“Underwater Love,” a Japanese film directed by Shinji Imaoka, is the most obscurely sweet and original soft-core porn musical I have ever seen. Actually, come to think of it, this would be my first soft-core porn musical, and for what it was intended to be, I appreciated this film from beginning to end. The story itself merges Japanese fantasy with reality. It centers around Asuka, who is a thirty-something fish factory worker in a small Japanese village outside of Tokyo. She is engaged to her boss Taki, and seems to live a more than ordinary lifestyle with little variance or excitement. One day she sees a Kappa, a mythological water creature that is part human. It is her friend Aoki, who long ago drowned at the age of 17. He has mysteriously come back into her life as a tortoiseshell, beak faced creature. It is amusing to see this Kappa so accepted and integrated into normal human life. We also travel with him and Asuka to the fantastical world he inhabits as a mythological Kappa.
