Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands

The estate agent Naka hires the hit man Sho to find his mistress Sae who was kidnapped by four gangsters. Among the kidnappers is also Sho’s archrival Ko, who had killed Sho’s lover five years ago. Sho seeks revenge ever since. A showdown between the rivals is scheduled for the next day. On the way to his hotel, Sho is made a pass on by the prostitute Mina. He takes her up to his room without knowing that she is Ko’s girl.

While he is in the shower, Mina secretly removes the bullets from his revolver. The following day at 3 p.m. Sho heads to the stipulated bar to meet Ko. He recognizes too late that the magazine of his revolver is empty. But does this all really happen? Or is it all only a dream?

Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands was Yamatoya Atsushi’s second film as director and his second pink film. The offer for the film came from Yamoto Kazuyuki (Asakura Daisuke), the son of Kokuei founder Yamoto Teruo and a confirmed cinephile, who was taken with Yamatoya’s directorial debut Season of Betrayal (Uragiri no kisetsu, 1965), which Yamatoya had made for Wakamatsu Production. Yamatoya became acquainted with Wakamatsu Koji in 1964 and began writing screenplays for Wakamatsu using the penname Otani Yoshiaki, which he shared with fellow Nikkatsu assistant directors such as Sone Chusei.

Together they wrote the script for Wakamatsu’s Chronicle of an Affair (Joji no rirekisho), which became one of Kokuei’s biggest box-office hits of all times. Although he had left Nikkatsu, Yamatoya was invited by Suzuki Seijun to join the screenplay-writer group Guryu Hachiro. A result of this cooperation was Branded to Kill (Koroshi no rakuin, 1967), which was written by Yamatoya at about the same time as the script for Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands.

Both films share several features such as a multilayered and increasingly surreal plot and the motive of the hit man chasing and being chased by his alter ego, but Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands perhaps even surpasses Branded to Kill in breaking up conventional narrative patterns.