Before The Family Game redefined the Japanese cinema of the 1980s, Yoshimitsu Morita cut his teeth on two remarkable erotic films for Nikkatsu’s Roman Porno line: Top Stripper (1982) and Pink Cut: Love Me Hard, Love Me Deep (1983). Marked by an atypically sweet, sex-positive tone and an infectious pop sensibility that stands out amongst the more tortured classics of the genre, both films find the independent filmmaker working with studio resources for the first time and therefore experimenting with various new modes of filmmaking. 

Top Stripper follows Yoichi (Kensuke Miyawaki), a bright-eyed delivery boy who misguidedly falls in love with the stripper next door, Gloria (Kaori Okamoto). Shot on-location in a near-documentary style that forefronts delightful bygone locations and the camaraderie inherent to the strip club’s troupe, the film hits a surprising note of coming-of-age, suffused with open-ended questions about spectatorship. Its pop-inflected counterpart, Pink Cut: Love Me Hard, Love Me Deep, sees Morita working on a set for the first time, basking in the artificiality of it all. Morita goes as far as staging musical numbers, in a fantasmatic tale of entrepreneurship that finds Mami (Mayumi Terashima) and Yuka (Mai Inoue) open a barbershop best known for its… special services. A pure candy-colored concoction emblematic of the 1980s, it reveals Morita as a thoroughly versatile filmmaker that here takes his first steps towards the striking, playful postmodernism that would define his entire oeuvre.