Vita Sexualis Read online

  She said while smiling, "Won't you come to bed?"

  "I've no intention to."

  "My word!"

  "You're quite pale, aren't you? Is there anything wrong?"

  "Yes. I was in the hospital until a few days ago with pleurisy."

  "You were? Then it'll be hard for you to receive customers."

  "Oh no. I feel all right now."

  "I see."

  We looked at each other for a while. Smiling again, the woman said, "You look awfully strange."

  "How come?"

  "Oh, just sitting here like this."

  "If that's the case, let's hand-wrestle."

  "I'll be defeated right away."

  "Oh no! I'm not that strong either. They say you mustn't make light of a woman's arm!"

  "Oh my! That's a nice way of putting it."

  "Let's have a go at it."

  We clasped each other's right arm, our elbows resting on the thin hard bed. The woman had no strength whatsoever. No matter how much I tried to get her to put more strength into it, it was no use. Without expending any power whatsoever, I easily pinned her down.

  Koga and Saigusa called out to me from behind the sliding door. I went home with them. It had been my second visit to Yoshiwara. And it was my last. The time seems convenient to add this postscript.

  ***

  When I was twenty-one . . .

  At long last my going abroad to study was decided. However, I hadn't yet received the official announcement of my government appointment. I had been told that for the convenience of my university the announcement would be made in the summer.

  During this time my mother was kept in suspense about several offers of marriage to me.

  Because Koga said it would help my future, he introduced me to a Mr. Mochizuki, a counselor in one of the ministries. He was the son-in-law of some elder statesman. Mochizuki frequented a house of assignation in Shitaya called the Daishige. I was told that in order to get better acquainted with him, I had better go to that same house. Occasionally I did. I'd call in four or five geisha, engage them in some silly chatter, then go back home. In those days the prices were cheap, so I had to pay only three or four yen to each geisha. Since I had undertaken to translate some documents for the company that employed Koga, I always had money on me. In those days you could get about three yen per page by translating articles on law. I always carried at least fifty yen or so on me. But when I went out with Mochizuki, all he did was drink sake and return home. Koga said to me, "He probably feels reserved with you. I'll see to it that he doesn't!" So one night Koga talked to the madame of the house. The reason I offered no resistance to Koga this time was due to my old friend Neugierde, which was curious to know how a geisha would perform.

  I believe it was the end of January. It was a cold night. As usual the three of us called in some pretty, young geisha from Shitaya and engaged them in frivolous talk. The madame came in. Mochizuki's voice took on a strange quality. He had done it deliberately.

  "My old mistress!"

  "Yes, sir. My dear, your face is getting terribly shiny, isn't it? You'd better wipe it with hot water."

  The madame had a maid wring out a hot towel and wipe his face. His sternly handsome features were wiped clean. Since my face would have been none the better even if she had scrubbed it till it glittered, the madame paid no attention to it.

  "Mr. Kanai. Just a word with you."

  The madame stood up. I followed her out to the corridor. A maid was waiting and took me into another room. A geisha of the type I had never seen before was there. It seemed to me she was of a quite different variety from the type usually sent out for hire. I feel this a little difficult to write about. I realized for the first time in my life that the term "not to undo one's clothes" does not necessarily refer only to those moments when a good woman tends an invalid.

  This time I can write without distorting the facts. Even after this incident I went to these houses of assignation, but the event I have just described was my first and last experience of what actually goes on there.

  For several days afterward I had the usual feeling of a deep-seated uneasiness. Fortunately, though, nothing wrong occurred.

  One day after the weather turned warm, I went with Koga to Fukinukitei Hall to listen to the famous storyteller Encho. Right near me was a fat old man about fifty years old accompanied by a geisha. She was the "good" geisha I had met that night. She and I looked at each other as if we were observing air.

  ***

  That same year on the seventh of June I received the government order allowing me to study abroad. I was to head for Germany.

  I went to the home of a German to study conversation with him. My studies during my early days at Ikizaka proved quite helpful.

  I boarded a ship at Yokohama on the twenty-fourth of August. It so happened that I left Japan without marrying anyone.

  ***

  Mr. Kanai had written this much that night. The entire house was steeped in silence. An early summer rain was gently falling against the shutters. Amid the dull soft sounds of rain on the thick growth of plants in the garden could be heard the jangling noise of water running along the zinc troughs on the eaves. The traffic on Nishikatamachi had completely died out, and he could hear neither the raindrops against paper umbrellas nor the wooden rainclogs stepping into the mud.

  With his arms folded, Mr, Kanai was lost in thought.

  The sequel to the record he had started writing drifted across his mind but in a disorderly process. He remembered a small coffeehouse at a spot where one turns west along the Unter den Linden in Berlin. The Cafe Krebs. It was a gathering place for Japanese students studying abroad, a place they called Kaniya, which means "crab" in Japanese. Though he had been there often, he had never made any advances toward the women; yet one night the most beautiful girl in the place, a girl who had said she would never go out with a Japanese, proclaimed she would definitely go out with Mr. Kanai. He would have nothing to do with her. In a fit of passion the woman threw her cup of milange on the floor, shattering the glass.

  Then he remembered his boardinghouse on Karlstrasse. Every night the niece of the old landlady came to his room in her chemise and sat down on the edge of the bed he was lying on, talking to him for thirty minutes. "My aunt said that since she was up and waiting for me to come back, she didn't mind my coming in if it was only to talk to you. I guess it's all right? Say you don't think it's not nice." The warmth of her body was transmitted to him through the coverlet. After paying for three months' rent according to some provision in the law on rents, he fled, though he continually received letters from her in which she claimed she saw him every night in her dreams.

  He remembered a house in Leipzig with a red light on its door. Each customer drew a woman near him, a woman with curled bright-colored hair powdered in gold, a woman dressed only for form's sake in a red dress from her shoulders to her hips. He cried out, "I've got tuberculosis! Come near me and you'll catch it."

  He remembered a hotel in Vienna. A maid there became quite angry because of the advances of a high government official on tour who was at the time being shown around by Mr. Kanai. Piqued by what he took to be her hauteur, Mr. Kanai foolishly said to her on the day before their departure, "I'll come to you tonight."

  "My room's at the end of the corridor to the right. I'll be annoyed if you come in with your shoes on!" Her words were as quick as the response of an echo. She waited for the sounds of his stockinged feet along the corridor, her room flooded with enough perfume to make one choke.

  He remembered a coffeehouse in Munich. A place the Japanese always came to in groups. Among its regular customers was an uncommonly beautiful girl accompanied by a handsome native of the region who looked somewhat roguish. All the Japanese extolled this girl. One evening while this couple was present, Mr. Kanai went into the men's room. He heard someone behind him hurrying into the room. In almost no time at all two thin arms were clasped tightly around his neck. He felt his lips pressed
by the hot kiss of a woman. He found a visiting card being squeezed into his hand. When he saw the woman turn back like a whirlwind and take her departure, he found it was that glamour girl. Written in pencil on the visiting card bearing her address were the words "Eleven-thirty." He felt as if he wanted to spite his fellow countrymen who claimed he was a coward for not having had anything to do with his own vulgar desires. So he decided to launch out adventurously into this rendezvous. He found she had a scar on her abdomen from the time she had once been pregnant. Afterwards he learned she had gone into this escapade with him to recover a pawned dress she needed for a dance. His countrymen were absolutely astounded.

  He enjoyed the peccadilloes he committed. But not once were his sexual desires strong enough to make him aggressively assert himself for their satisfaction. The only reason he took to the field was not to lose that desire. Occasionally, however, his innocent Neugierde and his obstinacy made him participate in these skirmishes despite his lack of need for them.

  When Mr. Kanai first started writing, he had intended to write only up to his marriage. It was in the fall of his twenty-fifth year that he had returned from Europe. The woman he married shortly following his return died after giving birth to a son. For some time he had lived alone, and when he was thirty-two he married his present wife, who was seventeen years old. He had felt when he first started writing that he would definitely try to record all the events until his twenty-fifth year.

  Once he put down his pen, he came to suspect that the writing of these casual encounters, haphazardly repeated, might become mechanical. What he had written was not autobiographical in the usual sense of that term. Then when he asked himself if he really intended to write a novel, that too wasn't so. What to label the proper genre for his writing did not concern him in the least, yet he did not want to write anything that had no artistic value. He did not acknowledge only what Nietzsche called Dionysian as deserving the name of art. He also acknowledged the Apollonian as art. In sexual desire detached from love, however, there could be no real passion so that even he himself could not but realize that a person without passion cannot be a good subject for autobiography.

  He definitely decided to discontinue writing And still he thought about it over and over again. The public, regarding him in his present condition, would say he had lost his passion because he had aged. But this lack of passion was not due to that. Because he had had an excessively thorough knowledge of himself ever since he was a boy, that knowledge had completely blasted his passion in its embryo. Yet having been misled by some accidental and silly inducement, he had received his sexual "dubbing." This "dubbing" actually had been totally unnecessary. It would have been much better had he not been "dubbed" until he had married. To carry this consideration one step further: if, as a matter of fact, it was not necessary to be "dubbed" before marriage, it would probably have been better if he had not married at all. Somehow it seemed to him he was an uncommonly frigid person.

  Having come this far in his analysis, he at once thought it over again. Of course it had not been necessary for him to get "dubbed." However, he found any analysis superficial which implied that his knowledge about himself had blasted his passion. Even in the bowels of the earth covered with eternal ice, raging flames are furiously thrusting upward from a volcano. Michelangelo quarreled with his friends when he was young and had his nose smashed by their fists and so was forced to give up all hope of love, but when he was sixty years old, he met Vittoria Colonna and miraculously gained her love. Mr. Kanai knew he wasn't incapacitated. He wasn't impotent. People in general let loose the tiger of sexual desire they have kept under leash and occasionally ride on its back until they tumble into the Valley of Ruin. He had tamed his tiger of sexual desire and controlled it. Bhadra was one of Buddha's disciples. He slept beside the tiger he had tamed. His young disciple was afraid of it. The meaning of "Bhadra" is "wise man." His tiger was probably the symbol for sexual desire. It was certainly tamed, but its power to terrify and awe was not at all enfeebled.

  Having thought everything over in this way, Mr. Kanai slowly reread his manuscript from the beginning. And when he had read it to the end, he found the night much further advanced. The rain had stopped without his realizing it. Drops of water falling on a rock from the mouth of a water pipe fell intermittently, making a sound like the beating of the chevron-stone of ancient China.

  After reading his manuscript, he wondered if he could show it to the public. It would be quite difficult to. There are things which everyone does but which one does not mention to others. Since he was a member of the educated circle governed by the law of prudery, it would be difficult for him to bring out his book. If that was the case, was it possible to let his son accidentally come across the manuscript and read it? He might let him. However, he couldn't tell beforehand what the effect on his son would be. If his son read it and became like him, what then? Would the boy be happy or unhappy? He couldn't tell about that either. A line in Dehmel's poem reads, "Don't obey your father! Don't obey him!" He felt he didn't want to let his son see his manuscript.

  He picked up his pen and wrote in large letters in Latin across the front cover of his manuscript, VITA SEXUALIS. He heard the thud of his manuscript as he hurled it inside a storage chest for books.

  - THE END -