“Your life is a sea you’ve been thrown in.” The earliest — and some may find the weakest — of Japanese director Teruo Ishii’s five films in this collection, Nyotai sanbashi (US: Flesh Pier) tells the gritty, sleazy story of an undercover cop’s efforts to infiltrate and bring down an international sex trafficking ring backed by an American gangster. With the pretext of sourcing one of the “call girls” that have emerged in the wake of Japan’s ban on prostitution, Keizô Yoshioka (Ken Utsui) ends up at Arizona Club, a hub of illicit activities where he eventually connects with two women: a lovely, undercover reporter named Haruko (Akemi Tsukushi) for whom he develops a protective instinct, and an old flame named Rumi (Yôko Mihara) who now works as a pimp for the syndicate while fending off advances (“Try that again and I’ll have Thompson sterilize you”) from club musician Teruo (Teruo Hata). As Yoshioka closes in on the gang, he jeopardizes not just his own life but the lives of both women. The film mercilessly depicts Japan’s postwar financial desperation, particularly among women: for example, when another undercover policeman (Hiroshi Asami) sets up a fake “call” under a fake name, he’s devastated when his own fiancée shows up, covertly earning extra income to pay for her brother’s college tuition. Into this cynical atmosphere Ishii inserts plenty of action scenes, often intensified by a shaking camera or oblique angles, and plenty of noir compositions like the roulette wheel den in the back of the bar and the final shootout on the pier, which brings us right back to 1940’s gangster noir.