Eguchi (Toko Namiki) is a nice guy. Why did his wife ditch him for another man? Uguchi quits his job as an estate agent and instead starts working in a hard hat for a building demolition firm. Might the problem be that he's too nice? That's the opinion of a part-time prostitute, Fujiko, who's also one of his colleagues at his new workplace. (It's her day job.) Eguchi gives her money... but not to have sex, instead just wanting someone to sit there and let him talk. He offers her a drink. Fujiko's face suggests that she'd have preferred to provide the expected quickie and then get out of there.

"What was wrong with me?"

"You're probably too kind. You're the complete opposite of my husband."

"You're married? Then why are you doing sex work?"

"For my husband's sake, obviously. He's not working and we need to eat."

An example of Eguchi's misplaced kindness is that he doesn't want to strangle Fujiko, even when she asks him to. Her husband does that to her, hard. It excites her. (He used to be one of her johns, then she married him.) Later, we glimpse the husband and that's clearly not a normal relationship. Most wives don't sneak out to demolition sites to give cash to their husband in secret, then later tell someone who'd followed them not to tell their colleagues. However, that's trumped big-time by what we discover later of Fujiko's inner darkness.

There's also a J-horror ghost. Well, a cheap one. She looks a bit silly, to be honest, but I still jumped when she ran towards us. Daisuke Yamanouchi knows horror and he can put you on edge with something as simple as a closet door closing in an empty room. He makes less use of this ghost than you'll be expecting, but you wouldn't want her lurking in your house. A couple got murdered by a robber in a house Eguchi was showing to a client, then afterwards the ghost starts following him. Was strangulation involved? Well, maybe.

What is this film? What's it about? The original Japanese title includes the word for "ghost story" (or "tale of the supernatural") but it's not really horror, despite that ghost and its ambiguous maybe-connection to the film's interest in strangulation (only sometimes in a sexual context). That throttling always creeped the hell out of me. Even when it's consensual, you'll be on edge, expecting everything to go wrong. Overall, this film is dirty, drab, dour and unhappy. It's a study of a stoic protagonist who doesn't know what he's doing and has sent his life on a downhill course. (He's taciturn and inexpressive enough that the film sometimes decides it needs voice-over narration from Eguchi himself.) He'll develop feelings for Fujiko, but she occasionally shags their boss at work and our hero doesn't understand what's in either her life or her head. I don't think I do either. This is one of Daisuke Yamanouchi's more understated films, but it's haunting and mildly hypnotic.