Haruki Iwata

There was a man, a novelist, who had unavoidably turned his hand to sensual novels for a living, but now made a living out of it. One morning while jogging, he picks up a lighter and cigarettes dropped by a bookstore owner, and decides to deliver them to the store. When there is no answer to the doorbell, he goes to the back of the store and looks in the slightly open window to find the owner tying up a female clerk and engaging in SM play.

The story of two men, one middle aged one mid twenties, who make friends and exchange cigarettes and stories of their sex lives, unaware they have unwittingly exchanged partners. The story, told in flashbacks, as the two men travel through the night on a motorcycle, is loaded with highly charged eroticism. Sex and violence are juxtaposed against the drabness of the men's everyday lives, effectively blurring the line between what is real and what is fantasy. Founded on the well-known myth of furtive sexual gropers on the rush-hour Tokyo commuter trains, Tandem is a low-key masterpiece of Japanese Pink Cinema.

Fumio, who works at an ironworks, has an affair with Yoko, the wife of the president of the ironworks. The wife of Shimizu, a detective who investigates Yoko's background at the request of Nobuo, the president of the company, is also having an affair with his mistress, Kenichi. Nobuo becomes angry and impulsive. Upon receiving the report, a jealous Nobuo impulsively kills Shimizu and appears with an iron pipe in front of Fumio and Yoko, who are entangled in an ironworks. The story accelerates toward the end as the impulsive murderer brings together a man and a woman in a love-hate relationship at a villa in Izu....