s sultry command is magnetic and irresistible. Takahashi emphasizes gestural subtleties: she purses her red-glossed lips; her eyes sharpen into a focused squint. If she isn’t already in motion, she’s braced to break into dynamic movement at an instant. “I thought it might be kind of fun,” Rei says irreverently of how she came to be a dominatrix. Sneaking glances, she first greets the coquettish Ayumi in the elevator of the anonymous high-rise their agencies share, both en route to their next client. “We keep running into each other—keeping busy?” she asks. The exchange is brief but electric, charged with mutual recognition, and they agree to meet again soon. 

_{A New Love in Tokyo (1994)}

Ayumi disappears down the corridor of a love hotel to meet a middle-aged john. He swings from scolding her about the indignity of her work to pleading for more than what is included in the “package” he has paid for. With practiced composure, she resists his bumbling attempts: “Nothing above the neck!” she cries as he leans in for a kiss. Staged more as controlled theater than erotic excess, Rei pushes her submissives to their limits. She carefully pierces the nipples of a man bound by his wrists to a chainlink fence, licking the needle before striking it through each taut nub. Pre-dating the antics of experimental performance collective Young Boy Dancing Group, Rei lodges a lit candlestick into his ass, jutting perpendicular as he wriggles clumsily around the room on all fours. He leaves her a generous tip. Queer and kink cultures have long functioned to imagine and refine aesthetics shaped by their dissidence. In a digital landscape now overrun by optimized image curation, sexuality has flattened into a consumer identity. Transgression is now just something that can be added to a cart (a polyurethane harness is only $12.99 on Amazon, free shipping). But adorned in leather with a motley of whips, Rei gives a performance, honed by routine, that is both compelling and fiercely intimidating. 

Off the clock, Rei and Ayumi meld instantly, talking shop and trading stories while fending off the propositioning men who circle their table in pairs, sending bottles and offering rides. The girls dance, guzzle beer, belt karaoke, and devour towered skewers of meat with the same gleeful abandon as the Maries in Věra Chytilová’s Daisies (1966): all impulse and appetite. In this perfect evocation of mid-’90s Japan approaching the “pop” of its money-mad Bubble Era, Takahashi captures bold, lavish excess. There is a sensual aspect to Rei and Ayumi’s affinity, with its sometimes frivolous jubilation, but in bold gestures and enraptured gazes, the pulse of solidarity surges between them. Much like Claudia Weill’s observational drama Girlfriends (1978) or the understated resilience of the protagonists in Mikio Naruse’s perceptive portraits of working women, A New Love in Tokyo translates the intimacy and complexity of their friendship through the nuanced rituals that forge connection.

Ayumi cycles fervently through boyfriends: a future doctor, a future lawyer. She’s already saving her checks for their wedding, cushioning the fantasy with lies about how she earns the money. In voice-over, her wry humor and quiet authority surface, revealing what she truly thinks of the men who orbit her: “Ken-chan’s hobbies are sex and crossword puzzles. It takes him about a month to finish one. I get the answers before he does most of the time. But I don’t tell him because I don’t want to hurt his ego.” She dismisses her latest lover to Rei as “yet another wannabe.” Meanwhile, Rei tends her sunflowers with meticulous care and writes letters to her mother, recalling the tender maternal address in Chantal Akerman’s News From Home (1976). She pours her remaining energy into rehearsals for an upcoming play she’s starring in. The local theater troupe—a gaggle of five young men she fucks methodically and consistently, one-by-one—approaches the production with the same earnest enthusiasm. Morale is at an all time high! Until, in one unforgettable scene, Rei warns her ragtag crew to get tested at the hospital: ”Venereal disease!” She flounces away effortlessly in a port de bras, leaving the boys to play a hilarious game of whodunnit. For Rei and Ayumi, sex is not merely part of their jobs; it’s also a tool for building an infrastructure of kinship.

_{A New Love in Tokyo (1994)}

As in Lizzie Borden’s groundbreaking Working Girls (1986), A New Love in Tokyo unfolds as a picaresque of sex work, attentive to both its corporeal demands and bureaucratic procedures. Takahashi depicts the job without sentimentality, grounding his portrait of Rei and Ayumi’s lives in scrupulous, real-world detail. A cheerful receptionist (also Rei’s theater castmate) answers phones, money changes hands, girls drift in and out of frame as they await their next clients, the sale of sex intermingling with the rhythms of everyday administrative tasks. Throughout history, sex work has been repeatedly mobilized as metaphor, sociological warning sign, or moral boundary—even as it persists as a material mode of labor shaped by real risk and constraint. Takahashi refuses this abstraction, approaching sex work with a clear-eyed understanding of the dangers embedded—particularly for Ayumi, whose role as a traditional call girl leaves her especially vulnerable.

When a woman’s corpse is discovered in the bathtub of a local love hotel, most escort services shutter for the day. But Ayumi sees opportunity, taking back-to-back clients until she encounters one with a frightening penchant for knife play. She calls in the emergency code word “spaghetti Napolitan,” and within minutes rescue arrives via her agency owner and a member of the Tendo-Kai gang. Danger doesn’t fracture the scene; it galvanizes a practiced, collective response—a quiet edifice that keeps Ayumi safe. 

New wave artist Tetsuro Kashibuchi and prominent folk musician Hako Yamasaki score A New Love in Tokyo, driving the film with buoyant momentum through darting synths and airy flutes, alongside a bubbly pop soundtrack. The film is based on the 1993 art book Ai no Shinsekai (New World of Love), a title perhaps borrowed from an earlier text by utopian socialist Charles Fourier who posited that “all human passions including love are allowed to be freely expressed to achieve social harmony and universal ‘unityism.’” The book assembles 66 short essays by writer Kei Shimamoto on the inner lives of women working in Tokyo’s sex industry, accompanied by photographs taken by the acclaimed (and notorious) kink photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, whose prolific career has included subjects such as Björk and Lady Gaga, as well as collaborations with Nan Goldin. Araki appears briefly in A New Love in Tokyo, staging a reflexive story-within-the-film taking photographs of Rei. He circles her with manic intensity, scrambling onto chairs and furniture to seize vertiginous angles as she twists and arches acrobatically in states of undress. The photographer’s striking black-and-white portraits recur throughout the film, punctuating the narrative and charging it with the mesmeric allure that defines his work.

In A New Love in Tokyo, work is prosaic and pleasure is never incidental—it’s a vehicle for connection. Through Rei and Ayumi, Takahashi depicts the ways intimacy and desire intertwine to build community on the margins. Meaningful disobedience appears not as transgression for its own sake but as an exquisitely potent practice in which joy, mischief, and solidarity pulse together as the very architecture of survival; a way of world-making sustained through collective experimentation and pleasure as praxis, to build a luminescent utopia where everyone might come out on top.