In a recent issue of Film Comment, critic Elliott Stein listed this 1976 Japanese feature, still obscure in the U.S., among the top ten films he had viewed in 1983. A Stroller in the Attic is a classic example of the innovative Japanese erotic film genre known as “roman poruno,” derived from the term “romantic pornographic.” Made with an eye toward Japan's rigid censorship laws, and thus soft-core by American standards, these films exemplify “a unique type of eroticism (that) has been a driving force in Japanese art.... Eros and voyeurism are frequently key components (and) s/m and bondage are not uncommon. They often feature violence, but at the same time are much more realistic than their Western counterparts....” (Bill Thompson, Thalia Theater).
Writing for the 1979 Melbourne Film Festival, Albert Johnson notes, “In 1975, Noboru Tanaka was acclaimed in Japan for his film A Woman Named Abe Sada, based on the same story as Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses (1976). The Stroller in the Attic continues Tanaka's exploration of sexuality and eroticism. Goda is a voyeur. Hiding in the attic of a boarding house, he drills holes in order to watch the activities in the apartments below him. The sexual encounters he spies are all hidden and furtive. Respectable citizens from various walks of life indulge their secret fantasies. Lady Minako hires a clown for her pleasure,... a woman painter, Miyuki, paints her surrealist landscapes...on a model's body. Goda's desires turn from voyeurism to murder, and he devises elaborate means of killing those he has observed. But before he can put his schemes into practice, fate intervenes.”