Big in Japan, Column 2: What We Talk About When We Talk About Tentacle Porn

By BeRightBack

As promised, this week’s column is on one of Japan’s most spectacularized exports, the pornographic genre Wikipedia rather demurely refers to as “tentacle erotica.” But where to start?  As any ancient mariner of the cyberseas can tell you, the internets are woven in no small part out of endless, clammy, somewhat salty-smelling threads devoted to the subject, slithering over publication histories, generic boundary confusions, censorship codes and the like with unsettling single-mindedness.  What kind of sucker would want to risk entangling himself in this wriggling mass?  What else could there possibly be left to probe?

For the purposes of this column, then, rather than trying to outgeek the un-outgeekable, I’ll be meditating on one particular work, the late ’80s three-part animated series Legend of the Overfiend [超神伝説うろつき童子], which is credited with starting the trend’s current incarnation and is perhaps Japan’s most widely recognized animated pornographic title outside Japan.  I want to talk about how this kind of thing teaches the viewer how to watch it, and what that can tell us about the nature of pleasure, porn, and the limits of personhood in general.  Is there a way to stop worrying and learn to love (or at least find something compelling in) the pr0n?

(after the jump – a long, sinewy discursis accompanied by graphics that are a bit unsettling but generally not unsafe for work)

The most striking, and surprising, thing to me about Overfiend is less its perversity than its polymorphology.  Marketed and generally analyzed as the spectacular Ur-text of the slithery set, Overfiend in the imagination becomes an all-penetrating-appendages, all-the-time tentacular spectacular, but the thing itself is much odder and more interesting than that.

There, of course, are scenes that dwell on demons growing tentacles that surround and suspend heroines in the air in order to fill every available orifice (as well as wriggle courteously around nipples and clitorides); unlike in the famous 19th century woodblock print by Hokusai, there is no narrative of mutual pleasure here accompanying the probing, and the spectacle indeed deserves the classification shokushu gôkan (触手強姦), or “tentacle rape.”

But these scenes are not as prevalent as one might surmise, and are imbedded as one kind among many instances of spectacular, violent transformation that defy an easy categorization of the film as simply a festival of fabulated phalluses.  The entire movie is premised on boundary transgression: the world of humans infiltrated by various demon gods who insinuate themselves into the bodies of the humans only to burst out from within them at inopportune moments of sexual excitement.  They are all there in pursuit of the titular Overfiend, or “chôjin,” who is rumored to be about to emerge and bring about the union of three planes of existence (the worlds of “humans,” “magical beings,” and “beast-men”): it is an open question whether this apocalypse will usher in a utopia or its opposite.  It turns out that the Overfiend resides inside our hapless hero, and much of the series, especially its second episode, concerns itself with his personal struggle between giving in to the rapacious omnipotence of his inner Overfiend or fighting to remain human enough to be a suitable lover for his sweetly (if at times insipidly) vanilla and all-too-human love interest.

Penetration, then, is just one of many ways to cross a bodily border.  Characters are engulfed by other characters, then burst back out of them; the tentacles themselves, in their multiplication, start to exceed their phallic symbology after a while as they cluster and engulf like anemones; at one point, the main character, in his aspect as Overfiend, becomes an enormous mass of tentacles that are also shafts of light after a rather spectacular sexual session that climaxes in a moment of Rapture that rhymes orgasm with a transubstantiation of the flesh into light, and the appendages he grows perform the decidedly un-phallic act of sucking people into themselves as they swell.  And an earlier tentacle rape scene is answered later with a scene in which a supernatural female character makes use of a spare demon like a sex toy, reducing him through mutual orgasm into a pile of smoking remains.

Bodies become increasingly fluid and abstract as the series progresses, as do the fluids themselves, which start to exceed their liquidity and coagulate into sentient, ropy embodiments of endless elasticity that fuse the seductive charm of the wife in The Incredibles with the sinewy strength of the stretchiest member of the Fantastic Four.  This viscous, fluid logic also demands that characters imbibe either the blood or the semen of the Overfiend in order to awaken their own demons within, which results in startling scenes of characters licking these fluids to commune with our hero, who hosts the Overfiend in his body.  One such scene comes at the very beginning of the series, preceding even the first tentacle, when a jock on the basketball team winds up a nice session of bullying our geeky hero by leaning in and licking the blood out of a scratch on his cheek.  Later, a different boy has become entranced with the promise of unlimited omnipotence to the point that he has enacted a literal castration on himself to install a demon tentacle there instead – to activate it, he interrupts a rather conventional coupling between the hero and his girlfriend, kidnapping her in order to lick the semen our hero has just ejaculated onto her face.

In Japan, the word “hentai” was adopted at the turn of the century as a translation of the sexological concept of perversion.  But its etymology is very different from the English term’s insistence on deviation and “turning away” from normal sexuality; “hen” [変] literally means “changed” or “different,” while “tai” [態] simply indicates a state of being.  The emphasis is on difference, not decadence; its homophonic relative 変体 literally means “changed body.” Overfiend as an example of animated hentai pornography can be read as a fusion of these two connotations, an attempt to capitalize upon the abstraction inherent in the animated medium so as to explore the pleasures of bodily transformation and border transgression as ends unto themselves.  The borders between aspects of the individual self are mapped relentlessly onto a split cosmology whose collapse into each other results in catharsis phrased as orgasm and apocalypse (much as it does in the later, non-pornographic Evangelion).

According to the series’ creator, tentacles were born, like most Japanese pornotropes, out of a need to get around censorship laws forbidding the direct portrayal of penises and penetration, much like the lack of hair on the pudenda of any of our heroes has as much to do with a prohibition against showing pubic hair as a fetishization of youth.  Like the prevalent use of dildos in live-action Japanese pornography, the tentacles were apparently first conceived as penis-substitutes, and the monsters as a way to circumvent laws based on gender – the tentacles aren’t penises because the monsters aren’t human, and therefore aren’t even really male.

But this type of origin story fails to account for the polymorphous ecstasies the work indulges in with such polysemic gusto; the prohibitions appear to have generated a turn back from normative sexuality to the pre-Oedipal pleasures of the anus and the mouth – the intimacy of orifices, the flooding fullness of fucking via fluidity.  And this, I think, is what tentacle porn has to teach the world, and one of the keys to its international popularity (as well as its aura of ultimate transgression); this is also why its interest can move beyond the Orientalizing projections of disavowed perversion that insist on coding Japanese porn as being essentially Other, accounts that turn Japan itself into a kind of fetish for Westerners who correspondingly respond in ways both masturbatory and phobic, conditioned by the act of seeing their own desires reflected in the funhouse mirror of a hysterically over-articulated inability to “understand” this mysterious country’s mysteriously attractive cultural products.

So just let go, I say, and let the Overfiend within come out, to come over you, to come into you and you into it.  After all, the word for “Overfiend,” 超神, literally means “god that exceeds godliness,” but is a homophone for 超人 – the “human who exceeds humanity.”  Become your own Rapture, tentacle porn says; exceed yourself, open up to frightening yet cathartic ecstasies of transformation, of change itself.  The other name for apocalypse is, after all, revelation – you just might learn something, and wake up in a new world, to a new you.