The Pornographers Read online

  This is a Borzoi Book

  Published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  First American Edition

  Copyright © 1968 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  Originally published in Japanese as Erogotoshi-tachi by Shinchoosha Publishing Company. Copyright © 1966 by Akiyuki Nozaka.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 68–23962

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82803-3

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  A Note About the Author

  A Note About the Translator

  I

  SUCH IS LIFE in these up-to-date Osaka apartments. The outrageously loud yet purposeful creaking of knothole-filled floorboards, and in rhythm with it, heedless of echoes, a woman’s steady, ritualistic panting, with a word or two mixed in every now and then.

  “What’s she saying, anyway? Won’t it come any clearer?”

  Subuyan irritably pressed his ear to the speaker of the tape recorder as he sprawled out on the tatami floor. Beside him Banteki sat upright in his usual prissy way, his funny little legs tucked beneath him, knees neatly aligned. As he painstakingly put together scrap lengths of tape, he puckered his mouth woefully and muttered.

  “That’s it. You can’t get it any better. They got these apartment ceilings all filled with wires. And then there’s the radio hams, too. They got you coming and going.”

  As though in confirmation, there suddenly surged into a rhythmic breathing sound, as voluptuous as one could ask, a jarring metallic snarl of static, arbitrarily drowning all distinction. Since the recording had been made in the room beneath the couple, they must have been totally unaware; but still—maybe in deference to their neighbors’ ears, hindered on either side by a mere single layer of plywood—they had left their radio going full blast; and a commercial sang out merrily, wholly unmarred by static: “Jin, Jin, Jin! Jin Tan! Buy, buy Jin Tan! Nip your nausea in the bud! Jin Tan! Jin Tan! Jin, Jin, Jin! Jin Tan!”

  “The part I want just doesn’t come through. But that woman there really has a nice quality to her moan.”

  Subuyan gave a disheartened sigh. Trying to console him a bit, Banteki offered some background data.

  “Her boy friend’s a family man, a kimono dyer over in Kyoto. He comes over a couple times a week, right here above us. Once he gets going, there’s no mistaking it. You’d think the ceiling was coming down. He’s a pretty old fart, too, but it looks like he’s still got what it takes.”

  “Ssh! Hold it!” Subuyan gestured excitedly to Banteki. The woman was talking.

  “You hungry, honey? Want me to make you some soup?”

  The man’s mumbled reply was impossible to catch; and then all at once a raucous shout blasted Subuyan’s eardrum.

  “Hey! Bean-curd man! Let me have some, will you?”

  The man had something else to say at this point, and the woman laughed appreciatively. After a bit, the rough thump thump of feet clattering up the stairs, a knock at the door, a cough.

  “Just set it there, will you? Come back tonight, and I’ll give you back the box with the money, okay? Thanks.”

  All quiet for a while, and then once again the floorboards creaking, the woman moaning. Banteki edged a bit closer to the astounded Subuyan.

  “Going at it hot and heavy, and then she stops to order some bean curd. I guess they’ve got no sense of shame. And that bean-curd man’s no better than he should be either.”

  After hearing Banteki’s explanation, Subuyan doubled up in helpless laughter.

  “It’s got the smell of reality to it,” he finally managed. “The smell of reality” had recently become an expression cherished by Subuyan. His customers’ eyes and ears were becoming more and more discriminating and consequently nothing was likely to slip by them. There was, for example, a thirty-minute tape called “One Rainy Night,” an exotic creation in which the woman resisted—”Stop, stop! No, no!—from beginning to end, which Subuyan had gone to the trouble of bringing all the way to Amagazaki to play for a dealer in fine wood. In the midst of it, the man had a line declaring: “One may not struggle against fate!” Suddenly the old sex maniac, who had been listening on the edge of his chair up to this point, jerked his head up.

  “Aw, don’t give me that! Trying to put it to her and then making a half-ass remark like that. It’s phony!”

  “Now wait just a minute. When you’re all worked up, you’re liable to come out with almost anything.” But Subuyan’s championing of the man on the tape was all in vain, and the upshot was that the wood dealer had gotten off with a free performance.

  “When you stop and think of it, you can see right off that the Tokyo style just doesn’t go here. All a guy’s got to do is open his mouth, and no matter how sincere he is, right away they say it’s phony. No common bond of sympathy, that’s it right there. Now take that ‘Rainy Night’ number. If instead the guy had gone on like this: ‘Honey, you know down deep this is the way it’s gotta be. And if this is the way it’s gotta be, you just can’t fight it’—then that son of a bitch in Amagazaki would have been happy.”

  Banteki heard out Subuyan’s shrill, angry complaint. “Well, have we got a deal?” he then asked. For these tapes were Banteki’s property. Besides the affair of the bean-curd man, there was a lover’s duet in the neighboring second-floor room featuring a cabaret waitress and one of her customers. It had the same sort of competition from creaking floorboards and ham stations; and then, too, the waitress—perhaps due to some unfortunate dental problem—made a whistling noise throughout. And to crown it all, the man, utterly undone by passion, had shouted out, “Oh, honey! How sweet you are!” in the most inane tone imaginable. The third was a tape that caught the perfervid exchange two rooms away between a college boy and his girl. In a rather novel variation, the boy cried: “Baby, baby, baby! Oh, baby! Baby!” from start to finish.

  “Well, how much do you want? Give me a break, will you?”

  “Oh, I think about five thousand yen apiece would do it.”

  Banteki sniffled and sat up a bit more primly. What the hell, brooded Subuyan to himself, here he uses scrap tape and gets his material just by nosing around his own apartment house—no capital outlay whatsoever!

  Still and all, he reflected, put all the good parts of these three together, and you can get a hot number which could go for three thousand and have the smell of reality all through it. Make fifty copies and end up with at least a hundred thousand clear.

  Subuyan agreed to Banteki’s price, and the deal was closed.

  “I’m afraid I’ve got a cold. I think it was being up all night recording.”

  “Yeah? Well, keep your ears open in case something else good turns up. When I was coming in just now, I noticed hanging out the window of the apartment at the end here a quilt with ‘Long life!’ on it, and right away I said, there’s some newlyweds.”

  The embarrassed yet eager intimacy of two newlyweds! Damn! Pull that off, thought Subuyan, and you’ll have a tape that could go for even ten thousand a crack with no trouble.

  “Just listening’s no problem. Trying to get it on tape, though, is something else again. The more sensitive the mike you use, the more trouble the hams give you.”

  As might be expected, Banteki was not one to have overlooked such a windfall, and
he had already made some attempts at recording. The newlyweds were on the same floor in an apartment at the end of the hall. He had at first tried slipping a microphone into the ceiling, but there had been too much static. And worse than that, the second-floor toilet was just above, introducing into the tape the almost constant roar of flushing, not to mention the variety of sounds that accompany the indiscriminate breaking of wind.

  The mood was just shot to hell.

  After this setback Banteki had tried hollowing out a bamboo clothes rod and running a cord through it. He concealed the microphone by draping a pair of shorts over it and then put the pole out near the newlyweds’ window. But since it was outside, everything had interfered—faraway train whistles, sirens, dogs howling in the distance—and it had caught not the least sound emanating from the happy couple.

  “But as far as just listening goes, what do you say to this?”

  For the benefit of the disappointed yet still hopeful Subuyan, Banteki slid open the closet door and pulled out from the rolled-up bedding a doctor’s stethoscope. A length of vinyl hose was attached to it.

  “Now you put a funnel on the end of the hose, see? Then you put the funnel right up into the ceiling.”

  When he was a boy, Subuyan had seen in a picture book a monstrous, trumpet-shaped device for detecting approaching aircraft; it was said to be able to catch a fly’s buzzing at a mile. Obviously the principle was just the same.

  “It’s amazing how you can hear with this. It puts you right up next to them.”

  “What time is most of the action?”

  “Here, I’ve got a memo on that.”

  What a guy—memos on everything! thought Subuyan in wonder as he took the proffered slip of paper and studied the data scrawled upon it: “Sunday, 7:00 a.m. Woman UU. Monday, 10:00 p.m. After a fight, crying, UU. Tuesday, nothing. Wednesday, 3 seconds.” And so on.

  “What’s this ‘UU’?”

  “You know, UU!” Summoning up considerable effort, Banteki gave a fairly good falsetto rendition of the frantic, drawn gasp so designated. “Just at the end she came out with it. And as for the three seconds, he was right in there and done in no time. All over in three seconds, and you should hear what she had to say to him afterward.”

  Subuyan gave his slightly spasmodic laugh and nodded in hearty approval. “This is great. With a gadget like this, you can hear anything at all at Juso or Ginbashi. Damn! This’ll be our secret weapon. We can palm one off on the president of that shipping company. What an oddball! If he takes it to a place in Ginbashi, he’ll probably pass up everything else and hook it up in the john.”

  “The cost price is only four thousand yen. They got all kinds of old ones in the secondhand stores. I can make as many as you want.”

  Banteki chuckled slightly, then reined himself in. Anything that fell short of full composure was foreign to his nature. He was the son of the owner of a hat shop in Motomachi in Kobé. As a boy he had become fascinated with photography and then married a domineering woman to whom nothing less than complete subservience and devotion was acceptable. At length he had run away with a model, and in the course of the trouble that developed over living with her, he was disinherited by his father. Now he led a forlorn, solitary life here in Omiya on the east side of Osaka. As a photographer, however, he had become more skilled than ever, and besides that his talent had many other facets.

  “Hey, what do you say we go to the Turkish bath—my treat? That’ll knock out your cold.”

  Banteki accepted Subuyan’s offer, and together they went out. It was December, an especially good month for their business. For some reason the pornography industry seemed to thrive amid an atmosphere of sleighbells and Christmas trees. The moon shone brilliant and white in the winter sky, and Subuyan felt his heart bounding with vigor. He began to hum “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

  His nickname, Subuyan, came in fact from the word for pickled pork. He had always been fat, which accounted for the porcine aspect of the name; but then, too, he had a certain air of sadness that made the composite name an appropriate one. His name as it appeared on the official registers was one which only the police took much interest in. Then there was the alias Tokitaka Kiso. Under its respectable cover, Subuyan, for five thousand yen a month, rented a desk and a phone in the rear of the Dojima Building; this was what served as the firm’s official headquarters. In the business world, however, he and his colleagues were known simply as “the pornographers.”

  They walked through the bustling crowd in front of Senbayashi Station and entered the Turkish bath behind it. The place was packed, with not a single empty chair in the waiting room.

  “Look at them all! Out to cop a feel, and they know this is the place for it,” Subuyan observed.

  A boy in a work jacket and red socks in from the farm for some high living, a salesman in a suit and bow tie, a man in bell-bottom trousers with enormous feet and the air of a bartender, a grubby student scattering ashes as he puffed away on a cigarette held between nicotine-stained thumb and forefinger … But Banteki suddenly broke into Subuyan’s intent survey, his tone strangely altered.

  “It’s a perversion, that’s what it is.”

  “Huh? What do you mean a perversion? The Special?”

  “No, no, the Special’s all right as far as that goes. But the feel part is all wrong. They want to make it a Turkish bath, it oughta be a Turkish bath.”

  “I don’t get you.”

  “Well, I mean these women, they ought to be skilled operators, working in a Turkish bath the way they are. They’re supposed to get those fingers working and stir a man up, in those erogenous zones, you know. This is the way the pleasure ought to be given, according to the fundamental idea of things. But what do the women do? They get felt up themselves, that’s what they do. They’ve got no skill at all, but they cover it up this way. Just like in cooking nowadays, instead of having a stew made out of real fish or vegetables, they can fool you now with some kind of synthetic crap. And then once a guy does cop a feel, the next time he wants to go further, and the next time further yet, and so on, and the upshot is that everything pretty soon just gets into the sex category as a matter of course. No, I want the Special just like it should be with nothing ersatz about it. If that’s not the way it is, then the whole principle of the Turkish bath gets lost somewhere along the line. Why, you might just as well go down to Tobita or Imari and get laid proper while you’re at it. No, the right thing is to stretch out on the rubbing table—maybe like a baby, huh?—and while you’re laying there, you just hand yourself over to the woman completely. You close your eyes, and you don’t think about a thing. What kind of face’s she got? What’s she thinking about? It doesn’t matter one bit. With those fingers her job is to get to that real special spot—the one the guy himself doesn’t know about, the one even his wife doesn’t know about—and give it the tender treatment. That for me is what makes the Special. That’s the real thing of it. The man’s the one that’s supposed to be on the receiving end, not the woman. Why, you know, you ought to feel just like you’re getting it from your mother.”

  “My mother! What the hell’s my mother got to do with it?”

  Banteki’s words had been going in one ear and out the other up to this point, but all at once Subuyan had been brought up sharp.

  “Maternal affection, you know. Whatever you want to call it. Sure, it’s a matter of service, but it’s not just that. There’s dedication in it, you see. This is true especially when the going gets kinda rough. The guy, I mean, really gets worked over in the Special. The woman really goes at it, you know, rubbing the guy up with the towel, no holds barred. And right here she’s like your mother. The guy’s all shook up, see. All he can do is just hang in there, but at the same time, you see, the woman’s not batting an eye. She’s as cool as a cucumber. What have you got, then, but something an awful lot like a mother-baby relationship?”

  “Aw, you’ve just got a mother complex, don’t you?”

  “Mayb
e I do, I don’t know. But as for me, that’s the way I look at it.”

  “Number eighteen? Number eighteen? Is he here?”

  Startled by a rough female voice, Banteki quickly checked his tag and realized his turn had come.

  “Well, I’m going off on a frolic with Mama.” Banteki tapped Subuyan’s shoulder suggestively, sniffled a bit; and the next moment a woman in a swim suit, weighing in at perhaps one-eighty, had snatched him out of sight.

  Subuyan seemed to be past forty, but he was in fact only thirty-five. His mother had died in a Kobé air raid seventeen years before, and the circumstances of her death had been especially pitiful. After his father had been drafted, mother and son lived a frugal existence, dependent upon a small clothing-repair shop. Perhaps due to the strain of her work, his mother, who had never been healthy anyway, lost the use of her legs. Subuyan had started to work in an aircraft plant in Nakajima; and with the extra rations given the workers there, he and his mother managed to get by fairly well as far as food went. But then the silver vapor trails of the B-29’s started their domination of the skies, and his mother’s situation became desperate. Since she had no relatives in the country, there was no way open for her to leave the city as so many others were doing. Their house was near the Minatogawa Shrine in the very heart of Kobé; and to make matters worse, wild rumors abounded, such as the one alleging that the Americans were intent upon destroying the statue of the great hero Kusunoki, which stood close by. Escape was cut off and there was no place to hide.

  Then on the 17th of March, 1945, with a light, crisp sound, which, thinking of it now, recalled to Subuyan the breaking of Christmas crackers, the fire raids began. The fall of the bombs itself was hardly perceptible. Rather the billowing smoke from the fires seemed to surge up spontaneously.

  “Mom, what should we do?”

  “Go ahead, don’t worry. Get away.”

  She raised herself a bit on her bed and gazed at Subuyan. Though he knew it was hopeless, he picked her up and carried her on his back for a few steps. Had there been time, the very lightness of her thin frame would have been enough to bring tears to his eyes.