The Pornographers Read online

  “My God! He must have been going at it and the climax killed him,” declared Banteki.

  Hack had written no dialogue on the manuscript paper lying on the desk. Rather, in characters slanted slightly to the right, using proper pornographic terminology, he had written a sketch of a woman in ecstasy.

  “He must have been thinking up a good story, then got himself all worked up, started twanging it—and passed away just like that,” said Subuyan. “Well, I’ve heard of a man dying on top of a woman—but dying while masturbating! I don’t know, it seems incredible.”

  “It’s not so incredible. Even with masturbation your blood pressure will shoot up and your heartbeat can reach a hundred and seventy,” said Paul, drawing upon his hospital background.

  “Look here! Get a look at this, will you!” said Cocky, who had slid open the closet door and pulled out some bedding in which to wrap the body. “Semen stains all over everything, the bottom and top quilt both.” Subuyan and the others stood gaping. As if hundreds of snails had been crawling busily, the worn and dirty bedding was splattered with dried white stains. And the underwear and quilted jacket rolled up inside were stiff and crumpled as though they had been smeared with paste.

  “My God, he had vigor!”

  “He’d write a book, read it, masturbate, write another—there was no end to it.”

  Forgetting the body for the moment, they stood staring at this memorial to masturbation. Banteki shook his head.

  “Still, no matter how excited he got, the scene that set Hack off was the same one every time.”

  “What was that?”

  “He’d imagine a man and two women. The man’s giving it to one of them and the other’s watching it, all hot and bothered and she doesn’t know what to do. He’d imagine different people involved, but the setup was always the same. I don’t know—I’m just a layman in this area, but it seems to me that if you stopped and thought a little, you could come up with something better.”

  “Yeah, but just think of it,” said Cocky. “The first time Hack sat down to write a pornographic book, that’s what probably came to him and got him excited. And now here at the end, he went over it again so that he could get worked up and go to it. Everybody when he masturbates has a favorite scene that gets him going more than any other. For Hack it was this one with the two women.”

  “So it was just for himself he wrote all those books,” said Subuyan, shaking his head sadly.

  “I don’t know, but doesn’t it sort of remind you of the human torpedoes during the war?”

  “Yeah, that’s it! Grab yourself tight, go plunging ahead in a world all your own, and with a burst of semen you blow yourself up.”

  “We ought to put up a statue: his pen firm in his right hand, his tool in his left!”

  “The women’d get mad. If every man blew himself up like Hack, what would they do?”

  As they talked they began to make plans for the funeral. Even if a coffin big enough to hold Hack could be ordered, it would be impossible to get it up to the room above the paint shop.

  “How about this? We’ll sit him up and put him in an old tea box—that’d be a novel way.”

  So they took Hack, practically the way he was when death came, and loaded him into a tea box. And then, since he had been a pornographer—they probably were inspired by the Communist Party custom of wrapping the bones of its deceased heroes in a red flag—they stuffed in around his body representative copies of his major works, such as Confessions of a Mattress, Passion on Tour, The Inn by the Lake, What the Mirror Saw, and My Bed Is My Battleground.

  “Say, Hack loved Mah Jongg so much, why don’t we play a game for the peace of his soul?”

  “Requiem Mah Jongg, huh? That sounds good. The winner puts the money in an offering for the soul of the departed.”

  And so it was decided. They put a sheet over the top of the tea box; and then four of them, Subuyan, Banteki, Cocky, and Paul, sat solemnly around it and began to play, though because of the height of the dead man this was a little awkward. There was no likelihood that any relatives of Hack would come to the funeral, and so the sound of the Mah Jongg tiles clattering on the top of his tea box must have provided his soul with consolation of the most cherished sort.

  “Let me have that grease pencil, will you?” asked Banteki. He took the pencil and began to blacken the bright color of the red-dragon tiles. “You can’t use festival colors in requiem Mah Jongg.”

  “You can carry things too far, don’t you think?” said Subuyan in mild exasperation.

  “And we ought to be sad, too,” offered Cocky, “maybe on the verge of tears.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a wake, isn’t it? And tears are the proper thing at a wake, aren’t they? So a guy ought to try for that even when he pungs or chows.”

  “And I suppose he ought to break down and sob if he Mah Jonggs. You don’t want much.”

  “Don’t be like that. This isn’t for pleasure. We’re doing this for the repose of Hack’s soul. So let’s go and no more complaints.”

  And so they played well into the small hours of the morning, shouting “Pung!” and “Chow!” and talking loudly.

  “Old Hack really went for Mah Jongg, didn’t he?”

  “How he loved to take a round with a three-wind sequence!”

  From time to time one of Hack’s neighbors on the second floor stopped by, intending to pay his respects by burning some incense, but when each in turn was confronted with such a spectacle in the room of the deceased, he would retreat in shocked astonishment.

  “Gee, I guess I got to watch it, too, or it’ll be too bad,” said Kabo on the way home.

  “Watch what?” asked Subuyan.

  “I do the same thing Hack did.”

  “You! Didn’t you say you didn’t go for women?”

  “I don’t go for women maybe, but at least in this way I’m a man, I guess.”

  “You don’t say? Well, look, at that time a man’s got to think about having a woman, or if not that, at least something close to it. But if you don’t like women at all, what do you do?”

  “I think about when we’re out on one of those pickup expeditions, Paul and I. He’ll say to some girls: ‘Won’t you have a cup of tea with us?’ And when he does, they keep on walking, not sure whether they want to do it or not. They’re all excited, looking around at us, and they’ve got this real intense expression on their faces. I think that their faces are very pretty just then. Once they decide to say yes, then they get ugly. They put on all kinds of airs and start acting vulgar.”

  “What a fussy little bastard you are!” Subuyan burst out laughing, but Kabo insisted, more earnest than ever.

  “No, it’s so! Their faces are pretty then. I think of their faces then, and I masturbate. And that’s why I’m worried about heart failure now. Gee, that’d be awful.”

  “Okay, okay, I believe you. You know, Kabo, maybe you’re the one who gets his from women in just the right way. I think maybe you’re right. Maybe they are the prettiest just at that time when they don’t know whether they will or they won’t.”

  “You understand what I mean, then, boss? I’m awful glad you do.”

  Life is funny, Subuyan thought. Hack wrote pornographic books out of reverence for his dead mother, and they’d excite him so much that he’d masturbate, going so far as to kill himself in a final blast of passion. Kabo thinks about the faces of girls who aren’t sure whether or not they want to get picked up, and it comes up on him that way. Banteki and Cocky—they haven’t said much; but Banteki’s eyes practically glow when he’s filming and editing. That’s a sure sign he’s really hot then. But how about me, what do I do? And no matter what I do, nothing stirs at all—there’s not a quiver.

  “By the way, boss, you still haven’t gotten any news about Keiko, I suppose,” said Kabo, as though reading Subuyan’s mind.

  “Well, if Keiko only would come back, things would be as good as ever with me.”

  “As goo
d as ever? You mean you could live together real nice as father and daughter with no more trouble, I suppose.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. Now the thing is I’m impotent. In order to cure it I just have to have Keiko to help me.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Kabo with a blank look, not following in the least.

  “You see, there’d be nothing at all wrong with Keiko and me getting married. She’s my daughter in a way, but we’re not related at all. But, anyway … I wonder just where the hell she could have gone to.”

  “I’ll do the best I can to keep my eyes open for her, boss.”

  “Thanks, Kabo, would you do that? I’d pay you anything.” Subuyan felt unaccountably weak and helpless.

  On the following Saturday, the department-store girls whom Kanezaka had had his heart set upon could not make it, but three junior-college girls were rushed in to fill the gap. One girl boarded at the home of relatives, and the other two shared an apartment, so the auspices were good for setting up a night at an inn.

  By the time their party of six had gone from the gay surroundings of the Cockatoo to the Arrow Club to a barbecue place on the north side, it was eleven o’clock. Subuyan had Kabo buy some sleeping pills, and he broke them between his teeth and slipped their contents along with some saliva into the girls’ food.

  “C’mon, c’mon, eat up. Here, don’t use chopsticks. Eat it with the spoon,” he urged them warmly; but the pills had no effect.

  “When they’re young and hot, stuff like that does nothing to them, I guess,” said Subuyan to Kanezaka. It was a critical moment. For if the girls were not sleepy, what pretext could be used to lure them to an inn?

  They had said that they wanted to go to work in television after graduation. So Kabo had introduced Kanezaka as a production manager at an Osaka television station; as a result the girls had been sweetly cordial right from the start. Still, this was, after all, their first meeting with Subuyan and Kanezaka, and Subuyan was afraid that if he carelessly forced the issue, the result might be total disaster.

  “Mr. Kanezaka, let’s try a little stunt,” said Subuyan, taking advantage of the girls’ having gone to the ladies’ room to outline an intricate stratagem. “We’ll get in a cab and head for one of their places, the relatives or the apartment. But on the way I’ll start making noises like I’m going to heave right there. So we stop the cab, and you help me out, and I vomit—pretending, of course. So all this takes awhile, and meantime the cab is waiting, and the driver is bound to start complaining. Then it’s up to you, Mr. Kanezaka, to say something to the girls—‘I’m very, very sorry, but would you mind getting out for just a little while, and we’ll wait until he feels better.’ Then once we get them out of the cab, you say: ‘He just doesn’t seem to be getting any better. I think we’ll have to stop at that inn over there for the night. Since we can get separate rooms, how about you girls staying, too?’ And that way we can pull them in.”

  “But what good does that do, with separate rooms?”

  “No trouble there. We just slip a tip to the maid. And she’ll come and tell them: ‘Excuse the inconvenience but a big party of guests are coming, and would you mind sharing a room with your friends?’

  “I don’t know—do you think they’ll fall for that?”

  “I don’t know whether they will or not, but we have to try something.”

  With their scenario laid out, Subuyan and Kanezaka packed themselves into a cab with Kabo and the three girls and told the driver to head for Toyonaka, the home of the relatives of one of the girls. Before the cab had gotten much past Juso, however, Subuyan put his hand over his mouth and went “Gaaah! Gaaah!”

  Kanezaka picked up the cue at once: “What’s the matter? Don’t you feel good? That’s too bad. Hey, driver, would you stop for a minute, please?”

  Kanezaka, Subuyan, and Kabo walked some distance down the dark street, and then, confident that they were unobserved, they began to urinate in unison. But suddenly the click-click of high heels echoed behind them.

  “Oops! A woman is coming,” said Kabo.

  Since there was no stopping in midstream, they grit their teeth and put all they had into it, finishing in time but with no margin to pull up their zippers.

  “Let me rub your back, and it’ll probably make you feel better. When Dad gets drunk, I always take care of him,” said the girl, putting her hand gently on Subuyan’s shoulder, an act of tender kindness that would have been most welcome under any other circumstances. He could not very well refuse, however; and he and Kanezaka bent down over the still-frothy puddle of urine at their feet, as Subuyan frantically jabbed his uvula with his forefinger and finally provoked some vomiting.

  “The driver says that he has to get going,” one of the girls called. Since they had gotten off on the wrong foot with the driver by jamming an excess load into his cab, they could hardly expect him to be a good sport about being kept waiting. Kanezaka again picked up his cue promptly.

  “I guess we shouldn’t keep him waiting like this. Would you mind getting out and letting him go?” And so the other two girls were enticed out of the cab, and all was going according to plan.

  “Oh, my stomach, I just don’t know,” groaned Subuyan. “Well, we can’t very well walk around here this late at night. There’s an inn I know just up ahead there. Should we all stop there for tonight—different rooms, of course?” If they refused now, all the labor and pains already suffered—Subuyan had actually begun to feel sick by this time—would go for nothing.

  The three girls put their heads together for consultation; and then, with no mention at all of at least phoning the family in Toyonaka, they announced their decision: “Since it’s so late, we think we’d better stay.” And so the birth proved easier than the conception.

  They took separate rooms at an inn called the Ebisu, with which Subuyan had not the least acquaintance. And once settled there, still following the original plan, he waited a favorable opportunity. After the girls had left them, waving “Good night, now,” Subuyan took the maid aside at once and spoke earnestly to her. Then the three entered their own room, where they nervously waited.

  First the maid appeared again, her arms loaded with quilts. “Excuse me, but I’ve got to put these in here too,” she said; and in a few moments the floor was covered with six mattress quilts in two neat rows. Next to appear were the girls themselves. Already changed into bathrobes, they breezed in with a nonchalant “Excuse us,” not a care in the world.

  They were now inside, face to face with Kanezaka, Subuyan, and Kabo; but despite that, Kanezaka seemed unwilling to go beyond the television-executive gambit. “Yes, yes, TV does seem glamorous and all that from the outside, I suppose, but there’s a lot of tedious routine involved, too,” he rambled, when all he had to do was to stretch out his hand.

  “What do you say we try some hand wrestling?” said Subuyan, breaking into Kanezaka’s flow of rhetoric in an attempt to get things moving.

  The girls in the beds opposite were all for it. “Let’s go,” said one of them, jumping up. “Nobody can beat me.” She thrust back the sleeve of her bathrobe and, with a flash of whiteness, flexed the muscle in her right arm.

  Kanezaka came to grips with her and, of course, had her down in an instant. And just at that point, with their fingers still entwined, Subuyan flicked off the light switch; and the scene was plunged into darkness.

  Well, whatever happens from now on, thought Subuyan, I’m not to blame for it. He held his breath and listened. There were sounds of rustling and thrashing about, but not a word from anyone. Then, after a bit, there was a loud gasp from a woman followed by a grunt of unrestrained satisfaction, far more oblivious of common decency than anything on Banteki’s tapes.

  My God, what’s going on here! wondered Subuyan, getting up on all fours and peering through the darkness, to which his eyes were becoming accustomed. Kanezaka had his head buried in a pile of quilts, from which protruded a woman’s torso, her head thrust way back. Beside her sat a secon
d girl, gaping at her friend’s erotic contortions.

  “Kabo, I’m going after that one there. Do what you want,” said Subuyan, as he began to crawl stealthily across the room. When he had gotten past the entangled pair and pounced upon his victim, he found her cooperative, offering no resistance other than clutching the front of her robe, which had come partially open. Meanwhile the combination to their right soared toward a heated climax with a rhythmic throb that recalled the dull boom of the bell of Miitera struck by its wooden hammer. The woman in Subuyan’s arms turned with a grin and put her hand over his face as though saying “Don’t look!” But even this bit of blatant provocation failed to arouse Subuyan, in whom the spirit had once more outrun the flesh. No matter how stiffly the breeze blew, the sail hung limp from the mast.

  The girl was evidently experienced, but unlike the prostitute in Tobita, she did not create a scene. Instead she undid the belt of Subuyan’s robe and to his shocked distaste began to grope hesitantly about.

  “Hey, Kabo! Will you get her off me!” But when he looked for succor here, he saw Kabo sitting slack-jawed upon his mattress, as though caught up in an exciting Western.

  As it turned out, therefore, the full responsibility fell upon Kanezaka, and he discharged his burden equitably among the three women, sharing a pillow with each in turn. After that the three men slept soundly, each worn out in his own way; and when Subuyan opened his eyes, it was already broad daylight. There was no sign of the girls. I wonder if they left already, he thought as he woke up his companions. But then, as though in response to the signs of life within the room, the door slipped open, and the girl who had initiated the wrestling the night before appeared in the corridor. They had been waiting in the room next door.