Vita Sexualis (6 page)

"How about it? Do you understand it?"

"Well, for the most part."

"That's quite enough if you got most of it!"

When the storyteller who has been performing stands up, bows to the audience, and leaves from the side of the stage, the next performer makes his appearance on the platform. He humbly says, "It's my turn, but I'm a poor substitute." Immediately he leaps into his subject: the pastime of gentlemen is whoring. Then the storyteller proceeds to recite the tale of an artisan who leads his innocent friend to Yoshiwara. It's a lecture which might be entitled "A Yoshiwara Primer." I listened with wide-eyed admiration, feeling Tokyo was the most convenient spot in the world in which to acquire knowledge on any subject. At that time I committed to memory a strange phrase, "favored with cuntie." However, having never again encountered this expression anywhere else except at storytelling halls, I found it one of those phrases which imposed a useless burden on my memory.

*
*
*

Around October of that same year I entered a private school located at Ikizaka in Hongo where German was taught. That was because my father thought he would let me specialize in mining.

Since the school was too far for me to commute to from Mukojima, my father had me lodge in the home of the famous Professor Azuma, who lived in Ogawacho in Kanda, and from this house I went off to school everyday.

Having just returned from abroad, the professor was very particular about his diet, but with the exception of having plenty of meat at mealtimes, he was not especially extravagant. Only in drinking did he let himself go. It was after he returned from his office and had completed his translating at ten or eleven at night that he drank. His wife seemed to me to be heroic. Now that I think about it, it's rare among high public officials these days to see a family governed by such domestic bliss. It was wonderful that my father had placed me in a fine home.

During the time I lived at Professor Azuma's, I was never pressured by sexual desires. If I force myself to trace back those memories, I can recall only this event: My study was located between the parlor and the kitchen. One day the maid had not yet come in to light my lamp even though it was already dark outside. I suddenly stood up and went toward the kitchen. There I discovered the houseboy and maid talking. He was explaining to her something like the following: A woman's machinery can be put to use at any time. It can go into operation without any relation to feelings. A man's machinery is at times serviceable, at times not. If a man takes a fancy to something, his machinery springs forward. If he feels something distasteful, it gives a poor showing. The maid was listening with crimson ears. Disgusted, I returned to my room.

My lessons at school did not seem very difficult. Since I had studied English under my father's instruction, I had been using a dictionary by a man named Adler. It was in two volumes, one German-English, the other English-German. Whenever I was bored, I would amuse myself by looking up such a word as
member
and then finding its equivalent
Zeugungslied
or by looking up the word
pudenda
and finding
Scham.
But it was not because such words were interesting enough to have any effect on my sexual desires that I amused myself in this way. I found myself fascinated by such words simply as hidden expressions which could not be used in public. That is why I remember looking up the word
Furz
at the same time I had looked up the word
fart.
One day our teacher, a German, was instructing us in introductory chemistry and demonstrating how to make hydrogen sulfide. He asked us if we knew any substance which contained this gas. One of the students answered,
"faule Eier."
Certainly rotten eggs do have this same sort of smell. He asked us if we knew any others. Standing up, I shouted out,
"Furz!"

"Was? Bitte, noch einmal!"

"Furz!"

Finally our teacher understood, his face turning red. He was kind enough to instruct me not to use this type of word.

Our school had its own dormitory. After classes were over, I dropped in to look around. It was there that I first heard about sodomy. My classmate, Kagenokoji, who came to school everyday on horseback, was the object of the tender passions of dormitory students who could not have girls they could love. He was not able to do well in his lessons at school. He was a handsome boy with a plump, pale reddish face. That the word "boy" had the meaning of being an object for sodomy was something I had not known before. The student who had asked me to drop into the dorm on my way back home was also looking upon me as a "boy." The first two or three times I stopped, he offered me some refreshment and apparently wanted only to talk in a friendly way. He treated me to parched beans and baked sweet potatoes, called respectively at that time by the students "confetti" and "jellied bean paste." From the beginning, though, I felt his kindness was a little too tenacious, so I didn't like it, yet fearing to be impolite to a senior, I merely tolerated our association. Before long he was grabbing my hand. He even pressed his cheek against mine. It was annoying, unbearable. I had no genius as an
Urning,
as a sodomite. Yet even though I found it unpleasant to stop in on my way home, I had to out of force of habit due to our acquaintance. One day when I called on him, I discovered the bed prepared. His behavior was much more importunate than it had ever been before. The blood rushed to his head, his face turned red. Finally he said to me, "Please get in bed and sleep with me if only for a second!"

"I don't want to."

"You shouldn't talk that way. Come on!"

He grabbed my hand. The more passionate he became, the greater became my dislike and fear.

"I don't want to. I'm going home."

While we were arguing in this way, a voice called out from the room next door.

"Is it hopeless?"

"Yes."

"Then I'll help you."

He rushed out from his room into the corridor. Clattering open the tattered sliding door to the room, he burst in. He was a rough guy, and from the first I had not wanted to associate with him. At least, though, he acted the way he looked; the one who had lured me into that room was the real hypocrite.

"If he won't listen to what an upperclassman tells him, let's teach him a lesson by blanketing him!"

His hands moved simultaneously with these words. My head was covered with the bedding. I was desperately trying to push it aside. They were pinning me down from above. Because of the row we were making, a few students came to have a look. I heard someone say, "Cut it out! Stop it!" The hands pressing down on me slackened a bit. Finally I managed to spring up and flee from the room. At that moment, though, I made off with a bundle of books and a bottle of ink, flattering myself I had been quick and shrewd. After that I never went into the dorm.

In those days every Saturday I would leave Professor Azuma's house to spend the night with my father at Mukojima, returning Sunday evening. At the time, my father was a minor official in one of the ministries. I told him what had happened at the dorm. I expected he would be quite surprised, but he wasn't in the least.

"Yes. There are fellows like that. From now on be careful."

My father was very calm as he said these words. So I realized this was one of the hardships I had to undergo in life.

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*

The previous year my mother came over from our district and joined us.

I gave up German, which I had been studying since the first of the year, and entered the Tokyo English Academy. The change was due partly to the revision of the educational system by the Ministry of Education, partly to my having pleaded with my father to let me study philosophy. Though I felt I had wasted time and energy in studying German for the short interval after my arrival in Tokyo, I found it quite helpful afterwards.

I lived in the school dormitory. Though the youngest students were about sixteen or seventeen, most were in their twenties. Almost all the students wore the
hakama,
the formal skirt made of duck cloth, and they also wore dark blue
tabi.
Unless they tucked up their kimono sleeves to their shoulders, they were thought effeminate.

Permission was granted to the owner of a lending library to trade in the dormitory. I was one of his regular customers. I read Bakin. I read Kyoden. When I found someone had taken out Shunsui and was reading him, I even borrowed that book "secondhand" from him and read it. As I was reading
Umegoyomi,
I experienced for the first time in my life an impression of how good it would feel if I had been the hero Tanjiro and someone like Ocho had loved and respected me. At the same time I felt I would never be loved by a woman, for I was ugly, and even among those students who wore such plain, inexpensive clothing as the duck-cloth
hakama
and dark blue socks were boys with white complexions and fine-cut features. Ever since those days I have secretly been obsessed with this awareness about myself, and I've never been able to feel sufficiently proud of myself. Furthermore, handicapped by being younger, I was always overwhelmed by the tyranny of my fellow students, no matter what I tried to do, so my behavior became one of submitting openly while secretly resisting. Clausewitz, the military strategist, once said passive resistance ought to be the tactic resorted to by weak nations. Congenitally I was a person who was to be disappointed in love, a weak creature molded by circumstance.

When I consider the question of sexual desire, my fellow students in those days consisted of the "mashers," who were dandies and affected elegance of dress and manner, and the "queers," who were more manly and casual in their dress. The mashers belonged to that group which enjoyed looking at those strange drawings I've already mentioned. The keeper of the lending library at that time would gather up a pile of books and walk around carrying them on his back like a pannier. At the base of the pack he carried was a box with an attached drawer. It was in this drawer that those odd drawings were always kept. In addition to borrowing such pictures from the circulating library, some students owned their own collections of erotic sketchbooks. The queers never looked at these books. The one thing
they
could hardly wait to devour, each waiting his turn, was a handwritten manuscript about a boy named Sangoro Hirata. It was said that at private schools in Kagoshima, this story was to be the very first one read on the first day of the new year. It described the history of a love affair between Sangoro, who wore his hair in bangs, and an older man, his hair in the forelock style, shaved except for a small portion above each ear. It was about their jealousy and rivalry in love. I believe the closing chapter finds the two men, one after the other, dead on the battlefield. The manuscript also had illustrations, but they were not particularly indecent.

The mashers were superior in number for the simple reason that the queers were made up mostly of men from Kyushu. Because there were few men from Kagoshima in the college preparatory schools at that time, Kyushu students were composed mainly of people from Saga and Kumamoto. They were joined by some students from Yamaguchi. The rest of the students were mashers who came from places as far as those extending over the whole of Chugoku and up to the Tohoku districts.

And yet it seemed as if the queers had the real characteristics of students and that the mashers went about more or less with a guilty conscience. Although the student outfit of the skirt of duck cloth and the dark blue socks was the basic costume of the queers, the mashers imitated it. And in spite of the fact that the mashers put on the same clothing, they did not tuck up their kimono sleeves as high as the queers did. The mashers moderately perked up their shoulders. Even when they walked along with canes, these were thinner. When a masher went out to celebrate the holidays, he secretly wore a silk kimono and white socks.

And where do you think these feet in white socks were headed? Toward those archery "shops" at Shiba and Asakusa and the houses of ill-fame in Nezu, Yoshiwara, and Shinagawa. When the mashers went out in their usual dark blue socks, they often frequented the bathhouses. Not that the queers failed to go to the public baths, but they never went upstairs. The mashers counted on taking that trip upstairs. Without fail women would be there waiting. In those days some students even promised to marry such bathhouse women. It goes without saying that these women were creatures one step lower than boardinghouse daughters.

I was victimized by the queers, for the simple reason that in our dormitory at the time my classmate Shonosuke Hanyu and I were the youngest members. Hanyu was the son of an oculist in Tokyo. His complexion was white, his eyes bright and clear, his lips pure red, his body supple. My skin was dark, my body awkward, and to make matters worse I had been raised in the country. Yet contrary to what I expected, the queers dangled after me, not Hanyu. I concluded to myself that Hanyu was a born masher and so he was safe.

I had entered the school in January and had been assigned an upstairs room in the dorm. Yuzuru Waniguchi was my roommate. He had started his education rather late in life, so he was one of the oldest in my class. His long white face was full of pockmarks, his pointed chin sticking out in front. He was lean and tall. If he belonged to the queers, I felt I'd never be safe.