Asuka is in her mid-30s and has accepted Hajime’s proposal for marriage. They both work at a fish factory in a small village at the sea and plan their wedding. One day at the harbor Asuka encounters a kappa, a water sprite, who later the day appears again in front of her. It turns out that the kappa is her former schoolmate Tetsuya. Tetsuya had died drowning in a swamp in the last year of high-school before he was able to confess his love to Asuka. He was reborn as a kappa and came back to save Asuka.
From the Death of God, who appears as an eccentric hippie in a colorful flashy dress, Tetsuya learns that Asuka will die the next day before sunset. But Tetsuya is determined to pluck his high-school love from the jaws of death. He takes Asuka to the mountains to get from some elder kappa a shirikodama, a mythical ball. When Asuka puts the shirikodama in her anus, the Death of God would not be able to take her life. Will the kappa succeed in saving his first love?
Underwater Love, the latest film of Imaoka Shinji, is a good example that shows how the pink film industry reacts to changes in the market. The annual number of pink films has decreased constantly in the past decades. Today the annual production is down to less than 50 films from more than 160 films 20 years ago. DVD releases, TV broadcasts, online-streams and other new forms of consumption have replaced the theatrical release as main source of income. In particular for the production company Kokuei, which since the 1990s has actively promoted its films at foreign markets, the international festival circuit has become an additional outlet for its new products.
Underwater Love takes this internationalization of the pink film one step further. The film is the first international pink film production in decades (a number of co-productions was made in the 1960s especially with Taiwan) and brings together artists from several countries. The cast and main staff is Japanese, the cinematography is by acclaimed DP Christopher Doyle, and the music is written and performed by the French-German duo Stereo Total. Although songs and dances have been frequently deployed in pink films before – in more recent times for instance in Imaoka Shinji’s previous film Frog Song (Kaeru no uta, 2005) — Underwater Love may well be the first pink musical ever made.
In Japanese folklore kappa are mythical water sprites with an indentation on the top of their head that holds water. They are usually seen as harmless mischievous troublemakers, but sometimes also as malevolent creatures, which try to steal people’s shiridama, a mythical ball inside the anus believed to be the seat of one’s souls.