The name of Takashi Ishii may sound familiar. The man directed Gonin, an existentialist hard-boiled film starring Takeshi Kitano. In fact his first love was not manga but cinema. During the sixties he even worked as assistant-director at the Nikkatsu before health problems kept him away from movie sets.
That’s when he starts a mangaka carrer by default. From the start, he dives into the newly created gekiga genre. He quickly becomes a figurehead of this new kind of manga, more violent and openly adult-oriented. He mostly writes short stories, published in specialized magazines (sometimes gekiga ones and sometimes erotic ones). The standard Takashi Ishii reader is a young male living in urban environment, the exact same profile as the audience of the Roman-Porno movies produced by Ishii’s previous employer, the Nikkatsu. So it is no surprise to find the Nikkatsu behind the cinematographic adaptations of Ishii’s mangas.