But it is erotic, and even given the brutal place it winds up, it never feels for a nanosecond that sexual ecstasy is something for which its character or its audience deserve to be punished. It's not prurient, and the grimly transactional feeling that characterises what most of us probably think of as "pornographic" is absent. The film shows, almost to the exclusion of any anything else, unsimulated sex scenes the mechanics and fluids involved in sexual intercourse are depicted with unabashed physicality in close-ups and wide shots and the really important part is that, unlike virtually every other artistically nuanced film containing explicit sex that I can think of, Realm of the Senses has no obvious interest in circumventing our proclivity to finding its sex scenes pleasurable and arousing.
But trying to redeem Realm of the Senses from the shameful genre of porn is, I think, to completely misunderstand what it is, what it's doing, and why writer-director Oshima Nagisa made it. There have been attempts, as long as the film has existed, to somehow reclaim it from the category of pornography, often with the assumption that "art" and "porn" are mutually exclusive categories. To be a bit more specific, Realm of the Senses is that great theoretical ideal that all of the filmmaking intelligentsia of the 1970s kept driving itself: it is the great example of Artistic Porno. It is not merely a sexual film it is a critique and deconstruction of Japanese sexual mores constructed into a film-shaped object. The easy gag is to go for the "ye gods, it's too explicit for the country that invented tentacle porn?" angle, except that glosses over the social complexity that explains not merely why ITROTS - oh, we're going to have to work on finding a better abbreviation, aren't we - was so unprecedentedly controversial when it was made, but also why it was made to begin with. To the best of my knowledge, at the time of this writing, 1976's In the Realm of the Senses has never been shown uncensored in its home country of Japan.