La Bête Humaine

"When Kichi sees the woman has wet herself, his innate vulnerability is revealed. 'I thought I was holding my dead mother in my arms.' A latent fixation is hinted at: the small boy who lives in all grown men perhaps revels in Sada's dominance, being reminded of past maternal discipline and tactility. Sada's own mother 'suffered greatly before she died'. For a moment there is a suggestion that what the lovers found in one another went through and beyond the sexual; a limitless melange of dependence rooted in infancy: mother, father, child, lover, the whole ardently desired spectrum of physical comfort remembered and reinvented by the body's passionate chemistry.

"Thus the lovers return to their appointed destiny: the tsunami, composed of love, passion, terror, longing, is closing over them; a half-recognized yet almost cosmic ambition for total one-ness; a Calvary whose stations and implements are all artifacts of irresistible power; the power of sexual love, of a petite mort from which there can be no recovery.

"Sada is also the goddess to be worshipped: the beautiful Morgan-le-Fay, the Fata Morgana, one of the Furies, a Valkyrie reaching from paradise. She is Kali, goddess of life and death, who wears a necklace of human skulls, who fertilises, who loves as she kills. She is the Japanese heroine of the Kabuki theatre, whose feminine attire and whitened mask conceal a powerful man."

- Rosemary Hawley Jarman, Eros in Hell "Ai No Corrida"