Love Hotel, a pinku classic from Shinji Somai newly restored by the Nikkatsu Corporation will get its first-ever North American theatrical release, opening for an exclusive one-week theatrical run beginning Friday, April 4, at Metrograph In Theater in New York.

Somai, who had been an assistant director at Nikkatsu in the 1970s when Roman Porno sex films became the studio’s stock-in-trade, made his only directorial effort in the genre with the film, elegantly shot entry into the pinku eiga canon from a script by Takashi Ishii—he later reworked it into his own 1988 Angel Guts: Red Vertigo—which stars Minori Terada as a spiraling ex-businessman who, having squandered his fortune and his dignity and brought terrible suffering upon his wife, hires a sex worker (Noriko Hayami, in her signature role) to share what he intends to be his final night on earth at a hot sheets love hotel.

The synopsis reads, “A tale of two broken souls. A call-girl named Yumi, ‘night-blooming flower,’ and Tetsuro, a married man with a debt to the yakuza, have a violent rendezvous in a cheap love hotel. Years later, haunted by the memory of that night, they reconnect and begin a strange love affair. Determined to finish what they started, they return to the scene of their first macabre passion. With a taste for wicked absurdity and coursing with undercurrents of operatic emotion, Love Hotel is moved by the irrational forces that attract two bodies together. It’s a film with a uniquely materialist sense of eros manifested in Shinji Somai’s long takes, each shot a tightrope-like predicament flushed with earthly tension and live-wire physicality. Made in the same year as Typhoon Club, this elegiac erotica is one of Somai’s most bewitching and unnervingly romantic works, a high-water mark of Nikkatsu Studio’s legendary Roman Porno cycle of films.”

The new restoration of Love Hotel screens as part of In the Pinku: The Return of Roman Porno, a six-film series of Roman Porno films produced and released by Nikkatsu from the ’70s to the 2010s.

Additional titles include Masayuki Suo’s Abnormal Family, Sion Sono’s Antiporno, Tatsumi Kumashiro’s Lovers Are Wet, Noboru Tanaka’s The Oldest Profession, and Akihiko Shiota’s Wet Woman in the Wind.

Watch the trailer for Love Hotel.