She took her screen name "Tani" from the novelist Jun'ichirō Tanizaki and "Naomi" from the central character in his important early work A Fool's Love.
[5] Tani had a minor role in director Mamoru Watanabe's Slave Widow, which starred major "pink" actresses Noriko Tatsumi and Mari lwai.
[8] During this early stage of her career, Tani sometimes worked at prominent pink film producer/director Kōji Wakamatsu's independent studio.
She worked several times with the prolific director Shinya Yamamoto [ja] in such films as Degenerate (1967), Memoirs of Modern Love: Curious Age (1967) and Season For Rapists (1969).
Dan was secretly writing S&M film scripts under the pseudonym Matsugoro Kuroiwa while working as a high school English teacher.
[10] Tani's "pretty face, beautiful fair skin... and 96cm (38") large breasts"[11] as well as her acting abilities helped make her a popular actress in the late 1960s.
"[13] As an indication of her growing prominence as a representative of the erotic cinema in Japan, she appeared in the U.S. Playboy's December 1968 issue in their "Girls of the Orient" pictorial article.
[13] Feeling that S&M was her destiny, Tani consented to work at Nikkatsu only on the condition that her first film be based on Oniroku Dan's novel, Flower and Snake.
Flower and Snake and Wife to Be Sacrificed are credited with starting the S&M Roman Porno series which helped save Nikkatsu from financial collapse during the 1970s.
[25] In Konuma's 1977 parody of the Roman porn genre, In the Realm of Sex, Tani appears as herself, stalked by a perverted middle-aged fan who wants to perform an S&M session with her.
"[27] Tani starred in director Kōyū Ohara's Nikkatsu Roman pornos, Fascination: Portrait of a Lady (1977), Rope Hell (1978) and Fairy in a Cage (1977) which had Tani playing the role of a wealthy business woman who is tortured by the sadistic head of the inquisition branch of the Japanese military during World War II.
[28] Director Shōgorō Nishimura's 1978 film, Lady Black Rose, contained two notorious scenes which are often selected as examples of the Roman porno S&M genre.
[30] Tani's last film, Rope and Skin (1979) was also directed by Nishimura, once again based on an Oniroku Dan novel, and had a part for fellow "Pink queen," Junko Miyashita.
During the twelve years she worked as an actress, she never went to the beach or allowed herself to get a suntan, feeling that it was important to keep her skin very white, so that it could be seen turning red during some of the scenes involving such things as whippings or melting candle wax tortures.
"[34] She further states, "... to gain sympathy from the audience, I engaged in elaborate discussions with the filmmakers concerning Naomi Tani's torture scenes, to insure that they were both cruel and beautiful.
"[35] Her willingness to submit herself to scenes of extreme physical difficulty led director Shinya Yamamoto to famously utter, "Naomi Tani is a monster!
"[39] In his Behind the Mask: On Sexual Demons, Sacred Mothers, Transvestites, Gangsters, Drifters, and Other Japanese Cultural Heroes, Ian Buruma describes Tani as the most celebrated porn star of her time, "combin[ing] the savage and the maternal."
On this disc's recent re-release in CD format, a reviewer commented of Tani's vocals, "There’s a worldliness in her voice and a maturity which suggests she’s seen it all...
There is however a fragility to her voice, a cracking sense of the truly erotic, the unseen, the taboo which drapes each syllable... hearing music which would usually be readily associated with a mid-70s Samurai movie bedding down with such muted eroticism is more than a winning formula.
"[33] In this retrospective atmosphere, Tani was finally persuaded to return to film in 2000 to appear in Hideo Nakata's documentary on director Masaru Konuma entitled Sadistic and Masochistic.