Series opener for Japan Society’s monthly John Zorn-guest curated “The Dark Side of the Sun” is weirdly titled and even more weirdly scripted and assembled Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands/Koya no Datch waifu. Director-writer Atsushi Yamatoya’s 1967 Nipponese Nouvelle Vague noir also goes by the handle of Dutch Wife in the Desert, the first two words of which it says are slang code for the plastic pneumatic femme whose legs quiver here when caressed for a few seconds by a grief-maddened father.

A percussive jazz score by Yosuke Yamashita parallels Martial Solal’s for Godard’s first feature, while the disconnected jumpy cutting looks to that one as well as to the Frenchman’s tale of private eye Lemmy Caution. In this eighty-five-minute Japanese cult favorite, shifts are as much in time as in place, since with no apologies “dead” characters reappear, at times resurrected, at others apparently never really offed and at still others simply alive and deadly in the past or the future.

The film is frequently classified as pinku-eiga, “pink soft-core,” but aside from numerous naked female breasts fondled, one phallic pistol, some half-dozen laughable scrawny male torturers in briefs and hoods, and a little blood, there is less sex or flesh here than in many a movie today.

On the same overexposed wasteland road with which it will close, both full circle and also the overt start of yet another similar circle, the story opens with gun-for-hire Mr. Sho (Yuichi Minato) dropped off to be met and tested by real estate baron Mr. Naka (Masayoshi Nogami). Half his fee insisted on in advance, the hit man is contracted to rescue Sae (Noriko Tatsumi), abducted in retaliation six months previously from her “work” in the realtor’s office and shown being abused and perhaps murdered in a snuff film that is projected: “Bite your tongue, and die!”

Like Lee Van Cleef’s black-hatted Col. Mortimer, this assassin brought in is determined, not to score yen as much as to settle a score involving rape and death, in this case of a sweetheart or wife violated and killed by Mr. Ko (Shohei Yamamoto). That dapper villain has escaped vengeance justice a number of times for five years now but is readily located in his bar. He is a knife-thrower, backed by a well-dressed bald man and two bumbling comic gunsels, but Sho warns him that he will return for the final showdown the following day, on the stroke of three, the hour at which the raped woman’s heart and bedside clock both stopped forever.

Uncommon for the genre in its repeated shifting in, or bending of, time and space, the film follows the hero as he somewhat unwillingly becomes the love-sex object of Mina (Miki Watari), who looks like the maybe dead Sae but is target Ko’s current lady and may be in fact a trap laid for Sho.

Directing only four other films while acting in eight, Yamatoya was primarily a screenwriter, with thirty-six titles to his credit, many of them for Koji Wakamatsu, a director associated with erotic production erodakushon who died in an automobile accident exactly two years ago and to whom this screening, followed by a reception, is dedicated. This particular realization from Yamatoya’s own screenplay has a hallucinatory Kafka quality, a retro visual and aural feel that manages to be at once menacing and dreamlike and that seems better suited to this b&w 35mm format than to digital large-screen color.

(Released by Kokuel Company; not rated by MPAA.)