The Pornographers Page 12

  But, be that as it may, the most risky period, as Subuyan saw it, was the woman’s first six months in her new profession. For it was then that she might at any time spill everything to the police. After half a year was past, the soundest policy was to get clear of the woman and to urge her to carry on her own business from then on. And therefore Subuyan found it necessary to obtain at least one new girl each month.

  Matsue had made some new friends while working at the stocking factory. She had belonged to a factory-sponsored friendship society, in effect a sort of single girls’ club; and it was to these girls that she introduced Subuyan, probably because she was longing for companions with common interests.

  All of them were poor women who had been drawn by the lure of the big city. On a salary of seventeen or eighteen thousand a month, they rented six-by-eight apartments close to recently made friends just like themselves. For recreation, they went to tearooms in semifashionable suburbs and sat listening to records. And without exception, they succumbed to the charms of the college boys who roamed the neighborhood advertising themselves as student engineers, though the diplomas their third-rate schools could furnish them hardly helped to get any sort of job. On their days off, then, these women would go to their lovers’ apartments and attend their needs. And although this was all that seemed to give point to their lives, they had no skill at all in making it yield a profit.

  Subuyan’s method with them was the same as it had been with Matsue. He dangled the prospect of marriage before them, gave them a trifling taste of luxury, and then turned them over to his customers. Since they were all thoroughly unsophisticated country girls, the results were often surprising.

  “I didn’t know what to think! I sure didn’t expect to find a young girl nowadays wearing these baggy bloomers. And when we were in the hotel, she didn’t have any idea how to use the bathtub. I looked in and she had water all over the floor from washing herself beside the tub. Then when I got mad, she got some towels and wiped up every drop. I’m telling you, it was really funny!” Subuyan’s customers, accustomed as they were to ordinary call girls, were beside themselves with appreciation.

  However, once the girls got used to what the men wanted of them and started to become a bit shopworn, Subuyan stepped in with some on-the-job training. As a setting, he always chose the restaurant of one of the finest hotels in Umeda so that the intoxicating atmosphere might somewhat soften the lesson’s harshness.

  “Now, every man’s got a dream woman he’s always looking for. The thing for you is to be that kind of ideal woman, to fulfill, in other words, the man’s dream. Let’s see … another way of putting it in a simple way is to say that, above all, you’ve got to hide what you really are. Let me give you a little example of how you can do this. Now what you should do is always keep, say, forty or fifty thousand yen in your purse. Why? Well, a man is always very curious about a woman’s purse, and as soon as you go in to take a bath, say, the first thing he’ll do will be to open it and take a look. Now if he finds that you carry around more money than he does, he’ll wonder, ‘Say! what kind of woman is this?’ ”

  Keeping the real self hidden, then, was of prime importance. “What a lot of these men want are girls who work in offices, and so if you can act even a bit like that, it’ll go over well. A good idea would be to keep up on the weekly magazines these girls read. A bit of education is really essential. There are other men who go for salesgirls. So when you go shopping in the department store, take a close look at them and see how they act.”

  But Subuyan was not content merely to inculcate general behavior patterns. He was especially concrete with regard to clothing and accessories. “Harmony is the important thing. When you’re wearing a sweater and slacks, no matter how happy you are about just having bought an alligator bag, don’t carry it then. And when you’re plainly dressed, make sure what you wear underneath agrees with it. To sum it up, what you want to do is to increase the man’s expectations. Go at it in the wrong way, and he’ll see right away that you ought to be back working in a bakery somewhere. But do it the right way, and he’ll say, ‘Here’s a woman that’s got everything!’

  “And here’s another thing I want you to remember. You’re getting money for this, and you ought to be saving that money up to get married. For a woman there is no greater happiness than getting married, loving her husband, holding her baby in her arms. So save your money for that. And educate yourselves, too. Believe me, there’s nothing more worthwhile for a person than education.”

  As the women sat listening to Subuyan, while the soft music played and the waiters attended them, invariably their eyes would sparkle. Well, he thought to himself, for a while anyway they’ll lay off bitching about being exploited.

  “And,” he concluded, “remember that there is nothing wrong with using your bodies you got from your parents in a careful and proper way. Just like the baseball stars Oh and Nagashima—so all of you, too, make your living with your bodies.”

  Blushing slightly, the women nodded assent.

  This particular fall Subuyan had five women. The oldest was a former nurse named Tamako, and the youngest a nineteen-year-old girl named Yoshiko, who still worked in a bakery. Each of them had about twenty customers a month, with Subuyan’s standard commission being fifteen hundred yen. During each woman’s initial month, Subuyan also collected a fee from the customers. Every month, therefore, he was able to take in about one hundred and fifty thousand yen.

  The ex-nurse, Tamako, had an unusual story to tell. She had been working for a doctor, a surgeon who had a small hospital in Kobé, at the foot of Mount Rokko. Among other things, he was extremely tight-fisted, and Tamako had quit without any severance pay. Shortly after that the hospital driver and a young office worker were fired without having received all the money due them.

  “So the two of them,” Tamako explained, “were really mad at the doctor. They told me they were going to get some money by telling what they knew about him.” The doctor’s secret was pornographic movies. “He was the kind of doctor that’s always after women. As soon as a new nurse started to work, he’d go after her, and when he had her where he wanted her, he’d make her act in these films. He’s got this villa up on Mount Rokko, and he’d make the films there. In fact that’s where he keeps them all, stored in these two trunks. So, since you know your way around so well, maybe you could sell them. Then I could get my severance pay.”

  If they’re in two trunks, thought Subuyan, there must be about two hundred reels. It would be hard to judge without seeing them, but say the price was ten thousand a reel. That would make two million yen! We couldn’t manage that, but still, it wouldn’t hurt to get a look at them, and then, if there are some good ones, maybe we can buy those.

  He finally decided to tell Tamako to have the two men come to Banteki’s apartment.

  The driver was an ill-favored little man, the officeworker had a kind of boyish charm, and the selling price of half a million yen was unexpectedly cheap. The films were all in color, they said, but were somewhat on the perverse side.

  “Did the doctor make all of them himself?” asked Banteki with interest.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” answered the driver. “Every Sunday we’d go up to the villa with one of the nurses, and there he’d make them. I used to help out a lot myself. And, look, by the way, in the trunk you’ll see these reels marked “Samurai.” Those I wish you wouldn’t show. I’m dressed up like one of these rebel samurai in them, and I do all kind of things to captive princesses and so on. It’s awful embarrassing if you know what I mean,” he mumbled, his voice trailing off weakly.

  Subuyan raised a reassuring hand. “Now don’t worry about it. We’d never do anything to cause you any embarrassment. Just trust everything to us.” Subuyan had money enough available—one million yen, the amount which he had set aside for lawyers’ fees, bail, and so on in the event of arrest—and he had already decided to buy. So he wanted to make sure that he got as much as possible for his money.<
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  “Didn’t the nurses complain any?”

  “No, not exactly. He gave them a little money so they wouldn’t say anything. And then he’d have them get into all kinds of funny positions. I guess they really didn’t like it, though. There were two of them that committed suicide afterward.”

  “Why, that’s terrible!” said Subuyan, outraged.

  “Is there any chance of him getting us for robbery?” the driver asked worriedly.

  “Robbery? What do you mean, robbery? Didn’t he throw you out without paying you? This is a matter of simple justice—just like a labor dispute.”

  “In that case,” said the driver eagerly, “suppose we take all the equipment that’s there, too?”

  “Could that be done?”

  “Sure, sure! Nobody goes up there except on Sunday. He doesn’t even make the films any more. Go straight up there in a car, dump the cameras and other stuff in it—there’d be some real money for you!”

  Now Banteki’s enthusiasm was stirred. “Hey, Subuyan. If there’re cameras involved, I’ll buy them.”

  “This is really shaping up. We’ll get Cocky and Hack to go with us.”

  The next night, at the discreet hour of seven, they piled into the Volkswagen microbus Subuyan had rented, the driver at the wheel, Subuyan beside him, and the other three in the rear.

  “Hey, this is like a commando raid or something,” exclaimed Hack happily.

  They turned off the Osaka-Kobé Highway at Ishiyagawa and took the road leading up toward the mountains. The cinderblock villa turned out to be just a bit past the town of Teraguchi.

  Cocky took immediate charge of the operation. “You stay behind the wheel, buddy. If the doctor happens to come, you let us know.”

  Inside the villa, one room was set up like a studio, and the other was a bedroom. The intruders felt as though they come into a treasure cave. Valuable equipment was on all sides: two sixteen-millimeter Bell and Howell cameras, an Ampex recorder, a stereo set, a water cooler, a color TV set, a refrigerator …

  Subuyan, being Subuyan, stood trembling with fear, thinking of the peril involved, but Cocky hustled about like a man in his element. “Okay, let’s get the stereo next. Put this blanket around it so it doesn’t get scratched. Banteki, will you loosen those screws on the cooler? Hey, hey, Subuyan! Go out and tell that guy not to race the engine like that. It’s noisy.”

  “Well, I was just thinking that I could cover up the noise inside that way,” the driver explained after Subuyan had gone out and admonished him.

  “Well, don’t do it. The engine makes more noise than anything,” said Subuyan, peering anxiously through the darkness. If the police came by, what would they do?

  Cocky was all set to roll up the rug itself, but Subuyan stopped him on the grounds that nothing more would fit into the Volkswagen. He looked around the room, which appeared to have been swept clean by a typhoon.

  “I wonder what this is?”

  “That? It’s an electric pencil sharpener.”

  “It would make a nice souvenir for Keiko, maybe,” said Subuyan, caught between fear and desire.

  They got back to Osaka about ten o’clock and parked the car for a while, at a loss for a suitable place to store their loot. Finally, since it would never do to be caught with it in the car, they decided to take everything to Cocky’s place. And so, a brief two hours later, what had once been a miserable little shed was transformed into the sort of ultimate in modern living enshrined in life-insurance posters. The matchboxes for the cockroaches were lined up neatly on the stereo set.

  “Sell this stuff here and there, and you’d get—what?—a million or so,” said Cocky, making an estimate.

  The two master criminals, Subuyan and Banteki, were overflowing with satisfaction. Subuyan’s customers would provide a ready market.

  “I don’t want to be nosy or anything,” said Subuyan to the driver and the other man, “but do you two have any definite plans from now on?” The first said that he wanted to go home, but the young officeworker replied that he had nothing in mind. Subuyan made him an offer. “If that’s the case, how about this? Stay with Cocky for a while and take it easy. You can look around for work. Then, too, while we don’t have much to offer, don’t pass up the possibility of coming in with us.” Subuyan, in fact, was in need of some assistance in handling his call girls; and he was more at ease dealing with a man who had proved himself under fire.

  “Please call me Paul,” said the officeworker.

  Under Paul’s direction, the work of examining each of the two hundred and thirty films and making a notation of its content took just ten days. As could only be expected, given the peculiar bent of the cameraman, none of the more natural forms of sexual congress appeared in these films. Instead there was an oppressive montage of trussed and beaten women. And once one had adjusted to that much, the dominant theme suddenly became a woman thrown over a footstool, legs thrust apart, now prodded by the sword of the driver turned samurai, now, as a Chinese woman, tortured by the doctor himself in the guise of an MP of the imperial army. After watching only two or three, Subuyan and the others hung their heads, appalled.

  Among the films were some ordinary home movies, which showed the doctor’s guileless face as it appeared, for example, during a trip to America. The man who looked out from the screen seemed a scholarly type of forty-five or so. How incredible the truth!

  At any rate, since the films were all in color, even allowing for the discount that the perversion necessitated, they could easily be gotten rid of at forty thousand yen apiece. Subuyan had at last attained the brink of affluence. A happy thought came to him. “I feel just in the mood to go soak at a hot spring. How about it? Let me give you all a treat. We’ll go to Arima and take it easy for a while.”

  It was an especially good time of the year for such a trip. The slopes of Mount Rokko were still scarlet with autumn leaves; and the view from Arima, a spa at the rear of the mountain, was excellent. When was the last time he had come here? When Subuyan stopped to think he realized that more than twenty years had passed since he had relaxed at a hot-springs resort. Even after he had entered grade school, he was still plagued with the habit of bedwetting and so had always been afraid to take part in the usual school excursions. And so to make up for this, his father had taken him on a trip to Hakoné. “Things were going pretty well for Dad just at that time,” he told the others. “Material was becoming scarce and he was able to make some money on the black market.” But his father’s good fortune had not lasted long. A ration system had been set up, and soon after that his father had been called into service, and not much later he had been killed in action. “Now that things are going pretty well,” mused Subuyan, “maybe I could set up a memorial stone for Dad.” But just when he was growing a bit sentimental, Cocky suddenly burst out with a proposition.

  “Hey! Let’s check and see who’s got what and how much!”

  They had been here for days now and had spent so much time in the hot spring water that they were beginning to feel pickled. And they had even become fed up with Mah Jongg. The first night they had invited geisha in to entertain, but for men in the pornographic profession, this sort of thing obviously left much to be desired. So Cocky’s idea came at an opportune moment, when time was hanging heavy.

  “How do you go about it?”

  “Is there more than one way? You get it standing tall, see? Then we check the size, the thickness, the color.”

  Hack alone seemed embarrassed at the thought of the sport ahead.

  “It’s our profession, isn’t it?” Cocky remonstrated. “We ought to know all about a man’s equipment. And there’s hardly any chance of getting a look at another man’s when it’s taut and firm. When you handle it in your writing, Hack, what kind of vocabulary do you use? All this crap about ‘young shoots surging upward’ and ‘slender-stalked, thick-tipped twangers’—it’s all out of date. Nobody uses expressions like that nowadays. So c’mon, take another look at the real thing
, and it’ll be valuable research for you.” Cocky’s eloquence prevailed, and they obtained a tape measure from the maid.

  Then they decided that since the elevation process itself was best carried out with a certain amount of privacy, the five of them should scatter, each to a corner of the two adjoining rooms, and come together again when all had achieved the proper attitude. Young Paul was the first, springing into position in no time at all; and he was followed, in order, by Cocky, Subuyan, Hack, and Banteki.

  Then they faced each other again to evaluate and compare, tabulating the results on Mah Jongg scorecards.

  “Okay, I’ll start out,” said Subuyan. “But wait a minute. Should I measure along the top or from the balls out?”

  After consultation they decided that along the top was all right.

  “Let’s see—six and one eighth inches.”

  “Don’t push the end of the tape in so much. You make it a lot longer that way.” said Paul, complaining in a rather unsportsmanlike way.