A familiar Japanese story and kink gets a feature-length treatment with IREZUMI, on Blu-ray from Arrow Video USA.

The daughter of Japanese merchants, Otsuya (Ayako Wakao, AN ACTOR'S REVENGE) desires more than anything to elope with her father's apprentice Shinsuke (Akio Hasegawa, ZERO FIGHTERS) and move to the city. The money they have taken does not get them far but they are taken in by casino boat owner Genji (Fujio Suga, BABY CART AT THE RIVER STYX), but his attraction to Otsuya earns the ire of his wife Otaki (Reiko Fujiwara, BLACK MONEY). The pair conspire to kill Shinsuke and sell Otsuya to a brothel owned by Tokubei (Asao Uchida, TORA! TORA! TORA!) but Shinsuke survives and kills his attacker in self-defense but believes himself a murderer and goes into hiding. Tukubei lets tattoo artist Seikichi (Gaku Yamamoto, ZATOICHI AND THE CHESS EXPERT) ink Otsuya, but his masterpiece – a golden orb-weaver spider also known as "the whore spider" – terrifies him and he believes it has drained him in the manner that Otsuya is destined to destroy other men. Far from being terrified, Otsuya works off her debt and strikes off on her own apart from fleecing wealthy clients in collaboration with Tokubei. Otsuya takes in Shinsuke but he resents being a kept man, and the guilt of being compelled to kill as Otsuya wreaks vengeance upon those who have wronged her eats away at him and Seikichi who watches from the shadows as his spider takes more lives.

Based on more of a sketch than a short story by Jun'ichirô Tanizaki (THE KEY) – familiar to American readers through its English translation "The Tattooer" in Leonard Wolf's Complete Book of Terror anthology – IREZUMI's scenario is familiar in different permutations from other Japanese exploitation films including one of the parallel stories of INFERNO OF TORTURE as well as a vague inspiration for Bob Brooks' TATTOO with Bruce Dern and Maud Adams. Screenwriter Kaneto Shindô (ONIBABA) subverts some of the Japanese stock exploitation elements of abducted girls sold into prostitution, presenting Otsuya not as a blushing virgin but also not seeming to punish her for her boldness and duplicity, instead seeing those qualities as necessary to survive and not be a victim in such a situation in which men are either vile or weak; indeed, the decisive actions of both Shinsuke and Seikichi to try to kill her in order to alleviate their own guilt also tries to negate her own agency. Pink film director Hisayasu Satô (MUSCLE) adapted the same story to different effect for his SHISEI: THE TATTOOER (2006).

Unreleased in the United States, IREZUMI comes to Blu-ray in the US and UK from Arrow Video from a new 4K master struck by owner Kadokawa for their own barebones Japanese Blu-ray release. Possibly because the restoration comes from Kadokawa rather than Toei or Toho, we get deep blacks rather than milky grays, red blood pops, bare skin has a tactile feel, and the golden spider tattoo really gleams. The LPCM 1.0 mono track is very clean, raising a shiver each time the leit motif associated with the exposure of the tattoo comes up low on the soundtrack. Optional English subtitles are also included.

First up in the extras is an audio commentary by Japanese cinema scholar David Desser who provides background on the Tanizaki source story and reads passages which seem to have equivalents in the film adaptation, discusses the film's sexual politics and those of director Yasuzô Masumura (HANZO: THE RAZOR), as well as the decision by Masumura, Shindo, and cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa (YOJIMBO) to incorporate elements of kabuki into to the film's staging. Japanese cinema expert Tony Rayns provides a short introduction (9:50) in which he discusses the works of Tanizaki and the time in which they came from without referencing the Showa tradition of Ero guro nansensu (erotic grotesque nonsense) from which emerged a lot of Japanese twentieth century pulp fiction including the works of contemporary Edogawa Rampo.