Noboru Tanaka

was a Japanese film director known for his Roman Porno films, including three critically respected films known as the Showa trilogy: A Woman Called Sada Abe (aka Sada Abe: Docu-Drama) (1975), Watcher in the Attic (1976), and Beauty's Exotic Dance: Torture! (1977), all three starring Nikkatsu Roman porno queen Junko Miyashita. The first film in this trilogy recounted the story of Sada Abe a year before Nagisa Oshima's internationally released In the Realm of the Senses (1976), which told the same story. Though at the time he was working, his career was overshadowed by directors such as Tatsumi Kumashiro and Chūsei Sone, many critics today judge Tanaka the best of Nikkatsu's Roman porno directors. Life and career Early life Tanaka was born in Hakuba in Nagano prefecture on August 15, 1937. He majored in French literature at Meiji University in Tokyo. Tanaka said that his interest in the cinema came about through a circuitous route. Early in life he wanted to be a novelist. His interest in writing shifted to poetry. Tanaka remembered, "I wrote a lot of poems. Each expression in a poem may contain countless meanings, otherwise it wouldn't be a good poem. In other words, each expression provides a lot of imagery. Then I thought that in reverse, I could use images to express my poetic world. I thought the image world of film-making might be what I should explore." While working on his thesis, dealing with this interest in the relationship between imagery and literature, Tanaka took a part-time job at a movie studio to gain first-hand knowledge of film production. He served as a production assistant on Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961), an experience which created Tanaka's enthusiasm for the film industry. After graduation, he applied to Nikkatsu studios for a job as an assistant director and passed their entrance exam. In this capacity, he worked under some of the studio's best directors of the time, including Seijun Suzuki and Shōhei Imamura. Among the films on which Tanaka worked at this time was Imamura's The Pornographers.