I edged closer to where Masami sat, chucking an edamame skin into a bowl with what I hoped was casual panache as I scooted across the tatami. The afterparty tonight was in a place that tried for a retro, dark-wood-and-paper kind of charm, Tanizaki mystique slathered over the grimier realities of a twenty-four-hour bar catering to sweaty rockers prolonging their post-gig buzzes. Somebody’d already had to take one skinny bassist home; there had been blood coloring the half-digested yakisoba in the sink below his face when he’d been discovered leaning motionless with his eyes closed and his forehead cooling against the bathroom mirror. Soon the usual suspects would begin the half-joking humiliations that constituted bonding in this world, though sometimes it seemed more like bondage: out of the corner of my eye I could see Nobu conspiring with an ugly dude I didn’t recognize, gesturing toward one of his favorite targets, a skinny, sweet guy with newly-dyed blue hair whom everyone called Dice, hot sauce in his hands and a dangerous glint in his eyes. Poor Dice, I thought, but only in passing; I had other things on my mind.

Over the recent winter break, I had occasion to re-watch one of my favorite Japanese movies, Summer Vacation 1999. Wracked with anxieties about achievement, maturity, and mortality that always seem to descend as one attempts to represent the life one has led during the last year to one’s extended family, I found myself enchanted once more by the movie’s peculiar, self-contained universe founded on carefully suspended temporality and an airless yearning that seems to replace the very air the characters breath within the film’s gauzy, stylized frames.

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.