The Pornographers Page 16

  “Well, as to Keiko, that’s my affair, and I’ll handle it. What I want you to do tonight is to listen to this plan of mine,” explained Subuyan that evening, basking in the eminence that came of addressing a group which, Kabo now included, numbered five. “The police have gotten hold of me twice now. The first time it was ten thousand yen. This last time it was thirty thousand. Next time, if I’m lucky, I’ll get by with a three-year suspended sentence. And the time after that, I’ll have to fight it all the way, hire a lawyer, and maybe get sentenced for a year and three months. I’m prepared for all this, and I’m willing to take it on. I’m prepared all right, but then, too, I’m a man, after all. And I’ll tell you that I’m pretty much fed up with doing nothing but turning out ready-made sex films just like everybody else’s, selling dirty photos, talking poverty-stricken women into becoming call girls, and so on. There’s just nothing in it a man can take pride in! What I’d like to do is get something like a pornographic atom bomb and blow these sex-maniac customers of ours right out of their minds.”

  The customers were like eager little pupils, with Subuyan their teacher. But these pupils had a rate of advancement that was simply astounding. The man who today shed tears of ecstasy over some old and faded pictures would soon be stifling sophisticated yawns as he picked at flaws in the latest full-color pornographic epic. And the metamorphosis usually took less than a year. Subuyan and company could not always supply the very ultimate in sultry and torrid titillation. And it was at times like this, when they had to put up with the cold scorn of their customers, that the difference in status between a respected manager of a first-line corporation and a despised back-alley pornographer stood out with painful clarity. If these clients could not somehow be brought up short, if the pornographer could not somehow achieve a position from which he could laugh coldly and look down with chilly condescension upon the cringing lechers having recourse to him, what was the point of going on? “Okay, so there’s money in it,” concluded Subuyan, “but money isn’t everything. Take the example of Dr. Schweitzer. There’s such a thing as humanism, after all.”

  “Humanism? Don’t you think you’re pushing things just a little far?” objected Paul, the college dropout, an edge of sarcasm to his voice.

  “Humanism, I said,” Subuyan answered, unruffled. “How can you help other people unless you first arrange things so that they work out best for yourself?”

  At any rate, Subuyan’s plan called for turning out, if possible, one CinemaScope film a month. “It looks like they developed CinemaScope,” he observed, “with just our kind of films in mind. It’s just right to catch the man and woman all laid out and wrapped around each other. Now about the sound, Kabo here can help out. He went to this talent school, and through him we can get hold of some women there who we’ll pay to dub in the female voices. Hack, I want you to do a lot of thinking about the stories. Just as we saw from that doctor’s films, there’re all kinds of gimmicks. Every time, now, we’ve got to cater to a different taste. We’ve got to have them prostrate with appreciation one minute, and the next we’ve got to—wham!—make it spring right up for them. You see what I mean? Now as for the women, that’ll be my department. And we don’t want any of these old relics. I’m going to get hold of some young seventeen, eighteen-year-olds and train them properly in every detail right from the beginning. And we’ll eventually have some call girls that are real paragons.”

  “And just where are you planning to get all these girls?” asked Banteki.

  “Well, as far as the actual acquisition goes, I’m going to have to depend on Paul and Kabo. I don’t know, but you hear all the time that if you go to places like Shinsaibashi and Motomachi, you’ll see all kinds of young girls milling around all hot for men. Those are the ones we can pull in. We’ll groom them right from the start, teach them how to please a man, keep an eye on them all the time, and turn them out first-class women in every respect.”

  As Subuyan went on glibly and enthusiastically, Keiko suddenly flashed across his mind. Keiko—I was going to groom her, too, with my own hands, wasn’t I? he thought.

  From now on, they would no longer sell films. Instead they would cultivate corporations and similar legal entities as clients, gradually dropping all others; and, for the benefit of each of these, there would be a special screening once a month for all its employees who were interested. In other words, a company pornographic-movie club would be set up on much the same basis as a company golf club. The company would be free to use these monthly showings either purely for recreational purposes or as part of its general public-relations program.

  They would set the women up in apartments, and each would live in a wholesome, nonprofessional atmosphere and would transact her affairs only in the very best of up-to-date hotels. Skimping in this regard was one of the surest ways to attract the attention of the police. But pull out all the stops as to magnificence of style, and the opportunity might eventually arise to become part of the official reception committee for foreign heads of state and their parties. And then what would Sonezaki and Moriguchi Police Headquarters have to say for themselves? Subuyan’s dream soared to epic proportions.

  Afterward, Subuyan walked home from Banteki’s apartment with Kabo, who was staying with him. Both of them were chilled by the cold wind that was blowing.

  “What do you say we make some sukiyaki or something once we get home? We can probably find a shop that’s still open near Senbayashi Station and buy some meat.”

  “Gee, that sounds good. I’m all for it. And by the way, Sensei, there is something that I’ve been meaning to ask you about. You’re always going to so much trouble getting women for other people, and I was wondering what you did for yourself. Do you have a wife maybe?”

  “My wife died. There’s nothing to hold me back,” said Subuyan, but even as he answered, the memory of that night of impotence came back to him. He had decided while in jail that the first night he got out he would make up for his previous failure with Keiko. And now having been frustrated in this regard, he found his appetite lagging. He no longer even felt like going to the Turkish bath.

  “So you’re a virgin, huh? Do you feel like you want a woman?”

  “No, not especially. Who knows? Maybe I don’t have what it takes.”

  The more he studied Kabo’s pale skin and emaciated frame, the more Subuyan was inclined to go along with this hypothesis. Still, Kabo’s face recalled the romantic heroes of samurai epics. “Maybe so,” said Subuyan, “but I’ll bet a lot of women have run after you, haven’t they?”

  “No, not so much. That was before. That’s why I never went back home.”

  “How was that?”

  “Well, when I was in second year of junior high school, my stepmother grabbed me in her arms one day. Oh, was I surprised! I felt this slippery tongue come sticking right into my mouth, and I got sick and almost fainted. I got away from her, but after that, whenever my father was away, she’d do something funny. She’d take my hand and rub it over herself. And then she’d feel up my dinger, too.” Finally, Kabo explained, he could stand it no longer and he ran away from home for good.

  Subuyan brooded upon the complexities of human relations. One man pounces upon his stepdaughter and finds himself impotent: one is pounced upon by his stepmother and becomes impotent. Good God! he thought. There’s a fine combination for you!

  But then, shaken by the aptness of the parallel, he hastily backtracked: What am I talking about? I’m not impotent. I was just tired that night.

  The end of the year was approaching and Subuyan had all sorts of scurrying around to do. Prudence demanded that he at least show his face at his customers’ offices and shops.

  “Well, ha, ha, it’s all in a day’s work, and there’s plenty you can learn in jail, too. They’d feed us this salty soup all the time with chunks of tangle in it, and we called it ocean turd. Then the side dish of vegetables was always scab scrapings. And smoking wasn’t as big a problem as you might think. We’d sneak cigarettes
in, then pass them around when the guard wasn’t watching. You’d feel like this when you took a puff,” explained Subuyan, holding out a hand trembling like that of a palsy victim. “We’d smoke only cigarettes with light tobacco, and then the smoke wouldn’t be thick enough to be noticed.” And then he would go on to relate how the detectives had talked, what stories his cellmates had had, and so on, blending fact and imagination. And he would always conclude this portion with the same public-relations formula: “No matter what difficulties I ever get into, my customers may rest assured that it will never cause them the least inconvenience. Trust everything to me. You’ll always be as safe from storms as a passenger on the Queen Elizabeth.” Then he would stoke their lustful expectations by hinting at new worlds to debauch. “For next year we have something lined up that might just possibly prove a bit on the exciting side. I’ve come across some girl students who are looking for something a little different, if you know what I mean.”

  In still another part of the forest, the matter of Matsue, whom he had installed in a cheap apartment in Omiya near Moriguchi Station, was causing Subuyan a good deal of concern. Matsue, on the shopworn side by now, had evolved into an adept practitioner. In fact, if a client was careless enough to drop his guard with her, he was likely to come out of the encounter with at least a rifled billfold. Thankfully, Subuyan had recently been able to delegate the task of dealing with her to Paul. And now when Subuyan went to see her he smiled politely. “Well, how is everything going? Have you found a good, steady man for yourself yet?” he asked, as though all were right with the world.

  “Good, steady man? Who are you trying to kid?” Matsue retorted angrily. “I can’t even afford to make tea. I don’t care who it is—get some customers for me. New Year’s is coming.”

  “Watch your step, huh? I’m not your pimp. What have I done but introduced one gentleman after another to you? And what do I hear from them? Always the same story: that you’re interested in only one thing—money. You don’t make any effort to get things on a higher level. And so what does that make me then? Nothing but a pimp!” said Subuyan, pitilessly dropping his bomb.

  He had, in fact, been secretly preparing it for a long time. When Matsue had bypassed him and established understandings of her own with his customers—whether on a higher level or not—Subuyan had countered by innocently dropping remarks in front of these gentlemen: “Oh yeah, Matsue. You know, they say she’s got this hood Ozawa as a pimp now. He killed two men just last year.” Or perhaps: “I hear that she’s caught herself a good dose.” And then he had steered them toward greener pastures, all to his greater profit.

  “So you want help, then, even though you don’t want to play the game the right way? Okay, good enough. It’s just that I don’t want to be part of it, that’s all. It’s not so nice to see somebody wanting to throw herself away as a prostitute,” said Subuyan, and for the first time there was a shade of truth in what he said. If Matsue said she would be satisfied with anyone at all, then it was obvious that she had the mentality of a pro.

  “How about it, then? Should I introduce you to someone?” asked Subuyan, this time making his voice gentle. He owed this technique of changing his tone to the Moriguchi police.

  • • •

  Among Subuyan’s acquaintances was one especially formidable madam. She kept a string of ten call girls and was wealthy enough, people said, to carpet the floor of her luxurious apartment with ten-thousand-yen notes. He decided to pass his present call girls on to her, though he was not quite sure what the outcome would be. At any rate, he got together Matsue and three others and brought them to meet this woman at a restaurant. Everything went smoothly, as she glibly welcomed her new charges in a voice that rang with masculine assurance.

  “Okay, let’s relax and get to know each other. I run the business the right way, and I’m easy to get along with. You probably think I’m just sizing you up in a coldblooded way, figuring out how much money you might bring in. But it’s not that way at all. In my day I pulled in my share of men, too—starting out in Yurakucho in Tokyo, just after the war. But now the thing is, a few years have gone by, and now, it seems, no man wants me. So if you can do anything about it—if you can find some man and introduce him to me—why, I’ll pay you anything at all in commission. To have all the men ignore you—believe me, that’s not much fun at all. And so whenever I see some girls who can carry on business, I get all excited. I’m just dying to do it myself. But you’re probably too young to understand how I feel.”

  Subuyan was struck with admiration. I guess it takes another one to know how to handle them, he thought.

  But then, when he and the madam were alone, he made the mistake of attempting to shame her into giving him a sizable payment.

  “Well, what do you think?” he said. “Here, with no effort at all, you’ve picked up some valuable merchandise for yourself. Maybe a little gesture of appreciation might be in order.”

  “You must be kidding. Women like that? I can get my hands on all kinds of them,” answered the madam, not inclined to play the game.

  “Maybe you can. But that takes time and money.”

  “Not much at all. Once I get my eye on a woman—whether she’s a housewife, an office girl, or what—it takes me no more than a month to pull her in. I’m not kidding you. If there’s somebody you go for, just let me know, and I’ll have her in bed with you in a month. I just work on them a little and they’re in bed in no time and ready to be put on the market. It’s not hard to do at all. It’s their nature. When I’m out and I see these girls walking up and down, I see them like so many ten-thousand-yen bills. But maybe this woman here is a twenty-thousand one, or maybe that girl there might go for fifty thousand the first time, I think to myself. Ah, if only I had time to manage all the women in Osaka!”

  “It doesn’t matter if it’s somebody’s wife?”

  “Even if she has children, it doesn’t make any difference. Often I’ve taken care of a baby while his mother was in bed.”

  Naturally enough, Subuyan was overwhelmed. “My God! How softhearted I am! Women are terrible,” he sighed enviously.

  “Here,” said the madam, “I guess I can take the check.” And so it was that Subuyan handed over the four girls for the price of two beers and a sandwich. But actually, even though he had to make a present of them, he realized that he was lucky to have gotten rid of them so easily.

  There were still two girls left upon whom the grime of commerce had not yet settled to a noticeable degree; and to these Subuyan in a kindly manner extolled the joys of matrimony, urging them to return to their home towns and get jobs. “This isn’t very much, but go ahead, take it,” he said, pushing a five-thousand-yen note on each of them. Then, should something untoward develop later, Subuyan could always throw out his chest, righteously indignant, and declare: “And I even gave you money so that you could start a new life!”

  There was still no word from Keiko. By this time she had been expelled from school for unexcused absence, but that was of little import to Subuyan, who was concerned only about where she could have gone to. Often while he was walking along in a crowd, he would see a figure ahead of him that looked like her. At first he would rush madly forward only to realize it was not her; but, weary of having this disappointment recur so often, he finally got so that he would deliberately keep himself in doubt and follow the girl for blocks at a time. At night he would sleep clutching Keiko’s sweater or a piece of her underwear. Things had changed greatly since the days when he had casually borrowed her middy blouse for a movie.

  Every once in a while Kabo, who knew of the situation, would ask: “Where could she have gone to, I wonder?” as a means of expressing his sympathy. Subuyan would always reply coolly.

  “Oh, she’s doing all right, I suppose. She’s a kid, but still she’ll be eighteen next year. It would be nice if she’d let me know her address, at least. But since there’re no blood ties, what can you expect?” But however coolly he spoke, he was tortured by inte
rior suffering that the mere circumstance of a runaway stepdaughter could not account for. Then, too, one night in late December, he went with Banteki and Cocky on an expedition to the Tobita district, determined to clear away the misfortunes of the fading year. But at the critical moment, Subuyan’s shoot of masculinity was as withered as it had been the night with Keiko. This night, however, his companion was a professional, who did not hesitate to lash him with ridicule.

  “It won’t stand up, even though you’re so young! I never heard of anything like that. Hey, maybe you came to the wrong place. How about getting it checked at the hospital?” And then to cap it all, she went out into the hall and stood outside the room where Banteki was. “Hey, your friend’s finished for the night,” she shouted.

  Hoping to learn from bitter experience, Subuyan had refrained from drinking anything and had gotten a good sleep the previous night. I’ve got no excuses this time, he brooded somberly. What the hell can it be?

  At length he came to a conclusion: I’m in love with Keiko, he decided. When a man fouls up with somebody he loves, then everything goes wrong. I got to find Keiko somehow and make her mine once and for all. Unless I do that, I’m never going to shake this.

  The next day, late though the effort was, Subuyan put an ad in the newspaper. And he also set Kabo to the job of trying to find some trace of Keiko.

  The New Year’s holidays came, and Subuyan passed them quietly with Kabo, with no desire at all for a woman. Then, as the decorations were coming down everywhere and business was getting underway again—Keiko or no Keiko—Subuyan had to oversee the execution of his grand program of pornographic enterprise.

  One evening, then, in Shinsaibashi, Subuyan unleased his new combination: “jun, jun, jun!” Kabo, in Italian shoes and a modish if ready-made suit, and the boyish Paul, both well enough able to pass for sons of the middle class.