Mae West
It was my wife who enlightened me: “Here’s a woman I would like to see in one of your films,” she said. On her computer screen a sultry Mitsu Dan lounged in her lingerie, radiating an intoxicating sensuality.
Mitsu Dan is a woman who openly and confidently embraces her role as a sex object, yet it is the dark inner world that churns behind those doe eyes that I find particularly alluring. She has become a cultural phenomenon in Japan, where her sharp tongue and brazen exhibitionism has raised more than a few eyebrows, even in the Empire of Kink. Her blog is ranked number three in the nation. At the age of 29, she determined to shed her humdrum oh eru (office lady) existence and reinvent herself as a gravure idol (models who pose semi-nude or nude, but do not engage in sex) - a profession traditionally dominated by girls in their late teens or early twenties. She promised her mother that if she didn’t appear in any magazines after three years, she would quit. Three years later, she has risen to be one of Japan’s top guradoru, and played the starring role in an erotic feature entitled Watashi no Dorei ni Narinasai, or “Be My Slave,” released in Japan in November. Dan, a professed masochist, plays the slave.
“The ‘M’ in ‘S&M’,” she purrs, “also stands for ‘manzoku’ (satisfaction), and the ‘S’ for ‘service’.”
S&M is perhaps the supreme expression of eroticism; for it abstracts the brute impulses that drive us to the sex act and refines them into a formal liturgy. Its aim, like religion, is union with the infinite, a transcendence of the worldly, a glimpse of the sacred through the ritual transgression of taboo. Thus, it is not surprising that Dan would find a connection between Eros and Death. At one time she trained to be an undertaker - so fascinated was she with the subject of death - and told an interviewer, “Both death and eroticism are things that are hidden. It seems I have a fondness for things that are taboo.” I wonder if Mitsu Dan has read Eroticism: Death and Sensuality by the French intellectual and occasional surrealist Georges Bataille, affectionately known as the “metaphysician of evil.” Perhaps she would be impressed by this meditation on the mystical aspects of eroticism and its associations with death. I’m quite certain Bataille, were he alive today, would be impressed by Mitsu Dan.
Most of the information in this post was found in this interview.
