Series / The Naked Director

The Naked Director is a Japanese television series.

It's a Based on a True Story tale of Japanese pornographer Toru Muranishi. As the story opens, Toru is a salesman of English-language encyclopedias in 1980 Sapporo. Things aren't going all that great for him. He can't get it up for sex with his wife at home, and at work, his boss threatens to fire him due to lackluster sales.

His life is changed forever when he comes home early from work one day and finds his wife having sex with another man. And just to make things worse, she tells him that he has never given her an orgasm. His marriage is over. Reeling from this, Toru goes out drinking in a seedy club and winds up talking to Toshi, a seedy guy who markets adultery videos, hardcore porn in which unfaithful wives have sex with other men. Toru embarks on a whole new career as a porn star and porn producer.

A second plot thread follows Megumi, a young lady with a raging libido who chafes against the constraints of living with an ultra-Catholic conservative mom. Eventually she becomes one of Toru's performers, and a huge star in Japanese porn under the name Kaoru Kuroki.

A Netflix original series. The first eight-episode series ran in 2019 and a second series ran in 2021.

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The Naked Tropes:

• And the Adventure Continues: The second-season finale shows that Toru is down but not out, still working, appearing in weird reality show programs while also doing gonzo porn shoots in broad daylight in the middle of the iconic Shibuya Crossing. He even charms the lady cop who is slapping handcuffs on him. The last lines have him addressing the porn director's camera, telling the audience never to give up, because he lost more than most people and is still coming back.
• Anguished Declaration of Love: In episode 2.6 Mitamura, who has left Toru for good (along with everyone else), attempts to pay Naoko's back salary of thirty million yen from his own pocket. Then he says "I guess you know I love you," then they have sex.
• Audible Sharpness: Heard in episode 1.7 as Furuya the gangster pulls a big scary knife out of a sheath. He then proceeds to stab one of his mooks to death (for Stealing from the Till) right in front of a horrified Toshi.
• Based on a True Story: These exact words start the first episode of each season.
• Beautiful All Along: A villainous example. It turns out that dowdy, bespectacled Ms. Oba was a con artist in league with Komu all along. When the Outlaw Couple are speeding away in episode 2.6 after robbing Toru blind, she is without glasses and with her hair no longer pinned up, and she is revealed to be extremely good-looking.
• Beard of Sorrow: Toru grows one when he's rotting in an American Hellhole Prison in episodes 1.6 and 1.7.
• Book Ends: The first season ends with Toru shooting the same video that he is shown shooting in the How We Got Here montage that begins the season.
• Briefcase Full of Money:
  • Ikezawa brings two of these in episode 1.2, when offering to buy Toru's porn business for 300 million yen while at the same time threatening to meet him again "in an unpleasant manner" if Toru doesn't sell. Toru blows him off.
  • In episode 1.3 the people behind the VHS format bring one to Izekawa, because they believe in The Rule of First Adopters and they want his help in beating Betamax.
  • Toru brings a shopping cart full of five hundred million yen when buying the satellite transmission rights of the weird cult in episode 2.3.
• Briefs Boasting: Toru gives interviews wearing nothing but a pair of briefs.
  • Right at the end of the last episode of the series he reveals that he actually wears two pairs of white briefs when doing his Briefs Boasting, "for decency's sake."
• Bring My Brown Pants: Toru's door-to-door salesman visit in episode 1.1 brings him to the mansion of a deranged Yakuza who threatens him with a golf club. He wets himself. This actually winds up helping him make the sale.
• Call-Back:
  • After Toru gets out of jail in episode 1.3 he winds up having sex with a lonely widow whose husband used to work for National Rail. Her home movies of sex with her husband are what lead him into making porn videos. In episode 1.4 he makes a porn movie out of that very incident.
  • Toru has been reduced to homelessness in the last episode, selling his porn wares under a bridge...but he still has the "Nice Party" banner from his silly political campaign in the second-season premiere.
  • The goofy Imagine Spot in episode 2.1, where Toru has a vision of his porn studio as a satellite in space, gets a call-back near the end of the season when Toru imagines the satellite plummeting out of orbit as his career collapses.
• The Cassandra: Kawada.
  • In the first season he is strongly against Toru's grand idea to make a porno in Hawaii with an American actress. No one listens. He's right, as it turns out badly, although even Kawada did not guess it would turn out quite that badly, with Toru getting arrested and serving a half-year in an American prison.
  • In the second season, while everyone else is carried away by Toru's grand dream of a satellite television porn network, Kawada again opposes Toru, saying that it's foolish and risky and they should concentrate instead on just making good porn. Again Kawada is correct, as Toru overextends himself, starts a satellite channel that is not even close to being financially viable (costs of the network far exceed subscriber revenue), and ends up bankrupting the company.
• Chekhov's Gun: Toru's habit throughout the entire series of practicing business in a very casual way. First, by hiring randos into his company without any background checks or references. Second and even worse, apparently building a major company on an all-cash basis, paying people with briefcases full of money when making deals, handing out wads of cash to his actresses as salary, and keeping a huge pile of cash money in a safe in his office. This bites him in the ass towards the end of Season 2, when two duplicitous assistants steal all his money, destroying his business.
• Contrived Coincidence: In episode 2.5 Toshi and his girlfriend race out of their apartment, just barely escaping some murderous yakuza thugs. They frantically pound on the door of another random apartment, and are let it. It's the apartment of Kawada's domme, and in fact Kawada is there, tied up.
• Determinator: A negative example. Toru is so determined to be a king of satellite porn in season 2 that he first ruins his relationships with Kawada and Megumi, both of whom advise against what he's doing for different reasons. Then, after he gets overextended, he starts borrowing from employees and stealing the pledged salaries to his actresses in an effort to stay afloat and keep his satellite dream alive. He fails and loses everything.
• Did Not Get the Girl: Poor Mitamura. In 2.6 he gives Naoko her thirty million yen back pay from his own pocket, makes his Anguished Declaration of Love, and they have sex. In the series finale she comes back and gives him back his money...and she is followed by a respectable-looking fellow in a suit. She tells him that she's marrying the guy in the suit, and then leaves. (The angst of this ending is lightened when Mitamura starts crying, and then a sympathetic Rugby starts crying, and then they both start crying and wailing in a loud over-the-top manner, with Naoko cringing in embarrassment as she walks away.)
• Dirty Cop: Episode 1.3 reveals that Takei the cop is taking payoffs from Ikezawa to go after Toru. Takei even mentions the possibility of coming after Toru on "fake charges". Later he busts Ikezawa for distributing uncensored porn—but only because Takei has thrown in his lot with Furuya of the yakuza. In the end Takei, who spoke plainly about how he got rich taking bribes from yakuza, is arrested for corruption.
• Distant Finale: The end of the last episode skips forward two years to 1994. Rugby, Mitamura, and Junko are all still producing porn and apparently doing relatively well. Megumi/Kaoru has gone to Italy to study like she always wanted. Toru and Miyuki are still together, living in a humble apartment, with a baby. He is still being chased by creditors but he's struggling along and still working in porn, and charming as ever.
• Driven to Suicide: At the end of the first season, Toru's rival Ikezawa, busted by Takei for distributing uncensored porn, hangs himself in his prison cell.
• Drowning My Sorrows: Toru goes out drinking after his marriage blows up and his wife leaves him. This is how he meets Toshi, the guy selling the porn videos, which starts his own career in pornography.
• Dutch Angle: For a scene in episode 2.3 when Toshi is walking down a tunnel to the hangout of his yakuza gang, the camera tilts nearly 45 degrees. This helps demonstrate his misery and constant unease with being in the yakuza.
• Emasculated Cuckold: Or what the Japanese call Netorare. Toru comes home to find his wife having sex with another man. Just to stick the knife in, she tells him that he has never, not even once, given her an orgasm. Later he goes out to a bar and chats up Toshi, a porno guy who tells him that Netorare, and specifically cheating wives having sex with other men, is a popular genre in Japanese porn. Toru immediately goes into partnership with Toshi and starts selling cuckold porn videos.
• Every Car Is a Pinto: Lampshaded In-Universe in episode 1.3, when Toru's first live-action porn shoot ends with a tour bus bursting into flame. A parked tour bus.
• Fallen-on-Hard-Times Job: By the last episode of the second season, Toru has been reduced to selling what's left of his porn wares in a pedestrian underpass.
• Fanservice: Naturally given the premise, there is plenty of nude scenes involving Toru and other characters. Sometimes this becomes Fan Disservice, when it's not outright titillation and becomes uncomfortable to watch.
• Footsie Under the Table: Another student's boyfriend does this with Megumi when they are all at a cafeteria table together in episode 1.4. She establishes dominance by doing the same to him.
• The Glasses Gotta Go: Toru does this, pulling the glasses off the woman interviewing him in the second-season premiere, when he argues a little too forcefully that she should perform in one of his adult videos.
• Glasses Pull:
  • Toru does this in episode 1.6 when he first sees Allison Mandy, the ravishing American blonde who is supposed to star in his ambitious spy porn movie.
  • Umino does this in episode 2.6 in a flashback, as he watches the space satellite that was a thirty billion yen investment explode just seconds into its launch.
• Gratuitous English:
  • Despite not knowing very much English (he needed an interpreter in Hawaii) Toru has a habit of bursting into English when he gets excited, ending talks with words like "Perfect!", or "Fantastic!", and talking about his "nice, beautiful ideas" in the last episode when begging Toshi not to kill him.
  • All the soundtrack is English-language rock and pop music. Opening theme "My Wish" also has all-English lyrics.
• Gray Rain of Depression:
  • It's pouring rain in the first episode when Toru's wife leaves with the kids, after he caught her cheating on him. This segues into a flashback, which shows it was pouring rain 30 years ago on the day when Toru's drunken father walked out of the house.
  • In episode 2.6 it's pouring rain in the scene where Toru's actresses confront him about not paying them, followed by Mitamura bursting through the door and hysterically revealing that Toru has been selling uncensored porn videos, illegally. That in turn is followed by everyone walking out and abandoning him.
• Happy Flashback: When Kawada delivers to Toru in the last episode the devastating news of Toshi's death, there's a quick flashback montage of the good times that Toru and Toshi had together building the business.
• Hit Me, Dammit!: Megumi specifically asks Toru to choke her in episode 1.5, when they're doing her first sex scene. He gamely complies.
• Home-Early Surprise: Toru comes home early from the office only to find his wife having loud, passionate sex with another man. His marriage ends immediately.
• How We Got Here: The opening scene is a montage showing Toru as a porn star and filmmaker—filming scenes, showing up on Japanese TV in nothing but his underpants and cheerfully saying "People have seen my asshole!"—intercut with scenes of Kaoru Kuroki giving sex positivity interviews where she says there's nothing wrong with porn. Then the series cuts back to 1980 to tell Toru's story.
• Imagine Spot: In episode 2.1 a salesman shows Toru some satellite dishes and gives a pitch about how satellites could beam his porn everywhere. Toru stops listening as he gets lost in a very silly Imagine Spot, where he imagines his studio on a space station in orbit, all his porn videos floating around in zero gravity.
• Impairment Shot: An out-of-focus shot in episode 2.5 shows Toshi slowly regaining consciousness after he was beaten half to death by the yakuza...and finding out that he is still in the clutches of the yakuza.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: Several of the antagonists get their comeuppance in the last episode: Furuya the gangster is murdered, his dragon Ogiwara is arrested, and Takei the Dirty Cop is also arrested on corruption charges. But Komu and Ms. Oba, who stole an enormous sum of money from Toru, apparently escape.
• Know When to Fold 'Em:
  • An Aesop that Umino delivers to Toru in episode 2.6, as Toru is frantically scurrying around trying to save his porn company and his satellite channel. Umino tells about how he just lost thirty billion yen on a failed satellite launch. He says if he hadn't taken a "challenge" like Toru is always yammering about, he would still have the thirty million yen. Then he tells Toru that he is quitting the company, and he advises that Toru give up as well and sell his satellite rights.
  • Later in the same episode Honda from the bank tells Toru the same thing. Toru has arrived at the bank with some 250 million yen—acquired in an extremely ill-advised loan from Furuya the yakuza Loan Shark. Honda tells him that he needs to use the money to pay off his debts and get out, that his satellite channel was projected to have 100,000 subscribers and instead has less than a thousand, that he is bleeding money every day and must shut the channel down. Toru again doesn't listen.
• Kubrick Stare: Toshi, kicked out of Toru's company for drug use and now a member of the Yakuza, does this at the end of episode 2.1 as he watches Toru's TV interview while drinking in a Bad Guy Bar.
• Let the Past Burn: The Running Gag with Kawada's creepy sexual obsession with a mannequin—he puts makeup on it, pretends to feed it noodles, calls it "Kumiko"—ends in episode 2.7 when Kawada, with Toshi's encouragement, sets the mannequin on fire by the side of a river.
• Loan Shark:
  • In episode 1.2 Toru, trying to get a porn business going, borrows 500,000 yen from a loan shark who charges 10% interest every ten days.
  • Apparently he got away with that, but his desperate decision to take 250,000 yen from Furuya the gangster in the second season, as his porn company teeters on collapse, nearly gets him killed (and does get Toshi killed).
• The Loins Sleep Tonight: In the first episode Toru tries to have sex with his wife only to finally say "I can't." She says "I thought tonight might be different," he having suddenly become a success at work. Apparently, this is a long-term problem.
• Lonely Together: Toru and Megumi meet for drinks in a hotel lounge in the first-season finale, at Christmas 1988. She muses how she used to spend Christmas with her mom and he remembers how he used to spend it with his children.
• Model Planning:
  • In the first season Toru makes a model of Oahu, complete with Diamond Head and an airplane held up in the sky by wire, to plan his grand Hawaiian porn shoot.
  • In episode 2.3 he has a model of Yokohama Bay Bridge, complete with silly little wind-up toys of people bonking, to plan his film to be shot on the bridge.
• Monochrome Past: There are flashbacks of Toru as a boy in the early 1950s, growing up in desperate poverty, with an alcoholic Shell-Shocked Veteran father. Those are shown in a sort of desaturated color scheme to make them stand out from the main story.
• Mood Whiplash: The triumphant party at the end of Toru's Hawaiian porn shoot turns on a dime when 1) Allison the American porn star tells Toru that the Japanese industry is way behind, it was a bad shoot, and the movie is crappy, and then 2) the whole production is busted by the FBI and Toru is arrested.
• Naïve Newcomer: Toru's status as a guy diving headfirst into the porn industry without knowing anything about it allows the show to tell him and the viewers a lot about Japanese porn, like what bini-bon magazines are (Japanese porn mags sold in plastic wrappers).
• Off the Chart: Played for a gag in the first episode. Toru starts to become so successful selling encyclopedias, after getting sales tips from Mr. Ono, that the bar graph on the wall showing his sales extends up past the top of the chart, then up to the ceiling, and finally running along the ceiling for a while.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: When Toru, Toshi, and Kawada are making their first hires, one of them is a burly fellow named Goto. By way of introduction Goto tells them that he used to play rugby. Toru says "We'll call you Rugby!", and indeed he is only ever called Rugby for the rest of the series.
• Outlaw Couple: The end of episode 2.5 and beginning of episode 2.6 reveal this. Ms. Oba and Komu, Toru's assistants, are con artists and lovers. They rob him blind and head for the hills.
• Pixellation: In posters and advertising for the series in Japan, parts of the title are covered up by pixellation. This is a reference to the Japanese practice, even in hardcore porn, of using pixellation to obscure actors' genitalia.
  • This is a plot point in episode 1.2, when a Japanese vice cop comes by one of Toru's porn shops, and disputes whether or not the genitalia of the models in his magazines are pixellated enough. It becomes an even bigger plot point later, when Toru decides to start producing ura-bon, or uncensored porn magazines, which puts him and Toshi at risk of arrest. As Toru's career goes on he continues to push boundaries, producing uncensored porn videos even as his actresses are arrested by Dirty Cops.
• Raging Stiffie: In episode 1.4, the perpetually horny Megumi, in an art class drawing a male model, spreads her legs for him and intentionally provokes this.
• "Rise and Fall" Gangster Arc: Toru is not actually a gangster, although in some ways he resembles a gangster, working in a business that is generally seen as socially undesirable, skirting the law, sometimes getting arrested and jailed, and (to his eventual regret) getting involved with some real yakuza gangsters. In any event his story has all the beats of a rise-and-fall gangster arc. The first season is the rise, as he goes from a nobody door-to-door salesman to the "emperor of porn", establishing his own company and defeating his rival, Ikezawa the porn kingpin. The second season is the fall, as he makes a foolish gamble on satellite porn, overcommits, bankrupts his company, and loses absolutely everything. The only difference is that unlike a gangster arc Toru is not jailed or killed, but ends his story still fighting and trying to make a comeback.
• Round Table Shot: Seen early in episode 1.5 as Toru and his crew sit around a circular table, eating, and muse one at a time about their problems with making videos after Ikezawa's puppet commission comes down on them.
• The Rule of First Adopters: A plot point in episode 1.3. The folks who make VHS tapes, locked in a fight to death with the folks who make Betamax tapes in the early 1980s, go to Ikezawa the pornographer and bribe him with a Briefcase Full of Money to publish in their format. It works.
• Seamless Scenery: In episode 2.2 one of Toru's actresses, tells, via Flashback, about how she had sex with a Japanese pop star in a hotel. The camera zooms in on the actress pinching the pop star's nipples, then zooms back out—to Toru, in the same hotel room, filming the actress's story for one of his pornos.
• Seasonal Baggage: A single shot of the leaves on a tree going from green to brown, followed by snow falling, is used to demonstrate the time Toru spends in jail in episode 1.3 for selling uncensored porn magazines.
• Secret Other Family: Megumi discovers some mysterious photos in an album in episode 1.4 and then confronts her mother in episode 1.5 about how the two of them live in relative comfort despite having a Disappeared Dad. It turns out that Megumi's strictly Catholic, religious fundamentalist mom was The Mistress of a married businessman, and she and Megumi are the Secret Other Family.
• Shout-Out:
  • In the first episode Toru's coworker Mr. Ono is saddened to read news of the death of Alfred Hitchcock.
  • In episode 1.3 Mitamura, one of the new young hires, says he's joined the company because he wants to be the next Akira Kurosawa. He is startled to learn that the fledgeling film studio actually produces porn. There's another shout-out to Kurosawa in episode 1.6 when Jimmy, the gang's fixer in Hawaii, puts a hat and sunglasses on Toru and says he looks just like Kurosawa.
  • In episode 1.4 a porn video store clerk is watching the climax of The Terminator while at work.
• Shower Scene: Megumi masturbates in the shower in episode 1.2. Her severely religious mother catches her and makes her wash her hands again.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: In the last episode, as Ogiwara stabs Toshi to death while Sayaka (spattered in Furuya's blood) flees in terror, a cover of "What a Wonderful World" plays on the soundtrack.
• Spit Take: Toshi does this in episode 1.2 when the bini-bon magazine dealer asks how many magazines he wants and Toru says "all of them".
• Split Screen: Episode 1.3 ends with a split-screen sequence, in which Chairman Izekawa's fancy dinner with his bevy of porn stars is contrasted with the humbler pig's feet dinner that Toru's crew has after their first production.
• Stage Name: In-Universe in episode 1.5, where Toru comes up with the stage name "Kaoru Kuroki" for Megumi, after she tells him that her favorite color is kuro (black).
• Start My Own: Toshi and Kawada start their own porn business late in Season 2, after they are both kicked out of Toru's company for different reasons.
• Theiss Titillation Theory: In-Universe and Discussed Trope, in episode 1.2 when Ikezawa says that this is the real reason for Pixellation in Japanese porn.
  Ikezawa: It's precisely because it's hidden that you want to see more, right?
• Trade Your Passion for Glory: Toru's downfall in Season 2 started when his obsession with gaining satellite rights leads to him producing a lot of porn videos at the expense of quality and alienating his longtime colleagues and exhausting his staff to the limit. It gets to the point where he ruins his relationship with Kaoru, his closest collaborator, because he's so intent on pursuing his satellite rights that he neglected to care for Kaoru's feelings and what she really wanted to do.
• Vacation Episode: In episode 1.6 the gang flies to Hawaii to do a porn shoot with an American cast. It's Toru's dream, but it ends in disaster as he's arrested by the FBI and chucked in prison.
• "Wanted!" Poster:
  • When Toru and Toshi make an ill-advised return to Sapporo in episode 1.3, Toshi complains about their pictures on the wanted posters, before he rips them down. Unfortunately their meeting is a trap and they are arrested.
  • A brief shot of a wanted poster in episode 2.7 indicates that Komu and Ms. Oba are still at liberty after having delivered the death knell to Toru's company by stealing all his money. (It also reveals that Ms. Oba's real name is Yukiko Nagao.)
• Wham Episode: Episode 2.5, "The Bubble Bursts". His company is sinking rapidly due to Toru having overextended himself buying the satellite rights, but Toru seems to have salvaged the situation by staging a highly lucrative strip show with his actresses. He comes back home...and finds that his faithful assistant Komu has stolen all the money in the vault. It turns out that Komu and Toru's office assistant Ms. Oba were both con artists using fake identities.
• Whatever Happened to the Mouse?: Toru's two sons and his mother are never seen again after episode 1.2, and not even mentioned except for a casual comment by Toru in the first season finale about how he misses spending Christmas with them. Their reactions to him becoming a public figure and the "emperor of porn" are unknown.
• Yakuza:
  • In the first episode Toru visits a mansion attempting to sell encyclopedias, only to find that it's the home of a deranged, tattoo-covered yakuza gangster. Toru wets himself with fear but still makes the sale.
  • Later, a yakuza named Furuya becomes Toru's partner in the adult video business. And at the end of the first season, Toru's old partner Toshi has joined the yakuza and is running Furuya's underground uncensored porn business. This becomes a running plot line in season 2, as Toshi's time as a yakuza mook does not go well.
• You Can Leave Your Hat On: With his porn company in dire straits in episode 2.5 as the revenue from satellite subscriptions is not enough to meet expenses, Toru hits on the idea of staging a strip show with his actresses. Naturally, being Toru, he turns it into a big production.
• Yubitsume: The peculiar Yakuza custom of lopping off one's own pinky with a knife, and offering it to one's yakuza boss as a means of asking forgiveness. When it seems that the gang will finally kill Toshi as he simply doesn't have the last 100 million yen that Furuya demands for sparing his life, Toshi cuts off his own pinky and hands it over, saying it's worth 100 million. Furuya lets him go.