Apartment Wife: Affair In the Afternoon

Apartment Wife: Affair In the Afternoon
Theatrical poster for Apartment Wife: Affair In the Afternoon (1971)
Directed by	Shōgorō Nishimura
Produced by	Yasushi Takeda
Written by	Kazuo Nishida
Starring	Kazuko Shirakawa
Music by	Sansaku Okuzawa
Cinematography	Shōhei Andō
Edited by	Atsushi Nabeshima
Distributed by	Nikkatsu
Release date	November 20, 1971
Running time	64 min.
Country	Japan
Language	Japanese

Apartment Wife: Affair In the Afternoon (団地妻　昼下がりの情事 / 団地妻　昼下りの情事, Danchizuma hirusagari no jōji^?) aka From 3 to Sex is a 1971 Japanese film in Nikkatsu's Roman porno series. The first film in this successful new direction for the studio, it was directed by Shōgorō Nishimura and starred Kazuko Shirakawa.

A working-class housewife is sexually unsatisfied by her husband, and seeks fulfillment through extramarital relationships. Her affairs are discovered by a female brothel-owner who then blackmails the woman into working in her stable of prostitutes.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Nikkatsu, Japan's oldest film studio, was losing much of their audience to television and the importation of American films, and suffering from expensive, unsuccessful projects. Struggling to keep the studio out of bankruptcy, Takashi Itamochi, Nikkatsu's president, decided to put the company's high production values and professional talent into the adult, or pink film industry as a way of attracting a new audience. Until this time the pink film market had been almost entirely the realm of low-budget independent companies. This new direction for the studio was inaugurated with Apartment Wife: Affair In the Afternoon. These often well-made and artistic softcore pornographic films proved popular with both the public and the critics. This introduction of pornography into mainstream Japanese movie theaters has been credited with saving Nikkatsu from collapse at that time. For the next 17 years Nikkatsu produced Roman Porno films almost exclusively.

Apartment Wife: Affair in the Afternoon was released in Japan on 20 November 1971.

Apartment Wife: Affair In the Afternoon was an immediate hit with film audiences, and gained critical approval. The film made a mainstream star of Kazuko Shirakawa, who had been appearing in independent pink films since 1967.

In their Japanese Cinema Encyclopedia: The Sex Films, the Weissers credit the success of the film both to director Nishimura and lead actress Kazuko Shirakawa. Nishimura, they write, "pays particularly close attention to his characters, often allowing their lusty personalities to carry the tale without cliched action subplots. This results in a highly unique voyeuristic view of life, seldom achieved in the cinema." They judge that Shirakawa gives the film, "a wide-eyed innocence that is both fresh and convincing."