The Pornographers Read online

  “The idea here,” Banteki elucidated, “is that her husband is looking at her and mentally stripping her down as he does. Okay! She’s got nothing on now, so let’s get the bath scene. C’mon, let’s go!”

  “Easy, easy! They can hear you outside,” Subuyan cautioned, more than a little uneasy. The shooting process did not coincide with the story line at all, and the discrepancy disturbed him.

  The model soaked herself contentedly in the wealth of bubbles, the fruit of Cocky’s labor, and showed her good spirits by stretching out a leg and kicking her foot in the air, inspired no doubt by American movies she had seen.

  “No, no, that doesn’t go,” admonished Banteki. “Here it’s your wedding night and you’re all tense. So what you do is wrap your arms around your chest and sort of try to shrink yourself.” Banteki knew exactly what he had in mind; and under his careful, precise direction, even the rather ill-favored bartender came through this particular scene with a certain virile flair.

  Kabo had spread the bed with carefully selected pink sheets, used both to add a dash of color and to forestall the suspicion that would be aroused by leaving sweat-soaked sheets. Most of the action was to take place under cover of the blankets, and so the lower sections of the bodies would be covered throughout. The bartender, however, removed his pants and performed that way, cavorting in happy abandon. The model, too, showed real involvement, as she exerted herself repeatedly in shot after shot. She panted harder with each embrace, and beads of sweat glistened on her forehead.

  “Okay, okay, good. But now just hold each other and be quiet for a minute. We’ll start it again from there.”

  Next it was a breast-kissing shot; and after that a close-up of the man’s lips heading downrange rapidly, cutting to a close-up of the model’s face, showing her expression in detail.

  “Okay, now the two of you, don’t change your positions at all. All right, now, anybody at all, it doesn’t matter, pinch the back of her leg.”

  Lifting up the blanket a bit, Paul reached in at once, as Banteki had ordered him, and gave the model’s sweaty leg a hard pinch.

  “Ouch!” cried the model, her face contorted.

  “That’s it! That’s just the right expression. Just bear with it for a bit, okay?”

  Paul kept on pinching, the camera grinding in his ear, until Banteki cried, “Cut!” And then he was surprised to see that the woman’s leg was covered with black and blue marks.

  “You’re both pretty tired. Take a break for a while,” said Banteki, waving the man and woman toward the parlor. “Hey, Hack, how about getting under the covers and moving your hips up and down? Let’s see now—yeah, it looks like just one is no good. Subuyan, how about it?”

  The two men huddled under the covers as they were asked, and Subuyan took no particular umbrage at Hack’s odd contortions. Without realizing it he had, bit by bit, been caught up completely in the electric atmosphere of the filming.

  Night came, but there was no need to suspend operations. Since the hotel was so large, even the glaring lights used for filming would attract no attention from outside. The actors followed Banteki’s directions as if bewitched. From the look of sensual abandon on the model’s face, it seemed almost as though Banteki’s original plan not to demand the ultimate of the pair had already been superseded. Hack and Cocky placed the sofa on top of the bed and the bartender lay prone on it. Then, as he frowned and propped his manly torso up with his elbows, his fierce expression was duly recorded—the husband at the climactic moment as seen by the bride. Next was a close-up of the model’s face, as though she were being thrust savagely against the wall beside the bed, her features twisted in an agony of endurance. “Okay, let’s have that glycerin now,” shouted Banteki. And Paul gently applied the simulated tears. Finally the woman was shot as she got up and went into the bathroom. There Hack took a pen and squirted a few drops of red ink into the bowl of the Western-style toilet—farewell to virginity—and as the cameras focused on this, he flushed the toilet. Later according to Banteki’s concept, just as the gurgling waters grew still once more, the legend “The End” was to be superimposed.

  By the time the model and the bartender had received thirty thousand and twenty thousand yen respectively and had gone, it was after eleven o’clock. The whole crew was, of course, exhausted, and furthermore they suddenly recalled that they had eaten nothing since morning.

  “Let’s go out and relax and have a few drinks,” said Subuyan, and so they headed for a supper club in Dotombori.

  “Well, say! It’s been a long time.” A vibrant female voice caught Subuyan by surprise; and he turned to see Yasuko, the virgin from Ashiya.

  “Well, what a surprise! I’m sorry I’ve neglected you for so long. Thanks a lot for your kindness that time.” Subuyan had difficulty coming up with a suitable greeting. Certainly he could not very well ask: “Well, how’s business lately?” Yasuko merely giggled, however. Apparently she was fairly well lubricated.

  “C’mon over here for a while. The drinks’ll be on me,” she said insistently.

  Subuyan wanted more than anything else to get some food into his stomach, but he yielded to Yasuko and, leaving Banteki and the others, went over to her table. Her style was altogether different from that of the Yasuko who had performed that day for the chairman of the board. She wore a white sweater and boldly patterned tartan-plaid slacks, to all appearances the well-indulged daughter of a wealthy family, with not a trace of her profession in evidence.

  “How’s everything in Ashiya? Is Mrs. Sato well and active? I’d been meaning to stop in to see her, but I’ve been so busy lately.”

  “Yes, thanks. She’s well and active, all right. Too much so, in fact.” Yasuko giggled. “Say, you want to know the truth about the old lady? She’s my mother. No kidding.”

  “Your mother? She’s your mother?”

  “Yeah, she is. You heard of stage mothers, didn’t you? Well, she’s a bed mother.”

  Subuyan did not altogether grasp Yasuko’s meaning; and as he stared at her wide-eyed, she leaned confidentially across the table to explain. “You got these mothers who break their necks to make their kids into singers, don’t you? Well, it’s a lot like that with her. What she wanted to do with me was to make me into a woman who was second to no one when it came to bringing in the money. So this is the way she brought me up.”

  When Subuyan professed interest in hearing more about the training Yasuko had received, she readily told the whole story, her tongue occasionally stumbling over the syllables. “She got her start before the war in Omori, up in Tokyo, and after that she went to Manchuria and ran a house there. I came along about that time. My father was an army officer, she said. Anyway, she stored up all that experience and she used it to give me this high-class education.” The madam had come back from Manchuria after the war with the other refugees, none of them allowed to bring more than the clothes on their backs and their bedding. She, however, had concealed some crepe material in her rolled-up quilt. This she had sold on the black market, and using the money as capital, she had set herself up in a small room in a section of Kobé that had survived the fire raids. And in no time she had pulled in the assistant stationmaster at Himeji Station. “I was already in school by that time. Every time the old guy came, he’d bring some stuff stolen from freight trains, especially American flour. So I was pretty happy about that. But all night long he’d really be going to it, and that was a big bother.”

  “This was just after the war?” asked Subuyan in surprise.

  “Yeah, Showa 22–1947, that is.”

  Subuyan calculated rapidly. That was seventeen years ago, and if Yasuko had already entered grade school at that time, by now she had to be about twenty-five, though she by no means looked it. “Is that so? I thought you were much younger.”

  “Yeah? How old do I look?

  More than a year and a half had passed since the affair of the chairman of the board, but now—perhaps it was the effect of her bright clothes—Yasuko, i
f anything, seemed even younger.

  “Well—I’d say twenty-one, twenty-two maybe.”

  “Oh, now you’re kidding! I’m almost thirty.” After recovering from another fit of giggles, she went on with her story. “So, anyway, I knew all about what men and women did together ever since I was a kid. That stationmaster had no regard whatsoever. After he got through with Mom, he’d get me up and have me go get him a wet towel, sitting there in bed just as he was. And she just let him do it without a word.”

  Perhaps even at this time her mother had decided upon her daughter’s future course and was already laying the groundwork. Finally she had broken up with the stationmaster and opened a small bar in Kobé’s Motomachi district. The building was little more than a shed; but she had prospered, most of the money coming from the extra services her barmaids gave the customers. Yasuko, too, who by now had entered a girls’ high school, had helped out at the bar in the evenings. And then one day during spring vacation, when she was fifteen years old, her mother had asked her to run an errand. “She asked me to take this letter to some inn in Kamitsutsui. I had done things like this before, going out and buying stuff for the place, delivering customers’ bills, and so on. So I trotted out, not thinking anything of it. But then the inn turned out to be one of these run especially for couples who are just good friends, you know.”

  There she had delivered the letter to a fifty-year-old contractor, who was also on the prefecture council. “Well, why don’t you just sit down and take it easy for a while? How about something to eat? And maybe a nice hot bath?” he had said to her after he had read the letter.

  “I thought this was pretty funny right off. But—I was curious, too. I still remember just how I felt. It was just about sunset, and the window of the room faced west, and it was really bright. Later on I knew what the letter was all about. I was the goods to be delivered and he was to pay a hundred thousand yen.” Somehow or other she had always known that this was the way things were going to turn out someday; and so when the contractor took her in his arms, she hardly made any show of reluctance and did just what he wanted. “What I did, in fact—whether out of good business sense or just plain natural talent—was to really put my back into it. I didn’t feel a thing, of course.”

  Afterward he had given her a check, and she had said, “Goodbye now,” making it as lighthearted as she could, and had gone out the door of the inn to find her mother waiting.

  “This was really virgin-selling, no two ways about it. So we got into a pedicab right there, and as we headed home, she looked at me with this real severe face and said: ‘Now after what’s happened, you can’t expect to be a bride any more. But if you just do like your mother tells you, you’ll be able to live your whole life with plenty of money and never worry about a thing.’ What was I then? Only fifteen, so I didn’t know exactly what she meant. But anyway, from then on the high-class education started.”

  Her mother had groomed well over a hundred prostitutes, and now she brought all the erudition she had gathered in the process to bear upon Yasuko. “Whenever I got a customer interested, she’d be watching every move and stick with us as long as she could. And she’d be waiting there, wherever it was, when I finished, and then she’d hit me with all these questions, wanting to know exactly how things went. She really put me through the mill.” If it had been possible, her mother—so anxious was she—would have sat right by the bed with them and directed operations in person. “She wanted to turn me into a first-class specimen in the worst way. I got fed up any number of times with the whole business, but there was no shaking her off. She’d get real stern and say: ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with you, Yasuko. You just don’t seem to appreciate what I’m trying to do for you. You think I’ve got nothing else in my mind but business. Why don’t you try to understand? It’s not that I want to use you to make money. If money was all I was interested in, I could make plenty of it on my own, as much as I wanted. What I’m trying to do is to turn you into a woman who’s second to none. Just like a great sumo wrestler gains his fame and fortune in the ring, so a woman like you finds hers in the bed. Only when she gets thrown down, she wins.’ ”

  Whether due to her mother’s training or to her own natural ability, Yasuko’s progress had been rapid. “Within half a year I not only had the virgin bit down pat but I also knew how to get along with women whose taste in sex was sort of exotic.” And so she had grown more skilled; and, although she was no more than sixteen, she was able to pass for twenty-one or twenty-two by using a little make-up in the right way. “Maybe it’s because I jumped into things so early. Anyway, thirteen years have gone by since then, but I still look about the same. Just like you said before, I don’t look my age at all.”

  Subuyan nodded in earnest admiration.

  “Right now I’m thinking about having a kid.”

  “A baby? You’re in love with somebody maybe?”

  “Are you kidding? No, it’s nothing like that. I want to have a baby girl so I can pass on everything my mother taught me.”

  Ahah! thought Subuyan. Just like the “Intangible Cultural Properties” and the “Living National Treasures” that the Japan Travel Bureau is always making so much of.

  “They say if your first birth is after thirty, it’s pretty tough on you, so I’m looking around now for a good prospect. Naturally I’d like to get the best man I can find.”

  “I see. But look, Yasuko. You say you want to have a little girl, but just suppose it happens that you have a boy instead? What then?”

  “Oh, there’s no worry there. Mom taught me the way to fix things so that you have a girl. That’s how she had me, in fact.”

  Well, I’ll be damned, thought Subuyan, rather depressed. Here he had gathered these girls together, hoping to develop the woman who would fulfill every man’s dream; but, now as he listened to Yasuko’s story, he began to realize the extent of the job he had cut out for himself. He would have to be with them morning and night, just like the coach of the girls’ Olympic volleyball squad. A veteran like the madam in Ashiya was able to do it, but Subuyan could by no means carry it off.

  “What my mother says is that most likely it’ll be her grandchild, my little girl, who turns out to be the ideal woman. Mom was the pioneer, then I came along and went further. In the next generation, the third generation, that is, the perfect flower should bloom, she said. Only then will she be able to close her eyes in peace.”

  When Subuyan heard this, the path ahead seemed to grow steeper yet. But he smiled and bowed. “Well, in the meantime, I certainly would enjoy hearing whatever you have to say along these lines. I could stand some education myself, you know.”

  “Sure, sure, any way I can help. And by the way—I wish you’d keep in mind what I said about looking for a good man. If you can come up with the right one, I’ll see that it’s worth your while.”

  “Yeah, of course. I’ll see what I can do,” he answered politely; but he was in fact more than a little miffed. To get insulted right to your face! he thought. She wants me to find a good man for her, if I can! Go look for yourself, bitch.

  The faithful Kabo was waiting for Subuyan, and together they returned home.

  “This business of grooming women, Kabo, believe me, it’s not easy. It’s like making your own Frankenstein monsters.”

  “I see. You’re not going to keep it up, then, boss?”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  Right at present, Kanezaka, the young copywriter, was after him to arrange a social evening with some amateur girls. Well, there’s nothing else to do, he thought, but give things a try and see how they go.

  “For this Saturday, Kabo, would you line up three? See if you can make them salesgirls if possible.”

  * A style of singing.

  V

  BANTEKI HAD NOT FELT UP to developing color film, and they had decided to risk giving it to a commercial processor. After all, it had been filmed with a certain amount of restraint; and then, too, th
e first part was a wedding, and the final section was deliberately filled with scenery. After it had come safely through, Banteki gave it a preliminary editing and then screened it for Subuyan and the others. Obviously he had been right about the superiority of sixteen-millimeter film.

  “All right now, Hack,” said Subuyan. “What I want you to do is to write some really natural and realistic dialogue for this.”

  Hack had already done a scenario before the actual filming; but since the actors were amateurs, when they had tried concentrating upon words, the fervor of their actions had fallen off considerably.

  “Just go ahead and say whatever you want to,” Banteki had finally told them and had stopped recording. Now on screen the two of them worked their mouths furiously as they panted and sobbed; so there would be no great problem to fit in words enough for a conversation of sorts.

  “Figure out the timing on it, Hack. Say the line yourself and make sure it’s just the right length. And turn out something that will really move the customers.”

  “I understand, boss,” Hack answered as he gazed at the screen with passionate intensity. He left them, promising to have the job done by tomorrow; and that was the end of Hack.

  “Something terrible’s happened! Hack is dead,” Paul shouted as he ran in. When Hack had not turned up at the promised time the next day, Subuyan had sent Paul looking for him.

  “Dead? An accident?”

  “I don’t know. Come on and see. His room is all messed up and I found him with his head down on his desk, stone cold.”

  Hack’s room had improved greatly since he had started working for Subuyan. Now there was a desk and a bookcase, and hanging on the wall were three pairs of trousers worthy of his six-foot frame, their legs resembling smokestacks. The room had become far more livable, but still the floor was covered with such a litter of manuscripts, magazines, toilet paper, newspapers, tonic bottles, empty packets of instant noodles, and so on that the tatami mats hardly showed through. In the midst of all this, just as Paul had said, Hack sat slumped in death. The cause was heart failure, according to the doctor. But, then, in full view beneath the desk, like a length of thick cable, the dead man’s penis dangled wearily.