Nonami Takizawa – Yawa Hada (July 24th, 2009)
E-Net Frontier
Catalog # – ENFD-5143 – Region 2 Disc – 16:9 Aspect
Running Time: 80 Minutes

The Skinny: As always, we are pleased to present another fine review from my colleague in Osaka, Japan – Zatoichi. I’ve known for some time that he’s head-over-heels for Nonami, but I also believe he can write a fair and impartial review. So without further delay from me, let’s get started. And thank you, Z!

In my opinion, Takizawa Nonami is probably the best “pure” gravure idol working today. Compared to her contemporaries, Nonami easily has the highest ratio of quality-to-quantity releases: not quite one-to-one but damn close. Her recent twin DVDs, Yawahada and Suki Dakara…, are no exceptions. I’m sure you’ve already read JMM’s review of the latter, and I’m happy to say that this one is probably even better, but not for the reasons you might be expecting.

There she is – looking grand!

Let’s get the very minor negatives out of the way up front: the soundtrack is mundane at its best and at a headache inducing level at its worst. The music veers off in several different directions, often within the same scene – it will start out with a slow piano piece, transition into some head-poundingly bad techno (is there any other kind?) and wind up with a pseudo-jazz thing. What’s even more puzzling is the way the tracks are mixed – one piece of music will abruptly cut, a beat of silence, then a completely different track will start up. No cross fading, no regard for tempo or the nature of the scene. Further, the odd decision to try an have ambient sounds mix with soundtrack just doesn’t work and serves more of a distraction than anything else.

No one watches idol DVDs for the brilliant music and the complaints about the sound are pretty much the worst things that can be said about Yawahada: anything else is just nit-picking. Nonami is as charming and sexy as ever, the scenes are a good mix of high energy and sultry, and the camera work and direction is without exception quite good: it never fails to capture Nonami’s beautiful face and figure, especially her magnificent boobs, in all their jiggling glory.

After a curiously long introductory montage ruined by the aforementioned annoying soundtrack, Yawahada drops us off in a grass-covered beach shack with Nonami wearing a bikini with a sparkly top with a cleavage window (top pic a few paragraphs above), providing a mouth-watering eyeful. Nothing exceptional here (aside from Nonami herself), but a nice opener with Nonami posing and slinking around the shack, occasionally stopping to rest her breasts on the railings.

Fit to be tied or I can’t talk now, I’m tied up with something

Out on the beach next, Nonami bounces around and flirts with the camera in a light coloured, typically abbreviated bikini. While there’s no doubt she looks gorgeous and her impressive body is as arousing as ever, this one almost has an innocence about it. I can’t image how boring these idol videos must be to shoot for the model, so it’s to her credit that she looks like she’s having a lot of fun here.

The third scene is a hit-and-miss affair. Taking place in a tatami room, it starts out with Nonami wearing a white blouse and and flower patterned skirt bound by ropes on the floor, her arms tied behind her back. She struggles and writhes to escape. I’m sure I grasped the point here: her outfit wasn’t particularly revealing, so any visual impact was lost. She looked suitably distressed and helpless I guess, but nothing happened at all here. The second part of the scene, she has inexplicably escaped her restraints (you can see the rope lying on the floor) although is now wearing some fuzzy handcuffs around her left wrist. Leaning by the sliding doors, Nonami proves she was into the entire bondage thing by doing a sultry striptease until she’s down to a very small pair of bra and panties. The second half provides some mouthwatering looks at Nonami and her unmatched body – that bra really struggled to contain her tits.

Needs to be seen in motion to be truly appreciated

No such problem in the following track as she’s not wearing a bra. Out in a garden with a lot of huge palm leaves, Nonami is outfitted in a very loose-fitting, backless sundress. The keywords for this scene are “side boob”: it seems like almost every other shot has some kind of side boob in it, but with Nonami and some solid camera work, it never gets old. One of the best tracks on the disc.

Taking a page of the Natsume Rio playbook, Nonami goes for full on cute here. Wearing a thin yellow turtleneck and some colourful panties, she jumps around, teases and flirts on a bed inside a cabin. Despite the fact that Nonami is more clothed here than any other scene on the disc, this is perhaps the sexiest one on the disc. Now that there is no worry of a wardrobe malfunction, Nonami gleefully frolics around on the bed, her breasts jiggling and bouncing with abandon. She also does some boob grabbing, which is a little unusual for her, but because it’s through a shirt, it somehow makes the entire thing more erotic.

Track six boasts Nonami in a bathhouse wearing a shiny gold bikini, a bowl full of what looks like KY jelly and some of the worst music on the DVD. As would be expected, Nonami proceeds to treat us to rubbing the jelly all over herself, paying special attention to her tits. Excellent camera work gives us all the zooms, pans and full body shots we could want of our goddess.

The following scene has Nonami near some kind of bandstand wearing (apparently) only an athletic hooded sweat shirt with her hair in pig tails. She skips around the bandstand, comes over to the camera, unzips the hoodie to reveal her boobs. The use of double-sided tape was obvious here was the hoodie sticks a little too close to her breasts than is natural but it matters little – Nonami is great here and the director gives us some fantastic shots of Nonami. Cute and sexy fun.

Flipping back into sultry mode, the eighth scene shows more of Nonami than I think has ever been seen before. And yes, she does look unbelievable. Wearing a see through bit of lingerie that sort of resembles a thong bathing suit, Nonami basically slinks around the scene naked – the combination of lack of fabric and the transparent nature of said fabric makes for a jaw dropping sight. The scene itself is pretty good but nothing that hasn’t been done before, but with a nearly nude Nonami on screen, who cares?

Going from nearly nude to… nearly nude, the following track has Nonami wearing only some light coloured panties and using a white sheet to cover herself. A slow moving, sensual scene, Nonami poses and flirts on a very messy bed, all the while clutching the sheet over her front, although her back is completely exposed.

The penultimate scene has our woman in a bar wearing a matching bra and pantie set. Nonami slinks around and poses with a block of ice which get progressively smaller as the scene goes on. She kisses the ice, rubs it over her body and sucks on it. Nice, but ultimately forgettable compared to some of the other tracks on the disc.

Nonami seems to have a problem with finding clothes that fit correctly

The final track (which also doubles as the credits) has Nonami outdoors again, playing around on a swing wearing the transparent lingerie she is pictured with on the cover art for the DVD, giving us a more than generous view of her impressive cleavage. Nonami thrusts her chest towards the camera, clutches her arms around her torso causing her boobs to become even more prominent. Again, this well done for what it is, but lacks the punch of some of the earlier tracks.

As is standard, Yawahada comes with a brief behind-the-scenes track which shows some of the shooting of the video as well as some photo-shoots. Nonami or the director doesn’t really say anything interesting here (although Nonami reveals that this was the first time she used handcuffs), but you get some more nice looks at Nonami, and I always find it a fun to see the idol and staff fooling around between takes.

Summary: One of the things I noticed about Yawahada (and Suki Dakara…) is that Nonami is definitely showing a lot more skin than she used to, as well as paying a lot more attention to her boobs. That being said, I don’t get the sleazy impression that releases from Matsugane Yōko, Morishita Yūri or Haruna Hana seem to define themselves with. Obviously, there is a very blatant sexuality to what Nonami’s actions, but if I were to make a comparison, Nonami’s releases are like a classic piece of pin-up art – sexy, alluring but still with a sense of playfulness. The others are more like a Hustler centerfold with all the potentially offensive areas censored – it’s porn with all the good bits removed. And I used to be such a big fan of Yōko….

At the beginning of this review, I mentioned that Yawahada was better than it’s twin, Suki Dakara…. What this boils down to is running time: the former clocks in at around eighty minutes, the latter over one hundred. Suki Dakara… simply seemed to drag under its own weight – the scenes often over stayed their welcome by just a couple of minutes. Nevertheless, you really can’t go wrong with either disc – this is Nonami at her finest and any true Nonami fan should pick them up immediately.

Behind the scenes

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