The Pornographers Read online

  “Yes, sir, this is Kiso. I owe so much to your past kindness. Thank you very much indeed.” As he spoke, Subuyan deliberately muffled his voice. Then in a still lower pitch: “I have a certain matter to discuss with you, sir, something which won’t keep. Yes, sir. It’s something just a bit intriguing. If you know what I mean. So if it wouldn’t be too inconvenient, sir, could you spare me just a few minutes?” Polite to the utmost, but at the same time keep the pressure on and push relentlessly—this was sound pornographic policy. True, some customers had only to receive a call from Subuyan to begin salivating, but other devotees—“What are you bothering me about when I’m busy?”—were only too ready to throw up a respectable front. Then there were not a few others, spineless types, who, all flaming ardor within, turned craven when the chips were down. And so it was a matter of push, push. Especially in the case at hand was it the best policy to make the client feel hemmed in and harried; for the product pushed this time was a virgin-defloration scenario.

  The customer he was talking to, the chairman of the board of an advertising agency, had been explicit in his stipulation: untouched. He was a man of forty-two whose career had prospered and who lived a life in which all his aspirations had been fulfilled—that is, all but one. He clung stubbornly to the conviction that his wife had not been a virgin. He had thought so from the first night of the honeymoon, and since then fifteen years had passed. “No, no, however you figure, some guy was in there ahead of me—no doubt about it. Recently, I’ve done a lot of reading and stuff on it, and the more I did, the surer I became. As to my wife, well, as far as that goes, it’s water over the dam. I’ve got three kids, and all of them—well, hell, they all look like me. I’ve got no doubts on that score. So that’s all right, but I’m at that certain age, you see. And never to have known a woman who thinks to herself, ‘Oh, my first man!’ God, but that’s hard to take. When you think about it, huh, suppose I’m flying up to Tokyo. Down the plane might go, and there I’m dead—dead and not at peace. Just think about it—dead without ever having known a virgin! God, it’s an awful thought!” Unburdening himself without reservation, the chairman of the board poured his troubles plaintively into Subuyan’s ear. “Listen, if once I knew I had cancer, I’d go wild, forget everything, rape a schoolgirl. I know I would!” He pleaded, on the point of tears, offering any amount of money, only please, he wanted a virgin. But virgins were out of Subuyan’s range; and though two or three of Keiko’s friends came to mind, he had no idea what to do.

  About that time, however, he heard from one of his colleagues of a madam in Ashiya who was a virgin specialist. And so, bringing the traditional present, he went there one day to pay her a visit. The lady, wearing several huge rings and about fifty years old, drew from him every detail pertaining to his client’s taste, then said: “Well, now, Yasuko’s just the girl for you. She’s twenty-three and she’s already done that bit fifteen or sixteen times, a real veteran virgin. She’ll be happy to do it.”

  Hearing the phrase “veteran virgin,” Subuyan was a bit nonplused, understanding yet not understanding; but after getting a detailed explanation from the madam, he learned that just within the Kobé-Osaka area there were thirteen call girls whose occupational speciality was feigned virginity. The oldest was twenty-nine, the youngest twenty-one; and each was adept at staging a performance suited to the particular customer. There were, of course, such things as the use of alum according to a traditional formula handed down from the Edo era; and a supply of blood drawn beforehand was cached so as to flow out on cue. All well and good, but the essence of the thing was for the woman to conjure up in herself the maidenly image that the patron cherished. If she could pull that off, she scored as a virgin, no matter how many children she had.

  “Now there’s a trick or two you as a go-between ought to use. After he first asks you, make him wait about three months, see? Then, just as it seems like you’ll get him and the girl together, sorry, no go this time. She can’t bring herself to it yet and she might never, it looks like, you tell him. So then the poor gentleman gets whipped up all the more and is just dying to have her.”

  The plump-faced madam chattered on as she ate her sushi, mentioning in passing how she had started out after the war up in Tokyo, in Omori, running an inn that catered to unmarried couples. “So let us know any time you’re ready, and we’ll get a doctor’s certificate dated the day before saying she’s a virgin.” The madam’s fee was fifteen thousand yen; the woman was to get the same; and as for Subuyan, it was up to him to estimate afterward how much the trade would bear.

  “Well, I’m probably being taken in, but maybe I’ll give it a whirl.” Munching choice bits from a steaming tray in the luxurious surroundings of the Suehiro restaurant, the chairman of the board played the role. Subuyan, emulating Banteki, sat primly, knees aligned.

  “I myself, sir, have no way of knowing whether what she said is true or not. This is my first experience in this kind of business. If there’s the least chance of their pulling a fast one, I’m the loser, too. So I thought maybe we shouldn’t go through with it, but, then, I just don’t know.”

  “How old is she?”

  “She’s twenty-two.”

  “Why’s she willing to do it? Is the family hard up?”

  “No, it’s not that. It seems she wants to go skiing over the New Year’s vacation and so it’s for recreation that she wants the money. I guess there’s plenty of them like that nowadays.”

  This particular gambit Subuyan owed to the shrewdness of the madam. Nowadays old stand-bys like “Father is ill, and I need the money for medicine” just did not go over; but this line achieved the effect desired, and the chairman of the board was hooked.

  “So that’s it! She wants it for a good time, eh? Well, she must be a calculating young lady, huh?”

  Then as he went on, his excitement mounted to an almost pitiable degree.

  “Look, since it’s her first time, some sleazy short-time house would be just out of the question. You think it would be good to take her up to Mount Rokko or to Arima? I know just how crucial it is that everything go off in a nice way. If she has qualms or anything, maybe we could put it off to another time. Once it’s done the wrong way, this woman is ruined for a lifetime; and I wouldn’t want that at all. So when should we make it for?”

  Resolved in body and spirit, the chairman of the board screwed up his courage and took out his appointment book. Sure finally that all would go well, Subuyan made the outrageous demand of eighty thousand yen.

  “Good enough. That’ll make it no more than a hundred thousand altogether, with the hotel bill,” the chairman of the board replied, perturbed not in the least.

  The twentieth of December was duly selected as being an auspicious day for virgin breaking, and when Subuyan walked out of the Suehiro, the sun was still high. Since it was on the way, Subuyan turned his steps away from Midosuji and in the direction of the Nakanoshima district, whose firms employed so many of his customers.

  He had begun with a single customer, that shopkeeper in Morikoji; but within a year, he had worked his way up through the chain of organizations, from retailer to wholesaler, from sales agency to manufacturer. And then, as relentlessly permeating as the seepage of a subterranean spring, he was into advertising agencies, banks, securities corporations; and no matter how varied the businesses involved, every last one of them was overflowing with assorted lechers and latent sex maniacs. Ah, the exterior was irreproachable: business suit, necktie, French cuffs—but strip all that away, and what did you have beneath? Say a quivering mass of sexuality, and you’d hit it right. Here they were, edging into old age, husbands who, as they lay masturbating beside their wives, enflamed their imaginations with the spectacles of teen-age sexual abandon that they had glimpsed in the pages of cheap weeklies. Among them you found a chairman of the board feverish for a virgin and an executive who pressed his palms together and pleaded with you to fix him up with any girl at all, just so she was a bus conductorette. And so, ho
lding high the torch of Eros, Subuyan treaded the twisting path of their tangled lusts. The list of his clients had now passed the three thousand mark.

  When Subuyan was introduced to a new prospect, he made it a practice never to take the card that was held out to him. After staring hard at it, he would gently push it back and set his jaw grimly.

  “Excuse me, sir, but I don’t want to take the least chance of causing you even a small amount of trouble,” he would say, playing his role to the hilt. “I have your name written right here, sir”—tapping his head—“no mistake about it, and even if it splits in two, nothing comes out but that white stuff.” But then as soon as he left his customer, he rushed to make a note of the name and telephone number, which he had been frantically repeating; and then in cases where the conversation was prolonged, there was the trick of excusing himself to go to the toilet, where he quickly scribbled the data in his notebook. It was good business policy to give these white-collar workers, living out their goldfish-bowl existence, the illusion of having contact, however slight, with the sinister underworld. To have lunch every once in a while with a man who might be just one misstep away from a jail cell—this for them was to reel with the intoxication that comes from a sense of shared danger while enjoying the security of a humdrum daily job.

  Lately no orders had been coming from the securities corporations, which had been hit hard by the current recession; but the demand for blue films had been as strong as ever from the steel concerns and the construction companies. The various fluctuations of the economic situation soon made themselves felt in this business also.

  A few days later, when Subuyan stopped at Banteki’s apartment, he found him working away full clip on some pornographic photos. Banteki’s idea was to triple the value of these run-of-the-mill pictures by substituting the faces of movie actresses for those of the stupid-looking women in them and the faces of athletic heroes for those of the loutish men.

  “Kashiwado’s got it, no doubt about it. Pushing for all he’s worth in the clinch, see, then just that instant when he takes the other guy, see, on the way down himself, and slams him out of the ring! That’s power for you, huh?” Banteki was pouring over Sumo wrestling magazines, on the verge of being quite worked up.

  “When the hell did you become a Sumo fan?”

  “No, no,” said Banteki, shaking his head. “The thing is it’s the expression at that instant, see? It’s the dead image of a guy in a porny photo. Myobudani, that young Hawaiian new guy, is good, too, I think, when he lifts the other guy all the way off the ground; but his ranking is still low so they don’t bother taking close-up shots of him. As for the other great wrestlers, Taiho and Wakanohana both just don’t have it. No, whatever you say, it’s Kashiwado.”

  Subuyan got the idea all right—Kashiwado giving all he had, his expression at just that instant showing all his power. Yet … “Okay, Banteki, but still, at a time like that does the guy really make a face like this?”

  “Well, I can’t say, because I’ve never looked in a mirror just then, but it’s certainly better than the expression on somebody flouncing around. Look, the woman’s got her eyes shut in rapture; the man, worked up to a frenzy by this time, exerts every ounce of energy ramming home the old payload—so even though it’s a trick, this kind of expression in the eyes is just right.”

  “Well, how about some baseball stars? How about Oh of the Giants on one leg just as he smashes one—if that isn’t masculinity, what is?”

  But Banteki shook his head. Baseball, boxing, judo, rugby—he had gone through all the sports, searching for those close-ups that caught the very cream of masculine facial expressions. “No, no, it’s Kashiwado hands down. Actually, even though he doesn’t bowl over all the opposition, he’s still temendously popular, and I think I’ve got his secret. I don’t know for sure, but aren’t a lot of his fans women? Especially girls who’ve gotten a taste of it—they go wild, I’ll bet.”

  Weighing Banteki’s words, Subuyan studied Kashiwado’s face more closely.

  “Hey, let me see your mirror a minute.”

  He tried rolling his eyeballs upward and contracting his brow in just the same way, but somehow it did not come off.

  “But, look, Banteki, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about,” said Subuyan, abruptly changing the subject. “Right now, well, nothing can be done. But in January when the weather gets clearer, what do you say that we try making our own blue films?”

  Right from the beginning, Banteki’s speciality had been photography; and so something like switching the faces in photos, for example, was a simple matter for him. An odd circumstance had brought him and Subuyan together. Among Subuyan’s customers was a comedian down on his luck, and he had asked Subuyan to photograph himself and his wife in some rather unconventional poses. Thoroughly abashed, the reluctant Subuyan took the camera and clicked away as well as he could; but then afterward, when he had shown agitation about taking the film to an ordinary photo shop, his customer laughed uproariously and told him that there was a funny little bastard he would introduce him to. And from this their intimacy had flowered.

  “You know all there is to know about cameras, whether an eight-millimeter or any other kind. And the way they work things now, for the most part, whether it’s made down in Kyushu or over in Shikoku, there’s no artistry at all in it. Everything’s cut and dried—it’s gotta be either three together going at a woman, a peep-in, or rape. If they keep going on like this, even though the customers have been getting more and more sophisticated, they’ll end up out of the money just like the big film companies now. Look, we’ve already put our necks on the line by showing films made by other people, so why don’t we try making our own? As for the money, I’ll put it up. And, Banteki, you be the director, won’t you? There’s no risk at all, I tell you.”

  Perhaps because Subuyan himself had become so obviously enthralled by his own rushing words, Banteki, too, as he listened to the other’s fervent eloquence, was caught up bit by bit and at last burst out:

  “Say, I used to be a cameraman with a Pathé nine-and-a-half-millimeter before the war. I know I can make pictures a whole lot better than the pornies they’re doing now. See, take a look here. I want you to see this.”

  As Subuyan sat thinking, Hey, I’ll bet I’m really going to see some movie technique now, Banteki brought out a reel of ancient nine-and-a-half-millimeter film, cracked and riddled with holes; and as Subuyan eagerly began to inspect it frame by frame through a viewer, no projector being available, he was taken aback to discover that he was looking at quite ordinary mountain scenery. But, nonetheless, Banteki’s enthusiasm boded well.

  The technical side of things was taken care of. Now the problem was talent. The woman whom Banteki had used as a model before had recently left her husband and taken a job as a maid at an inn. So offer her, say, ten thousand, and that would probably do it. As for a man, however … Banteki bent his head reflectively for a few moments; and then, raising it, he said: “What the hell, I’ll just do it myself.”

  The conversation had proceeded marvelously well, and just at the moment that they were going out the door, exultant at the prospect of making millions, there galloped in front of them as though a fair omen, setting the dust flying, white blouse tucked into bloomers, a group of about sixty schoolgirls.

  “My God, look at that! Look at those legs! Luscious!”

  Banteki, too, goggled in rapture. “Are they built! They’re going to bust out of those blouses.”

  “Hey, c’mon! Let’s run after them. It’s good exercise. C’mon, let’s go.”

  In an instant the two of them, as though drawn through the air by the schoolgirls’ exuberant buttocks and bouncing breasts, were running as though transformed. They kept up this pace for about six hundred yards until they came to the school, where, classes having already ended, some girls were cleaning the yard, others were loitering about chattering, others were hard at a volleyball game, and the newly arrived bloomer contingent, still t
irelessly at it, was running around the yard.

  “Nice view, uh?”

  “You said it. It’s an all-girls’ school and so you don’t see anything but what’s worth looking at.”

  “I wonder how many pupils?”

  “About two thousand, huh? All virgins, you suppose?”

  “No, no. Even ninety per cent would be pretty high. And this school is really strict, they say.”

  “Well, at ninety per cent, that would make eighteen hundred virgins, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yeah, that’d be it.”

  “Hmmm. For a real, bona-fide virgin, how much could you charge?”

  “Didn’t you say that the fee for a virgin impersonator is fifteen thousand? So a real one should go at maybe two hundred thousand.”

  “So if you multiply eighteen hundred by two hundred thousand …”

  “You get three hundred and sixty million. That’s exactly a million American dollars, isn’t it?”

  “Three hundred and sixty million! Damn, think of it! If we could take over and get our ten per cent, we’d get thirty-six million.”

  “And it’s all going to waste!”

  “I can’t stand it. My God! To be the principal of a girls’ school!”

  “Are you kidding, Subuyan? What would happen if somebody like you was ever the principal at a place like this?”

  “I know, Banteki, but … eighteen hundred cherries!” Subuyan was taken with a vision of eighteen hundred hymens fluttering down through the air like so many scattered blossoms.

  “You can even sell hairs.”

  “Sell hairs? What do you mean?”