The Pornographers Read online

  “Mom, I’ll cover you with the quilts. It’ll take just a second.”

  With no better alternative, Subuyan pulled the bedding out of the closet, put one quilt on top of his mother, and then doused it with the contents of the fire buckets. Then he put another over that and, after filling the buckets again, poured on more water, hoping frantically that this would work, this plan which his mother and he had decided upon as a last desperate measure.

  Then with no time even to offer a prayer for his mother’s safety, Subuyan dashed from the house and ran down the main street beside which stood Kusunoki’s statue. Probably because everyone else had fled, there was no sign of life in the neighborhood. The trees on the grounds of the shrine were burning fiercely, and black smoke belched up from the row of houses where he had been just a moment before. Relentlessly, with a sound like that of waves pounding against a rocky coast, the rumble of exploding bombs rolled over Kobé. Subuyan threw himself down in terror, clutching the bucket with which he had covered his head. Barely three yards in front of him, springing up like so many bamboo shoots, the flames from the incendiaries roared up to form a solid wall of fire.

  The next day the firemen dug into the still-smoldering ruins and recovered his mother’s body. He could not remember how many quilts he had piled upon her, but the bottom two were not burnt at all, and beneath them lay his mother. Her skin was a light brown, the color of slightly scorched cloth. Oddly enough, there were still drops of water clinging to her hair; and on her face there was no trace of agony.

  “We dig them out burned black and shriveled up like a little monkey. To have the body in good shape like this is something to be thankful for.”

  One fireman took her by the shoulders, the other by the feet; and at that moment, as easily as damp paper pulls apart, his mother’s flesh began to crumble away, baring the bones beneath. The shocked firemen jumped back with muffled exclamations. After a bit, one of them said:

  “Well, we can’t do anything else. We got to use a shovel.”

  So one of them scooped up her remains with a shovel, and her flesh fell away completely, stripping bare her very finger bones. Finally the whole crumbled mass, the pathetic shreds of her nightgown scattered through it, was hauled away on a stretcher of rush matting. Subuyan had stood there crouched over through it all, and even today he could not bear to so much as look at a roasted chicken.

  Though physically weak, his mother had been a woman with a mind of her own. On the very morning she saw her husband off to war, she had quarreled with him.

  “Well, stay with it now, and do your best.” His father had stood in the doorway of their home ready to attend the neighborhood farewell ceremony. But then, pointing to a rip in Subuyan’s trousers, he had gone on to say: “And be sure you fix the kid’s pants right away.” Poor though his shop was, he was a tailor through and through. The remark, however, touched off his mother.

  “Gloriously going off to fight and you stand there complaining! Just like an old woman!” And then in the twinkling of an eye, she snatched the pants off the schoolboy Subuyan and threw them into a corner. “Go on, hurry up. Put on your holiday clothes!” she lashed out.

  His father had made no attempt at rebuttal but stepped out into the lane in front of the house. There he had drawn in his chin as he bent his head to adjust the scarlet sash that proclaimed his mobilization. For his mother, and for Subuyan too, this was the last sight of his father.

  So, thought Subuyan, the Special and Mom, huh? What a helluva funny thought. Still, when I think of her, she was kind of frightening.

  As he waited his turn in the Turkish bath, there stirred willy-nilly in Subuyan’s memory, stimulated by Banteki’s words, all sorts of images of his mother, but none of them clear. Her strong will—could that have been a result of her physical disability? So it seemed. While he was still a schoolboy, as soon as he entered the house or even turned into the lane leading to it, he was greeted by the smell of Chinese herb medicine boiling in a copper kettle on the charcoal brazier. Then one day he had made a startling discovery. On the floor of the toilet, under some scraps of paper, he found a piece of silver foil such as is used to wrap chocolate.

  Mom’s been eating chocolate in here. What a dirty trick! he exclaimed to himself, feeling as chagrined as though he had been struck across the face. Years later he realized that the silver paper had not come from chocolate at all but from a suppository. The experience, however, was one that had been burned into his memory, and obviously it was not any particular fondness for chocolate that caused it to persist for so long. Rather, for the first time in his life, his mother’s visage had loomed up as wholly unsympathetic. She was revealed as a woman with faults; and to him as her child, the consequent regret was bitter.

  Did Mom and Dad, the way she was, really sleep together, I wonder? Well, they must of, I suppose. Otherwise no me.

  Just as he was unconsciously forming a rueful smile, a harsh voice shattered his reverie.

  “Can you beat that? Here he sits grinning away! Come on, let’s get to it.” Subuyan’s girl was ready for him.

  The building had been an inn before and had been taken over just as it was and made into a Turkish bath. Behind the sliding doors, rubbing tables were set up on the tatami floor. The alcove of the main room had been enlarged somewhat, and a bath had been installed. But no customers were washing there now. The room Subuyan was led to, as well as the building in general, was painfully chilly. There was not a hint of steam, even of the sort found in an ordinary bath.

  “Hey, isn’t there any steam? This is awful.”

  “You gotta come sooner for that. All we got this late is the Special.”

  Subuyan feigned innocence. “The Special? What’s that?”

  “That’s up to you, mister. We’re here to serve.”

  “Okay, suppose I give you a thousand?”

  “Make it two hundred more.”

  A brisk wrangle broke out, but then finally the woman, with a deft jerk, divested Subuyan of his pants, in this respect at least closely resembling his mother the morning of his father’s farewell, though instead of tossing them into a corner, she took care to hang them properly on a clothes peg. Next she grabbed his hand—“Just one finger, mister, that two-finger business don’t go”—and pulled it toward her shorts.

  Subuyan cried out in alarm. “Hey, just a minute! I want none of that. You’re the one’s supposed to do it, not me.”

  The whole truth of the matter was that Subuyan was ordinarily the man to delve with two fingers as deep as the hairy tangle itself, but at the moment the implications of Banteki’s novel thesis were troubling him.

  “This your first time here, mister?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you don’t go for this?”

  “No, I don’t go for it.”

  “We sure get all kinds in here!”

  “Will you just shut up and do your job?”

  “Okay, mister, you asked for it.”

  The woman rubbed a generous amount of cream into her palms and then, with a rapid lunge, she seized Subuyan violently, her icy fingers provoking a shriek.

  Subuyan’s home was near Takii Station, one past Senbayashi on the Keihan Line. There his wife, Oharu, ran a barber shop. Five years earlier her husband had died, leaving her with an eleven-year-old daughter. Besides running the barber shop, she rented out a second-floor room just above it, to which at length had come Subuyan after many vicissitudes; and within six months he had put an end to the hardship of the bereaved mother and daughter by undertaking the role of bridegroom. Once in the beginning, after Subuyan had crept in beside Oharu one night, the sharp-eyed Keiko, sleeping beside her mother, suddenly sat up and cried out piercingly.

  “Mama! Somebody’s there behind you!”

  “Keiko, what’s the matter with you?” said his wife, whom he addressed as Mrs. Sugimura at this juncture. “Were you dreaming, dear? Here, let me see if you’ve got a fever.”

  She stretched out her hand and l
aid it soothingly upon her daughter’s forehead, while Subuyan clung to her hip, making himself as small as possible and admiring her smooth deception. When it comes to lying, she’s really got it, he thought to himself. But had it actually gone off so well? That he had cause to wonder later. Keiko had never warmed up to him.

  After his mother died, the aircraft factory at which he worked was destroyed in a raid; and Subuyan, having nowhere else to turn, had appealed to the generosity of some former companions at the plant, who had returned home to Usen, a small town in Wakayama, to the southeast of Osaka. They had replied affably enough and assured him that he would not have to worry about fish or rice; but when he actually turned up, worn and hungry, they soon made him understand that his presence was burdensome.

  So he had spent all his time by the small hut allotted to him, one used to store rope. On the beach in front of it, he set up some boards on a slight slant and spread rush matting over them. On top of this, he poured buckets of seawater, let the matting dry out in the sun, and then repeated the process. Gradually the lower section of the matting became encrusted with salt; and this he traded to the fishermen as a preservative in exchange for sweet potatoes, cucumbers, and, on rare occasions, some rice balls.

  After the war had ended, he put all his efforts into hauling fish to the city to sell on the black market. The money he earned was rather good, but the business was at best an uncertain, day-to-day affair. So, finally, having managed to scrape together twenty thousand yen, he went off to Osaka shortly after his twentieth birthday.

  Subuyan had gotten no further than junior high school, but one day, poking around the black market, he came across what seemed to be the texts of some old Waseda University lectures. He had been impressed at first with the quality of the paper and bought a pack of it to wrap up dried fish. Later he had skimmed through the notes, but this academic background did nothing to secure him a more honorable way of making a living. He sold wire racks for displaying newspapers, peddled picture magazines, set up as a black-market broker, buying half-pound bags of coffee from the prostitutes in the Nakanoshima district, hawked answer sheets for intelligence tests, went around selling worthless gimmicks guaranteeing high pinball scores—a hand-to-mouth existence that made life one round of flophouses and culminated in a sales job with a third-rate cash-register firm. And so as the black-market era ended and the world settled down to normal, Subuyan reached his twenty-sixth year. And it was just at this time, while he was living in a cheap apartment in Sekimé, barely hanging on with a commission of thirty-eight hundred yen for each cash register sold, that an out-of-the-way event came to pass.

  In a line of shops in Morikoji was a certain stationery store run by a tight-fisted proprietor. Deciding what the hell give it a try, Subuyan one day took himself there and was received with unexpected warmth. The proprietor, bending his crooked neck for all it was worth, stood bowing in the doorway, urging him in.

  “Well, well! Come right in.”

  Then the old man bustled about getting tea for him as Subuyan sat wondering what was in the wind. He noticed that none of the proprietor’s family was around.

  “You boys, uh? You gotta go all over, don’t you? Something’s good, you’re not goin’ miss it, I’ll bet, eh?”

  He dropped his voice to a conspiratorial tone; and when Subuyan asked: “What do you mean, ‘something good’?” the proprietor, saying, “Easy, easy, these walls got ears,” disappeared into the back room, knocked and rattled about with keys and such, then appeared again, this time holding in his hand a small brown paper bag. In it was a ten-picture pack of somewhat faded pornographic photos.

  “Can you get your hands on some more somewhere? It just might be worth your while, uh? And as for that, too,” he said, wagging his chin toward the cash-register catalog which Subuyan had brought, “maybe I might want to buy one. You’ll think it over, won’t you?”

  There was no dearth of men selling pictures. Subuyan himself had sometimes bought some, and his former flophouse friends had been devoted to pornographic books also. So, knowing just where to go and being able to size the market up quickly, he was able to get a hundred-yen discount on a three-hundred-yen pack; and when he set out once more for Morikoji, he was carrying two bags of pictures. But no sooner did the proprietor catch sight of his triumphant expression than he flew into a panic and came rushing out of the shop with a scrape and clatter of sandals. “Ma’s home now! We gotta go somewhere else. Hurry, c’mon!” Thoroughly frantic, he rushed Subuyan away in desperate haste.

  And so besides the commission on a thirty-eight-thousand-yen register sold on the installment plan, Subuyan was able to pick up a profit of two hundred yen on a single pack of pictures. When he considered that a prostitute at Hashimoto on the Keihan Line, which he traveled frequently, was getting no more than four hundred for a quickie—Damn! This is good money, thought Subuyan.

  With the ice broken, entry to this establishment and that soon followed. The more contacts set up, the greater the ease in closing a deal; and the benefit of the pornographic pictures grew all the more potent. His customers, each with his little shop in the family for generations, each as though by some sort of predestination saddled with a shrew who rapped his bald head and made him toe the line, enjoyed no break at all, save for a single trip to a hot spring each year; and the pornographic pictures that they then wheedled from the bath attendant with an obsequious smile might well have been thought of as their erotic St. Christopher medals. When their eyes fell upon the new material that Subuyan brought, without exception their hands trembled and they were plunged into a dither. Not only that: from the samples Subuyan showed them they invariably pinched one or two, so deep-rooted was the stinginess that also characterized them.

  His sales record improved markedly. Furthermore, throughout the year, under pretext of repairing a conveniently broken cash register, he was able to pass fresh erotic material to his customers right under the noses of their loud, truculent spouses.

  Starting out with pictures, books, aphrodisiacs, Subuyan watched his customers increase in number by word of mouth. Then after a while he extended his line so that it included everything from artifacts to the production of blue films; he found himself rushing around from morning to night catering to the needs of these deficient Romeos hooked on secondhand eroticism and naturally crying out for yet madder music. As a result, Subuyan evolved into a bona-fide pornographer. He looked much older than he was, something which helped greatly in his role as manager of the cash-register sales agency, which was the cover organization.

  “I’m home. Are you in bed, Oharu?” Subuyan called out.

  He pushed aside the curtain that hung inside the front door, its dirtiness all too apparent even in the darkness.

  “Oh! Welcome home!” his wife answered. “I’ll bet you’re cold. Are you hungry?”

  All in a flurry, Oharu bustled into view, not yet in her nightgown, Subuyan noticed, though it was close to one o’clock; and he experienced the usual awkwardness attending a homecoming from the Turkish bath.

  “Keiko in bed?”

  “Yes. She just went. I guess she’d been talking to the policeman up at the corner box, but anyway she got home a little while ago.”

  “What? You say she was up at the police box?”

  “Yes, there’s this real handsome officer up there. He’s got these kinda real deep-set eyes that look out at you, and everybody says he looks like some movie star. But anyway I thought as long as it’s a policeman she’s talking to, I didn’t have to worry any.”

  For some time Oharu had known of the risks entailed in Subuyan’s business, but the consequent need of being circumspect had apparently not quite sunk in.

  “Obviously Keiko isn’t in a position to spill anything,” thought Subuyan, but still to wake up some morning and find you’ve got a policeman for a son-in-law—that would be the damnedest situation!” He admonished his wife, chewing his words sullenly. “She’s at that dangerous age. I don’t care who the hell i
t is she’s talking to, it’s up to you to keep your eyes open.”

  This much off his chest, he and Oharu went upstairs to retire. There, clad in his knee-length drawers, Subuyan took his wife in his arms and lay down with her, speaking reassuringly. “You don’t have to do a thing. I just want to love you up a little, that’s all.” Oharu complied, though with reluctance. “I’m pretty tired,” she whispered. “You’ll quit soon, won’t you?”

  Oharu had started to complain of being worn out and tired toward the end of the previous summer and had cut down on her work in the barber shop almost completely. Since Subuyan was able to handle all the bills well enough with his own work, this in itself was no cause for concern; but at the same time Oharu began to look disturbingly run-down, and an X-ray photo revealed a shadow in her right lung. The doctor was content to prescribe that she take it easy and step up her nutrition; but since then, in fact, both of them had begun to show restraint in their lovemaking. Come to think of it, the interval had now extended to nearly three months.

  Well, the Turkish bath was the Turkish bath, but this is something else, thought Subuyan as he held Oharu. But those shoulders and those plump thighs, how thin they had become in such a short time! “This is no good. You’ve got to go to the doctor again,” he blurted out earnestly.

  But Oharu replied evasively. “Just hold me. I don’t ask anything else,” she said, her voice choking with tears, oppressed, as might be expected, by the knowledge that she not only had a teen-age daughter but was three years her husband’s senior.

  “That’s not what I mean. It’s your health I’m concerned about. Damn silly women.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  As Subuyan exerted himself, trying somehow to stir up the vitality worn down just an hour before in the Turkish bath, he heard a loud sneeze from Keiko downstairs. What did she do, he thought, throw off the quilt again, I wonder? And an image came to him, one seen any number of times the past summer and soon looked forward to as he descended to the first floor in the middle of the night on his way to the toilet, an image of Keiko, legs wide apart, sprawled out asleep. And at the memory Subuyan’s masculinity, bit by bit, came unmistakably alive. Oharu gurgled happily: “Oh my! Suppose this was recorded!” There flashed across his mind the fantastic thought that maybe even this bed had not escaped Banteki’s web of wires.