The Pornographers Page 11

  “It’s the damnedest thing I ever heard of! Father and daughter! Why it’s awful!” declared Banteki after he had regained his composure and was setting up the screen again.

  “What’s so awful about it?”

  “Why, isn’t it obvious? Who would ever think of putting on an erotic number featuring a father and daughter?” Banteki insisted.

  “What else do you want the poor bastard to do? And anyway, who’s to say that it’s wrong for a father and daughter to do it?” challenged Subuyan. And he was suddenly reinforced by Cocky.

  “Yeah, sure. The Japanese gods—father, daughter, sister, brother—for them it was all the same thing.”

  “Sure! Why, right in the very beginning, father and daughter or not, it was all right to go at it,” said Hack, eager to make his contribution.

  “And what’s the first thing a man thinks when he gets a baby daughter? Isn’t it ‘Now who am I going to have to give her to?’ Isn’t that what he thinks the very first time he sees her at the hospital? And why would he feel that way if it wasn’t that down deep a man doesn’t ever want to give up his daughter?” Subuyan felt that here was a chance to vindicate the way he felt toward Keiko, and so he was giving free rein to his eloquence.

  “I can’t see it that way,” said the model, breaking in unexpectedly, as she casually puffed a cigarette. “That guy there has got himself a cozy little deal with that girl, don’t you think? No matter how much he seemed to stumble around while he talked, he came out with a pretty smooth story,” she observed disinterestedly and blew some smoke toward the ceiling.

  “Hey! What do you say we take another look at Two in a Boat,” said Hack. “We can see whether he handles a daughter like she was a woman or a woman like she was a daughter.”

  “You can’t tell the difference,” said Subuyan in disgust, but nevertheless the others were in favor of seeing the film again.

  At the end of it, the men did not know what to say, but the model came up with an extremely shrewd observation.

  “Did you ever see a father and daughter where there wasn’t some resemblance between them? Rie and that guy don’t look at all alike. He found the kid somewhere, and he got her used to the idea that he was her father. Then he’d let the rumor get around that this exotic act of theirs actually was a father-daughter affair, and then he could up his price.”

  Subuyan burned with indignation. How could a woman understand a father’s feeling, he thought angrily; but he was at a loss for a feasible counterattack. At any rate, Subuyan told Banteki to handle the rest of the film as he liked.

  As they were going out the door, Keiko rushed in past them, her face drained of color.

  “Mama, Mama! She’s dead!”

  Subuyan hailed a taxi at once, rushed back to the hospital with Keiko, and galloped frantically to Oharu’s bedside. He found her attended by a doctor. She was not dead, but she had vomited a huge quantity of blood and her breathing had become harsh and painful. When Subuyan saw her putty-colored face, he realized why Keiko had thought that she was dead and had rushed out in a panic, not so much to tell him as to escape.

  “Well, she hasn’t much strength left, and we think that there’s danger of pneumonia setting in.” The blunt words of the doctor seemed equivalent to saying there was no hope, and Subuyan’s heart raced wildly.

  My God! he thought. If it’s pneumonia, can’t they put a compress on her head, or let her inhale vapor, or some other damn thing?

  Keiko, rather than being overcome with sorrow at her mother’s approaching death, seemed to be on the verge of terror. Oharu lay gurgling noisily in her throat and shifting her eyes from time to time. The doctor went out, after saying curtly: “Let me know if there’s any change.” Subuyan, sitting in the only chair, was left alone with Keiko by the bedside. Since there was nothing else he could do, and hoping to hearten her a little, Subuyan began to stroke Oharu’s arm, which lay outside the sheet, thin as a broomstick. With the other arm he encircled the waist of Keiko, who was trembling softly, and drew her to his side.

  “Oharu, don’t worry. I’ll take care of Keiko. Everything will be all right. The business is in good shape. Oharu, can you hear me? You want me to hold you tight? Maybe you’ll get better if I hold you.” He could not very well lie beside her, but, bending over, he put his arms around her. “Can you feel it? I’m holding you. It feels good, doesn’t it? Feeling good, that’s life. That’s it for sure.” He ran his right hand lightly over her breast and stomach, and, as he did—was it just his imagination?—her breath seemed to come faster. “That’s it. That’s it. You know, don’t you, Oharu.” Then, as he brought his face closer, Oharu’s jaw began to tremble convulsively. There was no mistaking it. It was the last agony. “Keiko,” Subuyan shouted, “go get the doctor!” The girl, choking on her sobs, ran into the corridor. Oharu’s lips opened halfway, and then she slumped lifeless in his arms.

  When the doctor had rushed back, he merely nodded politely and said: “I’m very sorry.”

  III

  AFTER THE BODY had been brought home, Keiko seemed to regain her composure. She seemed detached, as though the full import of her bereavement had not yet sunk in. But at any rate, Keiko was the one who went to the ward office to obtain the cremation permit, who made the arrangements with the undertakers, who brought the rice flour and steamed the traditional funeral dumplings. She moved about attending to every detail, as she watched the utterly helpless Subuyan from the corner of her eye. For a suitable demon banisher, Keiko had the idea of laying out the very razor used by Oharu in her work, with the smudges left by her fingers still upon it.

  “Don’t you think you ought to let the relatives know?” Keiko asked Subuyan.

  “I don’t see why we have to bother. They’ve had nothing to do with your mother,” he answered. Oharu had an older brother and a cousin, who lived in Osaka. But for a widow to take up with a boarder, especially when she had a growing daughter! Oharu had broken completely with her past. “And when you think of it, I guess it’s all my fault,” said Subuyan, giving way to self-reproach. But Keiko’s rejoinder was earnest and unexpected.

  “As for the wake, just you and I can stay up together, Dad. I’d like that.”

  For the first time, the word “Dad” had come from Keiko’s lips. Perhaps because she had pronounced it so softly, Subuyan failed to notice.

  “Still and all,” she went on, “if you think just the two of us would be kind of lonely, and you want to have your friends come, I better see that there’s plenty of beer and sushi.” As a little girl she had been at her father’s wake, and she knew what to expect.

  “The altar will have to have three steps, you know. As for holy candles, the more the better. It’s not so dark and gloomy that way.”

  “I’ll take care of the fruit. Hack, would you pick up some of that special candy? Make it twenty-two pieces, will you?”

  Banteki, Cocky, and Hack—especially Cocky—had sprung into action at Subuyan’s first mention of the wake, eager and willing to handle everything.

  “Now wait a minute,” said Subuyan. “What’s this about twenty-two pieces of candy?”

  “You divide them in two portions, see? And when the people come to eat, they’ll see eleven at each end of the table, and it will make a good impression.” It was very simple, really. As for chilling the beer, the refrigerator wouldn’t do. Buy some ice and put it in the bathtub, and if you set the beer in there it will get cold fast. Sushi, well, you had best buy a fairly small amount at first.

  And so his friends ran on enthusiastically, till the distraught Subuyan finally managed to interrupt them. “No, no, we don’t have to go to all that trouble! Nobody’s coming to the wake but us.”

  Nevertheless, it seemed that things were shaping up for a proper sort of wake.

  Subuyan dressed himself in the single black suit that he owned. As a matter of fact he had bought the suit against the day when he might once again find himself thrown into a jail cell. It was three years before, after
the hoodlum had been picked up with the pictures he had sold him, that he had been taken to Sonezaki Police Headquarters, charged with possession and sale of obscene material.

  The detective had assumed a friendly manner. “Look, buddy, just tell us you sold the stuff to the hood, and everything will be fine. He’s already said he got it from you. So how about it? It’s easy to figure out, isn’t it?” But if Subuyan had admitted that he had sold the pictures, more would have followed—“Okay, and where did you buy the stuff? How much more have you gotten rid of?” And so on. So he had not known what to answer.

  “Okay, if that’s the way you want it,” the detective had said, his manner growing sinister at once. “They say May is the best month to be born and to be thrown in jail. How about trying it for a while?”

  But finally he had gotten off with paying a fine of ten thousand yen at an informal hearing, after making an official statement that he bought the pictures in Yamanoté in Kobé from someone he didn’t know. However, in the course of the investigation that followed, he had been routed out in the middle of the night and hustled into a police car, and when he was thrown into a cell again he was wearing only a jacket and trousers, with his bare feet thrust into rubber sandals.

  “What did they get you for, buddy?”

  “Me? Dirty pictures,” he had blurted out, his dignity shattered. Then it was that he had resolved that if ever the police caught up with him again, he would at least go to jail with the degree of gravity that went with, say, election fraud. So that was why the black suit was always in readiness, a sort of ill omen.

  “How about a priest? Was she registered at any temple?” Cocky asked.

  But Oharu had been a woman who instead of worrying much about the afterlife had flung herself wholeheartedly into this one. After she and Subuyan had become more intimate, she even had gone so far as to put away the altar with the traditional picture of her dead husband in front of it. Nor was Keiko any more concerned about religion. But finally, since it was something that was always done, Subuyan decided to call in the seedy priest from the broken-down neighborhood temple to chant a sutra or two.

  As the night wore on, Keiko, still weary from watching beside her mother’s deathbed, began to nod sleepily. The alert Banteki noticed this, and she was sent to bed on the second floor. Now the four men were left to theselves, and, as might be expected, the prevailing tone of the wake became less reserved.

  “Well, whatever you want to say, if somebody dies and gets laid out like this, they’re pretty fortunate,” said Subuyan. “My mom died from the fire bombs. It was just like she had been in a pressure cooker or something. They wrapped her up in a mat and threw her on a truck with a bunch of other dead bodies. Right there on the banks of the Yodo, they piled them all up, poured gas over them, and whoom!—up they went, and that was that.”

  Subuyan had struck a rich vein. Everyone had something to contribute.

  “Ah, that was terrible, wasn’t it? People burning to death. Their bodies would shrivel up like a ball, so that they’d end up just like a baby inside its mother.”

  “Did you ever see any who got caught in the wind blast from the bombs? The air would go shooting into them through every hole, and they’d blow up like a rubber ball and die.”

  “It was kind of nice, the way they’d die in slit trenches. Their faces would always be pale.”

  “A lot of them died, all right. After a raid it was like a sort of exhibition of ways to die. They’d be there, their bodies all twisted, the upper and lower parts together, and some of them weren’t quite dead. All twisted and looking right at their own knees—I wonder what a guy would think?”

  “I saw this kid laying there, holding on to his ankles, and his feet were torn off.”

  “The thing I won’t forget was this schoolyard where they brought all the bodies. They’d be covered with mats with only their heads sticking out. It would always rain after the fire raids and these burned-black bodies would soak it up and swell up like monsters. Sometimes the skin was burned so much it would crack, and there you could see the flesh beneath, all red.”

  “You know, when I think of it, this is the first time I’ve seen anybody dead since the air raids,” said Subuyan.

  “What are you talking about? Didn’t we bury your baby?” remonstrated Cocky.

  “Oh yeah. That was a human being, too, I guess.”

  “Some get buried at sea. Some get burned up. Some have nice wakes like this. But they’re all human beings.”

  “Once you die, that’s the end.”

  “Say, Banteki, did you bring any films along?”

  “Films? This is no time for business, Subuyan!”

  “Who said anything about business? This is Oharu’s wake, isn’t it? And she was my wife. The wife of Subuyan the pornographer. So instead of a sutra, let’s show a pornographic film.”

  “Hey, now you’re talking. Here, I’ll help,” said Cocky, as he and Hack sprang to their feet, brimming with enthusiasm, and pushed the altar aside.

  They hung the screen above Oharu’s coffin and extinguished the holy candles. After a short pause the beam from the projector pierced the darkness, and one of the early masterpieces, The Bulging Pillar, flashed on screen.

  “Subuyan, this’ll be a lot better than a sutra.”

  “Hey, Subuyan, how about being the benshi?”

  “Good enough,” answered Subuyan, standing up. “Here we see a young virgin who has come to offer a prayer to God. What does she ask? ‘Oh, dear God, won’t you please send me a handsome boy to love me?’ ” But as Subuyan carried out his role, in his heart he was thinking of something quite different. Oharu, you went for it, too, didn’t you, Oharu? Even right from the beginning. I was just thinking now that it was you that started things off between us. You woke me up. You had a stomach cramp, you said, and I could feel your breasts pressing against my back. Of course I was eager enough. Why wouldn’t I be? You were in your prime then, and there was plenty of reason for me to be eager. I guess I’ll never hold you again.

  The altar was put back in its proper place, and everyone had a pleased, contented look.

  “You can’t beat a pornographic wake!” said Cocky. “Let’s do the same thing for Banteki!”

  “What do you mean? You think you’re going to outlive me? Listen, I’ll arrange a cockroach wake when you die,” Banteki retorted.

  “Sure, go ahead. Fill the coffin up with them. They’ll be dying in the line of duty,” said Cocky, laughing happily.

  “You know, I was thinking,” broke in Hack. “When some real sexy woman dies—say, like Marilyn Monroe, somebody who all the men in the world go for—when a woman like this dies, how about a masturbation wake? What would happen would be that the men would be there all thinking about her, see? They’d imagine doing it with her. Then, all together, they go at it—yaaah! Or you could have a church bell or a temple gong give the signal, and then they’d start rubbing it up.”

  “Sound’s pretty good,” said Cocky.

  “I don’t know much about this, but when Christ died, wasn’t there balm or something sprinkled on him? Well, if it was the case of this woman, you could sprinkle semen.”

  “You’re crazy! I suppose you’d want all the men in the world to do it, huh? Let’s see now. Say there’s roughly a billion men. And say there’s about three cc.’s of the stuff in each, how much would that make.” Banteki frowned over his calculations. “It would come to about three million quarts. What a helluva lot that would be!”

  “And then if you could get it all together and put it into a swimming pool, then you could take her and throw her right into it. She’d go to heaven over a sea of semen—what a climax!”

  The figure of Marilyn Monroe, come to life again, swimming gracefully through a pure-white, if sticky, sea, drops of spray flicking from her dipping, rising fingertips, danced vividly in Subuyan’s imagination.

  Her mother’s death seemed to have turned Keiko into an adult. She handled all the household tasks with
a cool competence. She never, however, missed a chance to call Subuyan “Dad,” an affectionate term which had never passed her lips while Oharu was alive, despite its greater suitability then. On the contrary, she had made do with “Hey, you” or “Mister.” An odd thought all at once struck Subuyan: I wonder if she was jealous of Oharu? At any rate, his ego did not soar at the prospect of a schoolgirl nineteen years younger than himself having fallen in love with him. Rather, he brooded over the possibility of his unwittingly doing something to short-circuit the relationship.

  “I must truly beg your pardon for failing to contact you for so long. You see, there’s been some sorrow in the family. My wife died. For a long time she had had this trouble in her chest.” No matter who the customer was, Subuyan’s lines up to this point were the same, but from then on he varied them. For older men, he played the role of one crushed by bereavement. “Yes, yes, I’m still very much down. I just don’t feel like carrying on business, but what can you do? You’ve got to go on.” However, for the benefit of young customers such as Kanezaka, he struck a cavalier note. “From now, business and pleasure alike, I’m going to pull out all the stops.” Subuyan’s forte was fitting the words to the man.

  Meanwhile, he had installed Matsue in an apartment near Moriguchi Station. For this first month she had been active every day, and each time Subuyan had been able to pull in a commission of two thousand from the customer and one thousand from Matsue. She fell into the routine in no time, and day by day the new skin she had drawn over herself seemed to fit more naturally. After a mere month, so radical was the change, Subuyan was no longer able to bill her as “just an amateur.” And as surely as running water required a source, so too was it necessary to have a supply of new girls in readiness, not only to satisfy the demand but also for Subuyan’s own protection.

  Women in the call-girl profession have a characteristically deep-rooted aversion to “intermediary exploitation.” They realize that they are not selling a skill or receiving money on a long-term career basis. Their status is one maintained only with difficulty. They are always, they know, just one short step away from having their flesh sold cut-rate on the open market. They may say to themselves that this is nothing but having some fun, that the money’s the same whether you get it from pounding a typewriter or from letting a man make love to you. But no matter how well they understand this, their bodies will not go along with it. So, feeling a desperate urgency, they almost invariably bypass their pimps and go into business for themselves. And even if they fail to do this, they at least come to loath the pimp. So if an uncouth customer insults them, they grumble, “That bastard is the one who pushed him on me.” Or if they happen to think nostalgically about marriage and their own miserable circumstances, they complain. “That bastard! He’s the one that dragged me into this kind of life.” Whatever tribulation comes their way, it is always “that bastard’s” fault. After two or three years, however, when the women become full-fledged pros, these complaints cease, and all goes smoothly. But unfortunately, as Subuyan well realized, by this time the pimp’s clients have lost all interest in them.