Miyuki Hourai is Always in the Mood
with English Subtitles

You can kind of consider us historians of Japanese AV--to some extent.  We've never written up an AV encyclopedia at ZENRA nor My Dearest Desire, but we have taken a considerable amount of time through various reviews and articles to shed some light into the history of titles released in this ever-expanding industry.

One thing of note in the history of Japanese AV is the era known as its 'Golden Years'.  Fret not, it's not that far back.  We're not talking 80's or 90's AV here.  There's no way one can call an era with mosaic so large you can barely make out the breasts of an actress as she 'rides' her actor cowgirl style the salad days of AV.  So yes, the Golden Age of Japanese AV in the eyes of both ZENRA and the multitude of production companies that churn out our favorite sliver of adult media consider that era to be the approximately the early to mid 2000's.

Why this era?  Why not later?  We hear from many fans and see many posts on forums about how AV has never been better than now.  Picture quality definitely wins out of course.  You haven't really seen AV production companies embracing HD until just a few years ago, but being a money talks industry, money was needed to power the dreams of producer and directors along with necessary technology needed to make it happen.  Those three blended together better than a quality whey protein isolate mix during the aforementioned golden era.

GUTS, whom we have been showing regularly on ZENRA since early last year was a production company that thrived in this environment.  And since we licensed essentially their entire library of 200+ titles, we'll be allowing ZENRA subscribers to experience with full English subtitles the successfully frantic and imaginative environment Japanese AV was filmed in before the era of smartphones and savvy internet users.

With that considerable lengthy, but necessary introduction out of the way, we now can talk a bit about today's release, MIYUKI HOURAI IS ALWAYS IN THE MOOD.  This was a title originally released just before a similar one we showed with the milky pale MIKO HAYAMA.  There will be at least one more title we will show sometime in the future from the same series so if you enjoyed the previous update and today's, you're in luck.

Compared to MIKO HAYAMA, MIYUKI HOURAI comes off as less pure and more of a social misfit (called a 'yankee' in Japanese).  She looks like a smoker and even mentioned she used to play hooky from high school and walk around the city still in her schoolgirl uniform while puffing away.  The production itself is pretty much the same as MIKO HAYAMA's.  In fact, pretty much everything including scene structure was identical with the only exception being the final 10 minutes.

With MIKO HAYAMA, we saw that bonus feature all about the studio as it consisted of behind-the-scenes footage of her in the makeup room along with B-sides from the actual shoot.  This time around MIYUKI HOURAI was handed a camera and was instructed to film her apartment.  Surprisingly, she did!

We always want to know about our favorite Japanese AV stars and some things such as their real names are off limit (unless you work on our side of the industry), but fans sometimes can sneak a peek at some aspects of their personal lives.  A studio partner of ours has a whole series of movies all about the teeth of AV stars.  That may sound strange, but when you're looking into the mouth of someone famous, but only known by a stage name, you can see the actual dental work and tooth structure belonging to the real person.  It's bizarre, we know, but hey, it's Japanese AV.

Without going scene-by-scene, one of the more novel instances of sexual play was the first scene actually which made ingenious use of a dick-sock.  This, along with the MIKO HAYAMA release, was the earliest we can recall seeing it in Japanese AV.  It's a neat way to 'show' dick play which in this instance focused on a lipstick-laden blowjob in POV form, but without the necessity of mosaic application.  We've seen it used again in FETIS titles, but those are considerably more recent.

Then there was the kiss after the final scene.  It was a standard love hotel sex scene between MIYUKI HOURAI and an actor we surprisingly do not know.  The coitus was great.  The camera angles were fine and there isn't anything to complain about other than it would have been nice for it to be a wee bit longer.  However, the request for a kiss delivered by MIYUKI after he orgasmed over her chest was the most frisson-producing authentic one we've ever seen in an AV title....and we've seen a lot.