From pinup to painter: Interview with Natsumi Tadano

Aera Digital recently featured an article by Kawori Inbe in which she interviews the actress, former gravure idol, painter, and erotic novelist Natsumi Tadano (只埜なつみ).

The 34-year-old has long black hair and alluring eyes that suggest the confidence of someone who has had a very varied career to date. Today, she mainly works as a painter, selling as many as 80 percent of her works when she holds solo exhibitions.

As the interview explains, she moved to Tokyo at the age of 18. “I’m originally from Kyoto. After graduating from high school, I moved to Tokyo, determined to become an actress. That’s when I started performing in fringe theater productions.”

Life on her own in Tokyo, however, was far from easy. Her first home was a run-down, one-room apartment in Yoyogi-Hachiman, with a monthly rent of ¥60,000. Because the place was infested with rats, she spent her days setting traps under the sink to get rid of them.

“Back then, I had no money, and things were truly tough. In the world of small-scale theater, there are ticket quotas to meet, and with rehearsals packed into every spare moment, there was simply no time for a part-time job. I tried juggling shifts at an izakaya and a café, but it still wasn’t enough to cover my living expenses, so I even worked at a hostess club in Shibuya. But since I’m from the countryside, I just didn’t fit the mold. I couldn’t keep it up at all. I ended up drifting from one place to another, including girls’ bars, and snack bars.”

Though she radiates a glamorous aura today, Tadano reveals in the interview that she has actually struggled with social interaction since she was in elementary school.

“My mother was overprotective. Whenever I tried to speak, she would answer for me, so there was really no need for me to say anything. I was the type who’d only talk to a few close friends. I just wasn’t good at communicating with others.”

Even worse, she had been dealing with an eating disorder since high school.

“At first, it was anorexia. I simply wouldn’t eat. But after moving to Tokyo, where no one was there to monitor my eating habits, I ended up overeating. I would binge eat and then purge. Andwhen you work at places like a hostess club, you’re expected to eat and drink, which was incredibly difficult for me.”

This affected her mental state and she was unable to work. At one point, she fell three months behind on her apartment rent.

In an attempt to calm her mind, she once kept a noose hanging inside her closet. “Sometimes, just slipping my head through it, as if a noose would bring me a sense of relief. Knowing it was there made me think, ‘It’s OK. I can die whenever I want.’ It wasn’t that I kept it there with the actual intention of dying. it was just that I didn’t know how to go on living.”

After drifting between various talent agencies and failing to make a breakthrough in her acting career, she suddenly found she was 28 years old.

“I only had two years left until I turned 30, and I knew I couldn’t keep living like this. I had reached my limit. That was when I found an audition for a gravure competition called Miss Evening Fuji, sponsored by a newspaper. I decided that if I didn’t pass, I’d head back to my hometown. It was my final gamble.”

And it paid off: she won the runner-up prize. It opened the door to gravure modeling gigs and movie roles. She still had to work hard, though, because 28 was old by gravure standards.

“It was pretty tough. Gravure is very youth-oriented, so debuting at 28 meant being pressured to do more extreme things. I don’t have a particularly large bust, I’m more on the slender side, so a lot of it came down to the costumes. It felt like a constant battle to see how little fabric could be used.”

The images from her shoots and image videos show how revealing the swimwear and costumes were.

“Being in a space where I was consumed, in the sense of being used for entertainment, gave me a strange sense of security, as if it meant I had value. Yet, simultaneously, I felt the profound emptiness of placing my worth in something like that.”

As her career gained momentum, the pressure to lose weight intensified, and her cycle of binge eating and purging grew increasingly severe.

“Even though I had absolutely no money, I was spending more on food than I paid for rent. Of course, there was the fear of gaining weight, but I think I had also become addicted to the physical act of purging. In that moment of purging, it felt as though everything in my mind was being expelled. I didn’t have to think about anything at all, and it brought a sense of relief. Finding even a fleeting moment of ease became a kind of lifeline.”

About two years into this lifestyle, she declined an offer to appear in more explicit, 18-rated DVDs, which led to a decline in her work opportunities. Though she never formally retired, her gravure career faded away.

Today, Natsumi works as a painter, a transition that came about during the pandemic.

“Just as the COVID-19 pandemic began, a stage production I was cast in was canceled because someone tested positive for the virus. I suddenly lost both my income and work. Not knowing what to do, I mentioned to a film director I knew that I enjoyed drawing, and he suggested that I try visual art.”

She began by painting portraits of women using acrylic paints. She hadn’t painted since childhood and had no formal training.

“I started because I felt I had to do something. I never imagined it could actually become a source of income. I was simply expressing the thoughts and feelings within me through art.”

An acquaintance who ran a pearl business invited her to display some of her paintings. To her surprise, four of the five paintings sold.

“That’s when I realized that art could actually generate an income. I went on to hold my first solo exhibition at Design Festa Gallery. They sold quite well and some were even purchased by people from abroad. That gave me a bit of confidence.”

Yet, even after she began painting, Tadano kept that noose hanging in her closet, and she continued to struggle with her eating disorder.

A turning point came three years ago.

She received an offer from a film director to star in a movie that would involve a week of location shooting in a rural area. The plan included time for the staff to get to know one another before filming began, totaling about two weeks away from home.

However, upon arriving at the destination, she found that only the director and herself were there. They were also put in the same room at their accommodation.

“I was taken aback, but since we were in a place with absolutely nothing else around, I couldn’t bring myself to say no. I just accepted it. That’s when the sexual assault occurred. In the end, I fled and went home before filming even began.”

Afterward, she consulted the police, and a private settlement was reached. She also withdrew from the film production.

Around that same time, reports of sexual assault within the Japanese film industry (including allegations against the likes of directors Sion Sono and Hideo Sakaki, and actors Tak Sakaguchi and Houka Kinoshita, documentary filmmaker Yu Kaneko, and producer Haruo Umekawa) were surfacing, drawing significant public attention. Seeing these stories, Tadano felt the parallels with her own experience, but her mental state began to deteriorate rapidly when the people she confided in blamed her for going to the location.

“I was so deeply hurt. I lost all trust in people and couldn’t even leave my room. That was when I attempted suicide.”

She took about 80 sleeping pills and collapsed onto her bed.

“I truly thought I would die right there. But at dawn, I woke up, just like any other morning. I tried to get to the bathroom to make myself vomit, but after that, my memory goes blank. The next thing I remember is the door opening and an acquaintance, worried about me, had come to check on me.”

Realizing that something was clearly wrong, the acquaintance immediately called an ambulance. Tadano was taken to the hospital half a day after taking the medication, and her life was saved.

Following this incident, she took down the rope she had prepared for hanging, and her cycle of binge eating and purging stopped completely.

Though she has also tried her hand at writing erotic fiction, Tadano’s primary output nowadays is self-portraits, albeit unconventional, unsettling images featuring faces slashed by scissors or bodies entangled in countless hands.

“I paint my past self. Sometimes it’s a feeling of wanting to carve myself up and leave everything in a chaotic mess. Other times, it’s an image of myself curled up in a ball. Or perhaps it’s the process of breaking out of a shell, evolving from a state where I felt incredibly weak. When I begin a piece, I always start by putting my current state of mind into words.”

Painting offers a sense of fulfillment she never found in her work as a gravure model or actress.

“Painting helps stabilize my mental state, and it also provides an income; it’s just a really good thing for me.”

And yet, her suicidal tendencies are still there.

“It’s not that I’m in the depths of a crisis, but the feeling always lingers. It’s my default state.”

But, the article concludes, perhaps that faint, underlying sense of despair has now become a fertile source for her creative endeavors.