The Naked Director, and the One Rule That Was Hers

Sapporo, 1980. A man is failing to sell English-language encyclopedias from door to door, until a senior colleague takes him along and shows him how it is done. The Naked Director, Netflix’s series about the adult-video director Toru Muranishi, begins on those doorsteps, and a reading of it should begin there too, because what he learns in those first scenes is the one skill he will use for the rest of the story. He learns to sell. Soon he is selling magazines the law forbids, and then videos that the biggest studio in the business has had blacklisted.

The series is fast, funny and often very good company, and it has one argument about rules, which it makes again and again: every rule over sex turns out to be a hypocrisy. The censorship is one. The police can be bought. The largest studio sets up an ethics body to keep a rival out of the market. Even the strictest mother in the story has a secret of her own. Muranishi takes each of these rules as a personal insult and breaks it, and the series lets the breaking feel like liberation. About most of these rules, it is right.

But one rule in the story is not like the others, and the series never quite sees it, because its hero never does. It is not a rule about what may be shown of sex. It is a rule about what may be shown of her: what one particular woman has agreed to, in what form, and for how long. It does not belong to the state, or to a studio, or to a parent. It belongs to the woman on the screen, and it is the only rule in the series that does.

This essay argues that the clearest wrongs done to women in The Naked Director, on screen and in its own making, are done at that rule, and that the rule is broken there with the same energy the series teaches us to cheer everywhere else. The series, to its credit, keeps showing us where the damage is. Its hero keeps walking past it, and for most of its length, so does its argument.

The Naked Director ran in two seasons of eight episodes, the first released in August 2019 and the second in June 2021. Masaharu Take was its chief director, with Eiji Uchida and Hayato Kawai, and it was adapted from Nobuhiro Motohashi’s biography of Muranishi. Takayuki Yamada plays Muranishi. Misato Morita plays Megumi Sahara, a university student raised by a strict mother. Shinnosuke Mitsushima is Toshi Arai, the small-time hustler who draws Muranishi into the trade, and Tetsuji Tamayama is Kenji Kawada, a publisher who becomes the producer keeping the company running. In the second season Yuri Tsunematsu plays Miyuki Chiba, a former cosmetics saleswoman who comes into the business.

It is a semi-fictional account, mixing fact and invention. Several of its characters are drawn from real people, and it treats them unevenly: some keep their real names, and some appear under invented ones. When this essay says Muranishi, it means the character Takayuki Yamada plays. It makes no claim about the real man’s life, and none about anyone else’s beyond what has been publicly reported about how the series was made.

One of those real names needs a word at once. Muranishi gives Megumi a stage name, and the name the series has him give her is the one a real actress of the period worked under, a woman who had left public life many years before the series was made. It was reported at the time that the makers had not contacted her, and critics in Japan objected; this essay comes back to why. It will not use that name. It calls the character Megumi, the name the series gives her before a man renames her.

A few more notes. The series was not screened for this essay; its events are described as reference works and published criticism describe them, and what its characters say is paraphrased, never quoted as exact. And the essay discusses both seasons, including how the story ends, because the ending is where its argument about rules is settled; it will say so again where the ending begins. Nothing here is explicit: where the series films sex, the essay says so in a phrase. The second season includes a suicide attempt, which the essay states once, plainly, describing nothing of how.

Before the business, the man. The series gives Muranishi an origin, and it is worth being exact about it. No sooner has he become his company’s best salesman than the company collapses. He comes home to find his wife with another man. She tells him he never satisfied her, and she leaves, taking the children.

Notice whose rule comes first. Before any censor or policeman or rival appears, the first person in the story to decide something for herself is a woman, and what she decides is that she is going. He cannot argue with that, and he cannot break it. It is possible to read much of what follows as the career of a man who has resolved that no rule will ever again be made against him. That is this essay’s reading, not something the series says. One critic, as the essay will come to, went further.

Then, drinking in a bar, he helps a small-time hustler out of trouble. Toshi Arai sells tapes secretly recorded in love hotels: the sounds of couples who did not know anyone was listening. The series plays it as low comedy. It is worth stopping on, because in the series’ own telling this is where the trade begins. In The Naked Director, the trade’s first product is the intimacy of people who were never asked.

Muranishi turns his pitch on pornographic magazines. He builds a chain of bookshops across Hokkaido, and with Kawada, a publisher, starts printing uncensored magazines of his own. Bribes keep the local police quiet until a detective from Tokyo, Takei, arrests him. The salesman has found his product, and his product has found its first enemy: a rule about what may be shown.

When Muranishi comes out of prison, video recorders are everywhere. He, Toshi and Kawada set up a company in Shinjuku, Sapphire Pictures, and walk straight into the man who dominates the business. Ikezawa, head of the largest studio, has their videos blacklisted and sets up an industry ethics body to keep them out.

Here the series’ argument about rules is at its clearest and its most persuasive. The rules in Muranishi’s way are shown, one after another, to be something other than what they claim. An ethics code turns out to be a way of protecting a market. The police who enforce the law turn out to take money for not enforcing it. The censorship itself is drawn as a hypocrisy. Against all this Muranishi is loud, crude and relentless, and beside his opponents he looks almost honest. The series never has to argue that his rebellion is liberation. It only has to show us whom he is rebelling against.

Much of the time the series is right, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. An ethics body run by the market leader to shut out a competitor is a cartel with a conscience painted on it, and it is easy to enjoy watching a man kick at rules like that; the series is built so that we do.

The essay “Nobody Breaks the Rule” described the method that runs underneath this industry, and it is the opposite of Muranishi’s. It does not defy the law. It builds arrangements in which the thing a statute needs in order to bite is simply not there, and that essay observed that all of this ingenuity goes into whether an offence has been committed, and almost none into whether anybody has been harmed. The Naked Director stages the older, louder method, the one that kicks the door in. But the two methods share a blind spot. Breaking a rule and engineering around it are both conversations with the state. In neither is the person in front of the camera one of the parties.

So the question to put to every rule in the series is not whether it is a hypocrisy, which it usually is, but whose it is. The censorship belongs to the state. The ethics code belongs to a cartel. The mother’s objection, when it comes, belongs to the mother. None of them belongs to a woman on the screen. The one rule in the story that does is the one a man who takes every rule as an insult is least equipped to notice.

Then Megumi comes to Sapphire. She is a student who has grown up under a strict mother, and who has learned that she was born of her mother’s affair with a married man. Reference works give her reason for wanting to perform: she wants to earn the money to study abroad. She comes, as the series tells it, because she wants to.

This essay reads her yes as hers. The series gives it to her plainly, and the alternative, deciding on her behalf that a young woman who says she wants this cannot mean it, would be one more rule made over her by someone else. Nothing in the story as it is told makes her yes anyone else’s.

Her mother fights the release, and gets the video pulled. The series casts the mother as another obstacle, and here it deserves credit, because it is right. A mother’s objection to what her daughter chooses is not the daughter’s rule either, and the series has already given this mother a secret of her own. Megumi hands back her fee to pay for Muranishi’s shoot in Hawaii. When the shoot ends with him in an American jail, she goes on television as a working actress, breaks with her mother and helps raise his bail. The series frames it as a young woman taking her life into her own hands, and much of it is exactly that.

On television she talks frankly about sex, and her videos become hits. It is the best thing the series gives her, and it is worth seeing why. Muranishi is locked up on the other side of the Pacific. Nobody is directing her. The words are her own, and the country is listening to a woman say in public, in her own voice, what she thinks about sex. Whatever else the series does to her, it lets her have that.

Now look at who stood around that first yes. The man she came to is the man who directs the video. Because he casts himself opposite her, he is also her partner in it. The Japanese title, Zenra Kantoku, is blunter than the English: a stark-naked director is a director who has stepped in front of his own camera. He is the man who pays her. And he is the man who names her. A yes given to someone who holds all four places is still a yes. But a yes has another half, the no that would end it, and in that arrangement it is hard to say to whom the no would be spoken. The series, as it is told, spends its attention on the mother.

He names her. It is one of the founding acts of the business in the series, and it happens more than once: in the second season he gives Miyuki a stage name too. A stage name can do real good. It puts a wall between a woman’s work and the rest of her life, and in a business where being known costs so much, the wall matters. But the series shows what else it does.

A stage name is the point at which the woman and the product part company. The product has the name. It can be printed, advertised, copied and sold, and it can go where she does not go, and stay after she has left. In the second season, as reference works tell it, Miyuki comes into the business after Kawada hands her one of Megumi’s videos in the street. Megumi’s image, already travelling without her, has become the pitch that brings in the next woman.

None of that is sinister in itself. It is what images do. But it means that once a woman agrees to appear, there are two of her in the world, and only one of them can say no. The wrongs the series shows its women are done in the gap between the two: the image that goes further than the woman agreed to, and the woman left to live with where it went.

The clearest case in the series is not Megumi’s. It belongs to a woman who is not at the centre of the story, and it is the place where the story’s argument about rules turns over on itself.

Naoko appears in Sapphire’s first film. Afterwards she leaves the business and takes an ordinary job. Then, with Muranishi jailed in Hawaii and bail to be found, Toshi secretly hands the master tape of that first film to the yakuza boss Furuya, and passes the money off as a loan. Uncensored copies go into circulation. They find Naoko, and she loses her new job. Toshi begs Furuya to stop selling them. Furuya will not.

Say plainly what this is. It is not bad luck, and it is not a misunderstanding. Whatever Naoko agreed to when she appeared in that film, it was not this: copies struck from the master and sold by a gangster, in a form the law forbids, after she had left. Her image was sold without her say, and it cost her her living. That is what the series shows.

Now notice what the copies are. They are uncensored, the mosaic gone. From its first episodes the series has invited us to feel that getting rid of the mosaic is liberation, a salesman’s insult flung back at hypocrites. Here the same act, done to the same kind of image, ruins a woman who had nothing to do with anyone’s hypocrisy. The mosaic was how the trade obeyed the state’s rule. What Naoko agreed to was hers. Tearing up the first is the series’ idea of freedom. Tearing up the second is the same gesture, and the series shows exactly what it costs.

And notice who cannot stop it. Toshi, who started it, begs and is refused. Once a copy is loose, the man who let it loose has no more power over it than she has. That matters for where this essay ends. Whatever protects a woman in Naoko’s position has to work before the copy exists, or it has to put the power to stop it in her hands.

The essay “What the Camera Looks At”, writing about the industry the series depicts, observed that the visibility that gives its performers professional standing is the same visibility that makes leaving expensive. Naoko’s story is that sentence turned into a plot. She left. The image did not.

From here, this essay describes how the series ends.

The second season opens in 1990. Muranishi breaks with Kawada, founds a new company, Diamond Visual, and pours money into a satellite channel. His attention moves from Megumi to Miyuki, the shy newcomer.

Megumi reads his script for the channel’s first film, feels that he has moved on from her, and refuses the part. It goes to Miyuki. The series frames this as heartbreak, and it is. It is also a refusal, and it is honoured: she says no, and she does not do it. Notice the reason the series gives it. The reason is about him. She refuses because she feels he has left her behind. Even her no, in this story, is told as a chapter in his.

Then the bubble bursts, and the satellite venture drags him under. He borrows from Furuya, the man who sold Naoko’s copies, and in secret starts making uncensored tapes himself. He calls the people who work for him, performers and crew alike, mere product. They walk out, all of them, and Kawada and Toshi cut him off.

Two things about this, and the second matters more. The first is the rhyme. What cost Naoko her living in the first season, a copy in the form the law forbids, is in the second season the hero’s own business plan. The series is honest enough to bring it home to him. The second is the walkout. It is the moment in The Naked Director when the people in front of his camera and behind it make a rule together, and the rule is no. The series tells it as his fall. It could as easily be told as their decision: a room full of people who had been called product, deciding that they were not.

Once everyone has left him, Megumi comes back. She comes to urge him on, to tell him to start again. He does not respond. She tries to take her own life, and survives.

That is all this essay will say of it. The series puts the cost on screen, and deserves credit for that: the women in this story pay for his films with their work, their families and very nearly their lives, and it does not look away. What is worth seeing is how her part in his story ends. Earlier she met him with a refusal of her own. The last time she comes, she brings no deal and no refusal, only her attention, offered to a man who has none left to give back.

She goes home to her mother. Years later she is studying art in Italy. It is the ending the series gives her, and it is quietly exact. She first came to Muranishi to earn the money to study abroad, and she handed her fee back to pay for his shoot in Hawaii. At the last, the series gives her the thing she came for, on the other side of the world, outside the business and away from him. Her rule is kept, in the end, by leaving. The Deuce, HBO’s series about New York’s sex trade in the 1970s and 1980s, let its central woman, a sex worker called Candy, move behind the camera and make films of her own. The Naked Director’s answer for Megumi is distance.

The others are settled briefly. Toshi kills Furuya, and is killed moments later by one of Furuya’s men. Takei, the detective, is arrested for taking bribes. Kawada is making videos again with the old crew. Muranishi, deep in debt, is living with Miyuki.

The last scene is his. He is shooting in Shibuya without a permit, still breaking a rule, and the police hold him down. Pinned there, he shouts at the camera that anyone who wants to die should look down, because he is there. The joke is that he is the bottom: whoever you are, you can look down and find him. It is absurd, and touching in its way, and it is the series’ final word. Look at it again, though, and it is one more pitch. He is offering his own ruin as consolation, to strangers, through a lens. In the same season, the one person who came to him in person got no answer.

If the wish in that last line is close to you, or to someone near you, it is a matter for a person rather than an essay. In Japan, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare’s page “Mamorouyo Kokoro” lists places to talk, by telephone or by social media and chat, for anyone troubled by worries or anxiety.

Now step outside the story, because the series’ largest breach of that rule is not in the plot.

When the first season appeared in 2019, critics in Japan objected that it had given its heroine the working name of a real woman who had long since left public life, without contacting her. That August a women’s magazine site, Joshi Spa!, put the question to Netflix. The answer it printed was that, like Muranishi, she had not been involved in making the series, that it was based on Motohashi’s book, and that Netflix could say nothing more about rights.

Writing in Gendai Business in September 2019, Masae Ido set out what that answer left out. Netflix, she wrote, had contacted neither Muranishi nor the actress, and showed no awareness that her right to be forgotten called for any consideration at all. She also noticed something in the series itself that she found hard to understand. The real presenters of the television programmes the actress had appeared on are given invented names in the series, among them a man who had himself retired. The makers knew how to change a name. They did not change hers.

Ido also set out what the actress had done after she left: she retired in 1994, and afterwards took publishers and a company selling DVDs to court, over articles about what had become of her and over reissues of videos she had appeared in, as violations of her privacy and of her rights over her own image, and won.

Set that beside the story the series tells. Inside it, a woman who has left the business loses her new job to a copy she never agreed to, and nobody can stop it. Outside it, the name a woman had worked under, after she had left the business and gone to court over what was published of her and about her, was given to the heroine of a series streamed around the world, and its makers, it was reported, had not contacted her. The series tells Naoko’s story, and its making did something of the same shape to a real person.

The essay “Mrs Playmen, and Why a Signature Is Not a Yes” mentioned this series in passing, as the same problem in a Japanese key, a story about the trade in desire that used a woman’s name without asking her, and it declined to repeat the name. That was right, and this essay follows it. What the series adds, read closely, is that it carries its own objection inside it: it is a story about names given by men and images that outlive what was agreed, and its making repeated both.

What she thought of the series is not something this essay will guess at.

Three other readings from 2019 are worth setting out, because each names part of what this essay has been circling.

Ido’s objection went beyond the name. The series, she wrote, positions Muranishi as a hero for everyone, the leading figure of a sexual revolution that frees women, repressed and passive until then, from the spell they had been under where sex was concerned. The description is hers, and it names the series’ central flattery exactly: a salesman’s rule-breaking is presented as women’s liberation.

Iku Okada, writing in Newsweek Japan in October 2019, went to the origin. After his unfaithful wife’s parting insult, she observed, he throws himself into selling and making pornography, above all into shoots the law did not allow; and a man who talks so fluently about liberating desire never turns inward to his own dark wish for revenge, or to the misogyny that can be read beneath it. It is a hard reading, and a critic’s. It also makes sense of the first scenes, where the first rule he could not break was a woman’s.

The third came from an analyst rather than a critic, and it may be the most useful. Explaining in August 2019 how Netflix had been able to make the series at all, Munechika Nishida wrote that the company chooses with great care how to handle material on which no consensus can be had, and named that material in this series outright: women’s will, and exploitation. The adult-video business, he wrote, is hard to separate from sexual discrimination and exploitation. The series had not simply bleached these out. By choosing carefully how to draw the world around its hero, it had taken away the disgust and discomfort they produce, recast them, drawn its hero more like a hero, and dramatised the whole so that it could be watched with pleasure. His piece reads as an account of craft. It is also an exact description of what this essay has been tracing: the women’s will is in the series, arranged so as not to spoil the ride.

The government’s own account supplies what the series leaves at the edge. Japan’s 2022 law on adult-video performers states in its first article that making and publishing such videos may do serious harm to performers’ bodies, minds and private lives, harm that cannot be undone, and that such harm is in fact being done; its third article forbids anyone making them to force sex on a performer. The Cabinet Office, explaining the problem, describes people approached by someone pretending to be kind, or through their wish to become an idol. The series chose to tell the story of a woman who came because she wanted to. That is a real story. It may also be the story the industry would most like told about itself, and the women recruited in the ways the Cabinet Office describes are not what the series is about.

That law came a year after the second season. It was passed on 15 June 2022 and came into force on the 23rd, and the Cabinet Office calls it a law to protect individual dignity in matters of sex. Set beside The Naked Director, it reads in a particular way, because of what it is not about.

It is not a law about what may be shown. Its rules concern the contract and the calendar. The contract, and a written explanation of it, must be handed over and explained. No filming may take place for a month after those papers are delivered. A performer may refuse any filming, and any act they do not want, and may check the footage before release. Nothing may be released until four months after all filming has ended. A performer may cancel the contract unconditionally before filming, before release, and for a year after release (two years, for contracts made in the law’s first two years; those made in its third have a transitional rule of their own). And where something is published with no contract, or after the contract has been cancelled, the performer may demand that its sale and distribution be stopped.

Read that list with the series in mind. Every clause belongs to the one rule the series could not see. None concerns the state’s interest in what an image shows. All concern a particular person’s power over what is done with their image, and when. Nothing in a law of 2022 reaches back into a story set in the 1980s, and this essay applies it to no one. But set beside Naoko’s story, its last two clauses read almost like an answer.

Look, too, at what the law is made of. It is made of time. A month before the camera, four months before the release, a year to change one’s mind. The series is made of the opposite. Its hero learned his trade on doorsteps, where a sale is won in the minutes before the person holding the pen has had a night to think, and its pace, one of its great pleasures, is a salesman’s pace. Japanese consumer law gives a person who signs a contract at her own door eight days, in the words of Saitama Prefecture’s consumer centre, to cool her head and think again calmly. A set of encyclopedias is not a person, and the comparison flatters no one. It is drawn only because the series begins at a door. The answer to a yes obtained too fast is the same in both places: time, and the power to take the yes back.

Whether the law has worked in practice is a separate question, and this essay does not try to answer it. Its point is smaller. The series treats every rule as one kind of thing, a rule to be broken. The law divides them in two, and gives the half that belongs to the person on the screen back to that person.

The series’ deepest flattery is an equation it never states and everywhere assumes: that a society which shows more of sex is a society in which women are freer. Muranishi’s campaign against the mosaic is presented as the women’s cause, and Megumi speaking frankly on television is presented as its proof.

The essay “Why Japan Counts Sexlessness, and What the Count Hides” warned against that equation in another setting, in a sentence that fits this series exactly: “a country that once looked at sex openly was not therefore a country in which women were free.” The Naked Director supplies its own evidence. The same years that gave Megumi a television audience gave Naoko a copy she could not recall. Openness is a fact about images. Freedom is a fact about the person in them, and it depends on whether she has any say over what happens to them.

None of this makes it a Japanese story. The question of whose rule governs an image of a woman is asked wherever such images are made, and nowhere has answered it well by default. What is particular here is only the shape of the law: a country whose law had long concerned itself with what may be shown, and which in 2022 wrote a separate rule about whom the showing belongs to.

A reader in Japan who remembers the years the series depicts may find it strange to see them sold back as a romp. A reader who has come to Japan from elsewhere may have met this industry first through the series, which was streamed around the world. It is worth knowing, either way, that it is a picture built to be enjoyed, and that the country it portrays has since written down the one rule the picture leaves out.

There are at least five ways this reading could be wrong, and two of them should trouble it.

First, it may be asking a comic crime saga to be an essay on consent. The Naked Director is about a man and an era: a salesman, a boom, a bubble and a fall. It is not told as the women’s story, and it shows, more honestly than its critics sometimes allow, what his films cost them. Nishida’s account is in one sense a compliment: the problem is not bleached out, only recast so that it does not spoil the story. On this view the series has done what a story about a man can do, and this essay has built its case out of the series’ own evidence, which is a way of admitting that the evidence is there. Much of that should be granted. The objection is not that the series hides the cost. It is that it cannot tell the rule that would have prevented the cost from the rules that deserved breaking.

Second, and more serious: reading Megumi through the rules of the men around her may take away the one thing the series gives her. She chooses. She defies her mother. She speaks for herself on television, to the whole country. She refuses a script. She leaves, and makes a life elsewhere. A reading that sees her mainly as the place where his rule-breaking does damage risks turning a woman with a will into a casualty. This essay has tried to hold that line, by reading her yes as hers and her refusal as hers, but the risk is real, and a reader who finds Megumi freer in the series than she is in this essay is not wrong.

Third, the objection to the real name may be unfair to the makers. The series adapted a published biography. A public career is part of public history, and dramas about real events use real names all the time; Netflix’s own answer pointed to the book. The series itself supplies the reply: the makers who changed the presenters’ names made a different choice about hers.

Fourth, setting a law of 2022 beside a story of the 1980s is anachronism, and anachronism flatters the present. That is true, and it is why the law is set beside the series here rather than applied to it. Nobody in the series was bound by it, and the series cannot be blamed for not knowing it. What the comparison shows is only that the distinction the series cannot make was there to be made, because it has since been made.

Fifth, and aimed at this essay: it has spent a section on a real woman’s working name, her retirement and her lawsuits, and it has not contacted her either. It has done a smaller version of what it criticises. The only answers available are the ones it has tried to keep: to say nothing about her beyond what was publicly reported about the series’ making, to make no guess at her feelings, and to leave out the name. That is a narrowing, not an acquittal.

Three things, none of them a rule.

A rule about what may be shown and a rule about what may be shown of her are different rules. The first can be a hypocrisy, and breaking it can be a real freedom. The second is never a hypocrisy, because it is made by the one person it protects. A story that cannot tell them apart will cheer, sooner or later, at the wrong one.

A yes has a shape. It has a form, a reach and a length of time, and it belongs to the person who gave it. The wrongs in this series are almost never the first yes. They are the copy that outlives it, the use that goes past it, the name that stays on after the person has gone.

A name given is not a name owned. In the series, Muranishi hands out names; in its making, a name was handed out again. Whoever gives someone a name to work under takes on a debt about where that name goes, and for how long.

So, once, to you, if you watched The Naked Director and enjoyed it. The enjoyment is not a verdict on you. There is real pleasure in watching someone kick at stupid rules, and the series earns it; some of those rules deserved every kick. The question to carry away is only whose rules they were. And if anyone has ever treated a rule of yours as one more obstacle between them and what they wanted, whether it was your no, a limit, the version of yourself you agreed to show and no more, or your name, then it is worth knowing what the series shows and its hero never learns. It was not an obstacle. It was yours, and it still is.

This is a reading of a series. It diagnoses no one, fictional or real, and it says nothing about the real people the series drew on beyond what was publicly reported about how it was made. Nothing in it is advice about any relationship or any work, and it is not legal advice.

When someone broke a rule for you, or in your name, whose rule was it?

Is there something you agreed to once, in one form, that has since gone further than you agreed? Who could stop it now?

Which rules in your life deserve breaking, and which one is simply yours?

When you say yes to something that matters, what would you need in order to be able to take it back?

Has anyone given you a name you did not choose, at work, in a family, in a relationship? Where does it go when you are not in the room?