At the height of her popularity, in 1987, Kobayashi married Toshifumi Yuzawa, who would later become the president of Kobayashi's talent agency. Kobayashi put her AV performances on hold for a few years beginning in 1989 to concentrate on family matters. During this period, she never officially retired, never completely ceased appearing in AVs, and worked occasionally as a stripper. In 1988 she had a major role in the mainstream . Allmovie describes the film as a "sickening but riveting slasher," and author and film critic Patrick Galloway calls the film, "…nothing short of a multicultural terror tour de force, featuring gruesome, brilliantly rendered sound and imagery that will stay with you to your last dying gasp." Written by Takashi Ishii and directed by Toshiharu Ikeda, the film inspired two sequels. Japan Home Video, which financed the film, wished to showcase Kobayashi, their top AV star at the time, as the star of the film. Director Ikeda, unsure of Kobayashi's acting abilities, instead put Miyuki Ono in the lead role of Nami, and gave Kobabayashi the supporting role of Rei. The near adult-video style sex scenes that Kobayashi performs in the film have been criticized by horror film purists as the element that prevents the film from attaining genre classic status. Galloway, however, points out that "Evil Dead Trap" is not pure horror, but a genre-transcending film. About the sex scenes, Galloway comments, "Ikeda handles the steamy segments like a pro, coming as he did from Nikkatsu, where he honed his craft making the studio's signature "roman porno" (romantic pornography). In 1996 and 1997, Hitomi Kobayashi starred in two films for pioneering "pink film" director Satoru Kobayashi, who was the director of "Flesh Market" (1962) – the first "pink film". In 1997, she played the somewhat autobiographical role of fictional AV actress Mizuki Mahoro in the 1997 V-cinema film . Kobayashi's official return to the AV industry was in the November 1998 video "Love Bond" or "Immoral Bonds".