Love's Whirlpool, and the Self She Left in That Room

Before the night begins, a man explains the rules to a university student in glasses who has answered an advertisement. She asks the one question she has. May she turn down anyone she does not like? She may, he says. But if she keeps refusing, it will start to be a question of what she came for.

It is a small exchange, and the whole film is folded inside it. The right she asks about is granted. In the same breath the price of using it is named, by the man whose business depends on her not using it much.

Somewhere else in Tokyo, late at night, a young man without a job withdraws twenty thousand yen, which is everything he has, and follows directions given over the phone to a flat in Roppongi. He is one of eight strangers who will spend the hours between midnight and five in the morning in that flat, in bath towels, taking whoever is willing to a room downstairs. Daisuke Miura’s Love’s Whirlpool is the story of that night, and of the rules that were supposed to keep it simple.

What the room sells is sex agreed in advance and nothing afterwards. Nobody gives a name. Nobody exchanges a number. Everyone has paid, and the end is fixed at five. What the room cannot do is keep everything else out, and before long it is full of the things the arrangement was built to leave on the landing: rankings, gossip, jealousy, a round of applause, a couple quarrelling, a young man who has fallen for someone. The Japanese title calls it a whirlpool of love. The room was designed to keep love out, and love is what it fills with.

This essay argues that the manager’s answer is the room’s real policy on consent: a right, with a price attached, set by the people who profit when the right goes unused. The film follows that right through the night, and then further, to the one place the rules were never built to reach. What a woman agrees to in a room like this belongs to the room. Nothing that happens there, not the rules, not the night, not another person’s feelings, can make it follow her out, and which of her selves leaves with her is hers to decide.

Love’s Whirlpool is a Japanese film, released in Japan as Ai no Uzu on 1 March 2014. Daisuke Miura wrote and directed it from his own play, which the theatre company he leads first staged in 2005, and which won the Kishida Kunio Drama Award in 2006, sharing that year’s prize with another play. The film runs 123 minutes and was released for adults only, under the R18+ rating. That July it reached New York, at the Japan Society’s Japan Cuts festival.

Sosuke Ikematsu plays the young man, credited only as Neet, and Mugi Kadowaki the university student. Hirofumi Arai plays the freeter, Kenichi Takito the salaryman, Yosuke Kubozuka the clerk who minds the room through the night, and Tetsushi Tanaka the manager who runs it. None of the guests has a name. The film credits each of them by a role, as though the club’s rule of anonymity had become the film’s own manners. At the Kinema Junpo Best Ten for that year, Kadowaki won the award for a new actress, for this film and two others, and Ikematsu the award for a supporting actor, for his work that year.

Two notes before going further. The film was not screened for this essay. What happens in it is described as published synopses and reviews describe it, and what the characters say is paraphrased, never quoted as exact. And the essay discusses the whole film, including how it ends, because the ending is where the film puts its question. A reader who would rather meet the ending on screen should stop here, and come back.

One more note, about what this essay will not do. The film is explicit, and it was sold that way: when it was announced, the film press led with how little of it the cast spend dressed, eighteen and a half minutes out of 123. This essay is not explicit. It names sex in a phrase and no more, describes no one’s body, and reports the guests’ gossip about one another’s bodies without repeating a word of it. The play had found its own way of doing this. Ai Nagai, one of the judges who gave it the prize, wrote that the orgy it is about is never depicted directly, and that the writing still left her with the awkward feeling of having caught herself staring at a photograph of one. This essay stays on the play’s side of the door.

Look at the room first, because it has been designed, and the design is an argument. It is a flat in Roppongi on two levels. Upstairs is a living room with a sofa, where the guests wait in bath towels. Downstairs is a room with four beds and nothing between them, so that everyone there can see everyone else. From midnight until five, any guest may take any guest who is willing down the stairs. The manager explains the rules, and his clerk stays through the night to see that they are kept. One of them matters later: people who meet here may not exchange phone numbers.

It is also a business. Japanese coverage of the film calls it an ura fūzoku, an underground sex business, ura being the back side of a thing. Everyone in the flat has paid to be there, and, as the Japan Society noted when it showed the film in New York, the men have paid more than the women. The young man’s twenty thousand yen, spent on this one night, is everything he has.

Think about why. Women pay less because men are paying to meet them. Read that way, the difference in what they pay is the first ranking in the film, and it is settled before anyone arrives. It says who the room is for, and who the room is made of.

The rest of the design points the same way. One by one it removes every cost that makes sex between strangers awkward to ask for. There is no name to be embarrassed under, and no number to be pursued through afterwards. The purpose is shared, and was agreed before anyone arrived. The price has been paid. The end is fixed. The difficult first question, would you, has been asked and answered by the business, on everybody’s behalf, before the door opens.

That leaves one thing in the room still expensive, and it is not yes.

Go back to the student’s question, and to the answer, which is more exact than it sounds. She may refuse anyone she does not like: that is a right, and he grants it. If she keeps refusing, it will start to be a question of what she came for: that is a price. It is a clever one, because it threatens nothing. It does not say she will be sent home, or charged more, or made to do anything at all. It asks her to account for herself. After it, every no she says becomes a small piece of evidence about her: that she did not mean it, that she is spoiling the room, that she came under false pretences.

Said plainly, none of this is how consent works. Coming to the flat is not a yes to anyone in it. Neither is the fee, or the towel, or the waiting on the sofa, or a yes said earlier in the night to somebody else. A yes is given to one person at one time, and it can be taken back. The manager’s sentence folds all of those things into one assumption: that to attend is to have agreed in advance, and that refusal is an exception, to be used sparingly, like a sick day.

A no is only as free as it is cheap to say. Where refusing costs nothing, a yes can simply mean yes. Where every refusal has to be accounted for, some yeses may be given to avoid the accounting, and from outside nobody can tell which. The manager’s sentence raises that cost at the door, before the night has started and before anyone has touched anyone.

His question, what did you come for, is not a wicked one. It is a question in the wrong mouth. Why a woman is somewhere is hers to answer, honestly and in private, and this essay will not answer it for the student. What can be seen is who is asking, and what the answer is worth to him. In a room where, on this reading, women pay less because men are paying to meet them, a woman who keeps refusing is bad for business. This essay does not read the manager as a villain. He is the business, explaining its terms.

At first the eight guests sit in silence, in towels. Besides the young man and the student there are a freeter, a married salaryman, a factory worker, a nursery teacher, a young woman who works in an office, and a regular, a woman who comes every time. Small talk about diets goes on for a while. Then the first pairs go downstairs.

The towels are the club’s promise, made in cloth. Everyone is reduced to the same thing: no clothes, so no uniforms; no names, so no histories; no visible jobs, so no rank. The film keeps half the promise. It gives no one a name. But it gives everyone a label, and the labels are exactly the sorting the towels were meant to take off. Neet, from the English acronym for a young person not in education, employment or training. Freeter, someone who lives on part-time or temporary work. Salaryman. Factory worker. Nursery teacher. They are the words a society uses to place people by what they do for a living, and the film calls its guests by them, as though the only thing anyone could leave at the door was clothing.

Between rounds, the guests put their labels back on. They trade jobs and life stories, as strangers do, and in the trading the room acquires an order it did not have while everyone sat in silence. Nobody forces them. They do it themselves, because that is how strangers meet: by asking what the other one does.

A reader outside Japan may be tempted to take the labels as local colour. They are not exotic. Every language has words for where a person stands, and every room of strangers reaches for them within minutes. What the film adds is the setting: a room that sold the idea that, for one night, nobody would need them.

The young man and the student are the last two to move. Then, suddenly, she pushes him onto the sofa, and he asks whether she will go downstairs with him. They go.

It is worth reading the moment exactly as it happens, and no further. First an act by her, sudden and entirely her own. Then a question from him. Then an answer from both of them, which is going. This essay will not add a conversation to it. What the moment gives is an order of events: she chose, he asked, they went.

Downstairs, she turns out to be the least guarded person in the room. Between rounds she says that she is having a very good time, which strikes even her as strange, and he says that he is enjoying himself too, though it may not look like it. The two who sat silent longest are the two who say, out loud, that they are glad to be there.

What the room does with her pleasure may be the first thing in the film that makes a woman watching it sit up. It turns it into gossip. The others talk about her, about how she sounds; this essay will not repeat what they say. But look at the shape of it. In a room built for exactly this, a room that charges for it and sets the hours for it, what gets mocked is not the sex. It is a woman being heard to enjoy it. The room permits the act, and polices the pleasure.

The film knows the old types it is working with, and so do its critics. An admiring English-language review in 2014 noted that Miura was using some well-worn figures, among them the awkward virgin getting his first experience and the shy university student who turns out to be uninhibited, and argued that he takes them much deeper than type. This essay agrees, and would put the difference in one place. A type has no question in it, and this student has one before the night has even begun. It is about who decides what happens to her, and the film does not forget it.

The society that grows up in the flat takes only a few hours: jobs and life stories first, then gossip about one another’s bodies and noises, then quarrels over who is desirable and who should never have been let in. The film is often very funny about all of it, and it is funny because it is exact.

There is a mechanism here, and it is worth stating. When the one thing everybody came for has been agreed in advance, it stops being scarce. No one in the flat has to wonder whether sex is available; the business has settled that. So something else becomes scarce instead, and it is being wanted. Who was chosen first. Who was chosen at all. Who is being avoided. Who should not be here. The rankings are not a fault in the arrangement. They are what it produces, the way a market produces prices.

The essay “Don Jon, and Losing Yourself in Someone Who Can Look Back” read a young man’s preference for pornography as a preference for what pornography lacks: a person who might see him, want something from him, or be let down. The club sells a night built on the same lack. Bodies, without names and without an afterwards. What the film shows is what happens when the bodies turn out to have eyes. They look back. They judge. They compare. Some of them fall in love.

When the film opened, Miura described it as entertainment, neither erotic nor grotesque. It can still sting, and the sting is probably not in the sex, which few people watching will ever see from the inside. It is in the sorting, which almost everybody has done, and almost everybody has had done to them.

The night may be hardest on the factory worker. Some of the women avoid pairing with him. This essay will not describe him, and it will not repeat anything that is said about him.

Their choices were theirs. This is the right the student asked about, and it is the same right in every woman’s hands. A refusal needs no reason and owes nobody an explanation. It says: not with me, not now. That is all it has to say.

What the room adds is not the refusals. It is the talk around them. That talk takes a no, which concerns one evening between two people, and turns it into a verdict on a person, delivered in public. The conversion is where the cruelty lives.

Then it comes out that he has never had sex. And later, with the regular, it happens for him, and the whole room applauds.

It would be easy to make that applause the punchline of the night. This essay reads it the other way. It may be the only moment in the night when the room acts as one, and it acts for him. After hours of sorting, a room of strangers in towels stops keeping score and claps for somebody. It may be the kindest thing that happens all night.

It is also the clearest proof that nothing in the room is private. His first time belongs to everybody: the whole room knows, and the room’s applause is, among other things, a verdict. It is the kindest verdict the room gives all night, and it is still a verdict. The moment can be both at once. This essay holds both, and ranks nobody: not him, not the regular, not the women who chose otherwise.

At one point in the night the freeter invites the student downstairs, and the young man stands up and stops them. The freeter shouts at him not to go falling for her.

Read it as it happens. What the student wanted at that moment is hers, and this essay will not supply it. What the scene shows is a man deciding something on her behalf. It may have been protective. It may have been possessive. It was probably both. Either way the decision was not hers, and it was made in a room built on the premise that each person decides for themselves.

Notice, too, what the room calls it. Not rudeness, not interference: love, or its first symptom. And the word arrives as an accusation. The rule the room enforces most loudly turns out not to be the one about phone numbers. It is the one nobody wrote down: do not feel anything. The young man has broken it.

The freeter is not the villain of the scene. He is the room’s unwritten rule, speaking out loud, and he is right about the young man.

There is a point about consent here that is easy to miss, because the young man is sympathetic and the moment can look like gallantry. A room that makes yes easy also makes it easy for other people to act as though they know what you want. The refusal that protects a woman has to be hers, and not one a man makes for her while she stands there.

A couple arrive late. The woman takes the young man downstairs; the man invites the student, and she goes down with him. The young man watches her with the other man.

Then the couple start fighting. He accuses her of enjoying it for real. She walks out.

Whatever they said to each other beforehand, coming together says something plain: we will both do this. What they find in the flat is that the agreement had a clause neither of them had said aloud, and that it was his. You may do it; you may not enjoy it. The agreement covered the act. It did not cover her pleasure, which he had been treating, without knowing it, as his. The essay “Lady Chatterley's Lover, and a Marriage That Asked Her Only for Care and an Heir” found the same gap in a husband’s suggestion that his wife take a lover for an heir: not a permission to want, it said, but a permission to conceive. The permission here is smaller and more modern. What it leaves out is the same: what she wants.

The essay “Closer, and Confessing Everything Without Being Known” noticed that the question a jealous lover keeps asking, whether it was better, is not really a request for knowledge. It asks for a ranking, a place for the man asking on the list of people she has been with. The boyfriend’s accusation is the same question in the form of a charge. And once again it lands on a woman’s pleasure. The student’s is turned into gossip by the room; his girlfriend’s is turned into a betrayal by him. In a flat that sells pleasure by the night, a woman enjoying herself keeps being treated as an offence.

When the quarrel breaks the evening open, the young man apologises to the student, and the two of them go back to bed. Whatever the apology is for, it is worth noticing what an apology does. It treats the other person as someone who can be owed something. In a room arranged as a rotation, that is already a kind of attachment.

Put the night together and the title explains itself. Tenderness, in the applause. Possession, in the young man standing up. Jealousy, in the couple. Ranking, in the gossip. A married man on the phone to his wife, making excuses. Everything the flat was designed to leave on the landing is inside before morning, and turning. Ai no Uzu: a whirlpool of love. The title is not ironic. It is a description.

The people who judged the play noticed the same thing from their side of the stage. Ai Nagai wrote that of the plays in front of her it probably left the worst aftertaste. The aftertaste is the point. It is the consequence the club promised to abolish, arriving anyway, and arriving in whoever reads or watches it. Hisashi Inoue, another of the judges, described the play’s conceit as a question: what happens if the extreme realism that was one of the main currents of twentieth-century world theatre is turned on the newest forms of the sex trade? The film’s answer is that the sex turns out to be the least surprising thing in the room.

What the room did keep out was names and numbers. Names it kept out entirely: nobody in the film has one. Numbers it very nearly kept out.

From here, this essay describes how the film ends.

At five the night is over. The curtains are opened, and morning light falls on the guests’ faces. The regular leaves with the manager, and it turns out that the two of them are a couple.

The student has lost her phone, and to find it the clerk rings her number from the young man’s phone. It is an ordinary kindness, the kind anyone would do, and it breaks the one rule the club had made for exactly this moment. Her number is now in his phone, and his is in hers.

Everything else about the night stays in the flat when the curtains open: the gossip, the rankings, the quarrel, the applause. The numbers are the only thing that leaves.

Some days later she asks him to meet her. He is delighted. She has come only to ask him to delete her number. The woman in that room, she says, was not her. He answers that the man in that room was the real him. She walks away.

Look at how she does it. The only way to ask him to delete her number was to use his. She spends the one thing that got out of the room on putting it back.

The film hands the last word to both of them and the victory to neither. Two people who shared a night now disagree about what it showed. For her, the woman in that room is not the woman who walks away. For him, the man in the room was more himself than the one who withdrew his last twenty thousand yen at the start of the night. It would be easy to take a side, and to call her ashamed and him brave, or her sensible and him deluded. This essay takes neither, because what the two sentences share is more interesting than how they differ. Each is a claim to authorship. She claims the right to leave a self in a room. He claims the right to carry one home.

Consent, read as something that operates rather than something that is declared once, has a plain thing to say here. What she agreed to in the flat, she agreed to in the flat. It was a yes to that room, that night, those hours, and it does not reach forward into a morning or a phone. A night together does not oblige her to a second meeting, however kind the man. His feelings, however real, oblige her to nothing. The number she never chose to give was never a promise. Her request to delete it is the last refusal in the film, and it is the same right she asked about before the night began. In the room she could refuse anyone. After the room, she can refuse the room.

And he lets her. He says his piece, she walks away, and that is where the film leaves them. His account of himself is his to keep, and it makes no claim on her.

What she means by it, she does not have to say. It may be shame. It may be protection, of a life outside the flat that the night was never supposed to reach. It may be the plainest kind of boundary: a woman telling a man which of her selves he is allowed to know. Nobody owes anybody an account of which self was the real one. What matters is who decides which self goes home. At the end of Love’s Whirlpool, at last, she does.

The law first, as the statute states it. Japan’s Penal Code makes it a crime to commit an indecent act in public (Article 174), and makes a person who aids a principal an accessory (Article 62). Both articles appear together in one news report from June 2009. According to J-CAST News, police in Sendai entered a flat in the city where a sex party was under way and arrested eight people, among them two of the guests, for public indecency, and two of the organisers, for aiding it. A room in a private flat is not an obvious public place, and the report’s headline recorded the reaction: is this even a crime? The police explanation, as the report gives it, was that although it was a single room in a flat, an unspecified number of people had been having sex openly, and every participant could see the others.

This essay makes no claim about how the law would treat the club in the film, which is fiction, and nothing here is legal advice. But the word the Japanese coverage uses, ura, is exact. A business on the back side of things keeps its own rules. In this one, the manager’s sentence is the whole of the policy on refusal.

Readers outside Japan may meet the film in another frame. Its American distributor describes it as a film that “explores Japan’s fuzoku (sex industry) with candor, humor and freewheeling indecency.” The frame is worth resisting. Nothing in Love’s Whirlpool needs Japan to make sense. Strangers pay for one night without consequences and find the consequences waiting for them, and that could happen in any city with a flat and a phone. What is local is the vocabulary, the labels and the word ura, not the people. A young man spending his last twenty thousand yen on one night, and a student asking whether she may refuse, are not Japanese stories. They are only told in Japanese here.

In the film’s second week in cinemas, a talk for women brought members of its cast together with the writer Mami Amamiya. What she said there belongs with the objections that follow, because it is the sharpest of them.

There are at least five ways this reading could be wrong, and the first is the most serious.

First, the young man. At that event, Amamiya said plainly that he looks down on the student. If she is right, this essay has been too generous to him. His falling for her would then belong with the room’s rankings rather than standing against them, and his last line, that the man in the room was the real him, would be a confession of something other than love. This essay cannot rule that out, and a woman who has been looked down on by a man who later said he loved her may find Amamiya’s reading the truer one. What the essay can say is that the student’s request survives either reading. If he loved her, she may still leave. If he looked down on her, she was right to.

Second, the guests’ lives. Christopher Bourne, reviewing the film warmly for its New York screening, found under its single-minded subject a tale of how people use the sex industry as “an escape from superficial and rather empty existences”. On that reading the film is more of a social critique than this essay has allowed: it is about the emptiness the guests bring to the room, and not only about what the room does to them. This essay has declined to call anyone’s life empty, because sorting people from outside is the room’s own habit. But it concedes that the film may be making a harder judgement about its guests than this reading does, and that declining a verdict can be a way of not seeing one.

Third, the student. This essay has read her request as authorship, a boundary drawn by a woman who knows which of her selves she is taking home. It may simply be shame. The essay may have turned shame into autonomy because autonomy makes a better ending. The film does not say which it is, and this reading is a reading.

Fourth, the film itself. Love’s Whirlpool is explicit, and it was sold on it. An essay that stays in the living room may be describing a gentler film than the one that exists. By one judge’s account the play never showed the act directly; the film shows it. A viewer who finds the film’s frankness exploitative, or its comedy at the guests’ expense unkind, is not making a mistake. This essay has not answered that objection. It has only chosen not to repeat what the objection is about.

Fifth, the premise. This essay has discussed consent inside a business built to profit from yes, as though the answer were a better policy on refusal. A reader may think the answer is that such a room should not exist, or that no amount of refusing makes a paid night of this kind a free one. This essay does not make that argument, because the film does not. It does not claim that the argument is wrong.

Three things, none of them a rule.

A right with a price on it is still a right. But somebody set the price, and it is always fair to ask who, and who gains when the right goes unused.

Agreeing to one thing in advance is not agreeing to everything that grows up around it: being ranked, being talked about, being wanted afterwards, being looked for. The room’s rules could say what was on offer. They could not say what it would turn into.

Two people can share a night and disagree about what it showed. Neither owes the other agreement.

So, once, to you, if you have ever said of a night, or a year, or a room, that the woman in it was not you. You are allowed to leave a self somewhere. You are also allowed, one day, to go back for it. Neither is a verdict on the night, and no one who was in the room gets to make that decision for you: not the one who liked you best, not the one who ranked you, not the ones who clapped.

This is a reading of a film. It diagnoses no one, fictional or real, and it says nothing about any actor’s life. It gives no legal advice: the two articles of the Penal Code it mentions are stated as they stand, and one reported case is described as it was reported. It recommends no arrangement, and it condemns no one who has been in a room like this one.

When you said yes to something, what exactly were you agreeing to? And what did the room assume you had agreed to along with it?

Who set the price of your no, and who gained when it went unsaid?

Have you ever been ranked in a room you came to for something else? What did you do with the ranking afterwards?

Is there a self you left somewhere on purpose? Would you want it back, and would you want anyone else to be keeping it?

If someone told you that the person you were on one particular night was the real you, whose account would you trust, and why?