The Pornographers Page 5

  After that Banteki had pored assiduously over the best pornographic books for inspiration; but still, with eight minutes of every twelve-minute film given over totally to sexual intercourse, just what was one supposed to say during this period? Finally Banteki had gotten an inspiration and spoken to Cocky.

  “Say, do you know of any benshi still around?”

  Cocky had replied that indeed he did know of one of these artists, a man who had enjoyed not a little fame in the Tokyo of years before. He said he would be glad to ask him, but by all means it would be necessary to obtain the services of a violinist, too, since a benshi could not be expected to work without an accompanist, a bit of knowledge which properly belonged to Cocky as one born before the era of silent films. He had been enthusiastic.

  “Hey, this is going to go over big! And between reels how about me walking around selling things: ‘Good pictures! Red-hot books! Rubbers with ticklers! Whattaya say, gentlemen?’ ”

  The place hired by the advertising agency sponsoring the show was a key club near Tennoji Station, and arrangements had also been made to get a violinist. Subuyan went with Cocky to meet the benshi at a hotel in Nakanoshima; and Banteki went on ahead to the club in order to make all the necessary preparations, such as putting up notices and furnishing a desk and a water glass for the benshi. The latter’s name was Joyboy Toyama, a gentleman whose youthful appearance made him seem scarcely more than sixty. With his old-fashioned, finely tailored wool suit, his vest adorned with a gold watch chain, he gave off an aura of quiet dignity.

  “Sensei, you’ll have to excuse us, asking your kind assistance in so absurd a matter.”

  As Subuyan bowed politely, the benshi laughed affably, saying that Cocky had given him a general idea of what was expected of him.

  “It would have been nice if I could have seen the previews. But it really doesn’t matter. I’ve ad-libbed often enough in my time.”

  The admiring Subuyan, displaying the most extreme deference, then conducted him directly to the club. There Joyboy addressed himself to the thirty-odd guests who filled every one of the several rows of chairs, which had transformed the hall into a movie theater.

  “Gentlemen—honored guests, shall I say? To all of you who have deigned to come here tonight creating such a pleasant hubbub in our midst, I have the honor of representing those undertaking to present this entertainment and on their behalf bid you the sincerest and most heartfelt of welcomes.” With masterful ease, then, did he overleap the gap of thirty years. “Tonight we offer for your discriminating pleasure three cinematic gems: The Passionate Pilgrims, The Massage, and When a Woman’s Alone! I myself, Joyboy Toyama, inept and unworthy though I be, will serve as your faithful and most vocal guide throughout, working my jaws to the utmost on your behalf—for which endeavor I now most humbly solicit your hearty and manifest approval.”

  He bowed to a tumultuous burst of clapping, the lights went out, and The Passionate Pilgrims began to flicker upon the screen.

  “He really got to them. Just what you’d expect from a real pro,” said Subuyan.

  “I set up the mike. We’ll get it on tape and use it again.” Banteki wasn’t the man to let such an occasion slip by. Cocky, however, was content to sit there and sip his whiskey.

  “Is sex all of life or is life all sex? Whichever it is, while it’s there we know we’re living. Right, gentlemen? But deign to forgive my presumption in daring to tell what you know so well already.” Marshaling his syllables in the flamboyant cadences of a more heroic era, Joyboy introduced the film as the violinist accompanied him with “Nature’s Fair Bosom.”

  On screen, in the room of an inn, a guest is in the preliminary stages of seducing the maid. He grabs her hand. He passes her some money. He grasps her shoulders, lays his head against her breast, and the tempo increases as now they start to go at it in earnest; but—what can be the matter?—not a single comment.

  “What’s the matter with him anyway?”

  “Well, even a benshi’s not supposed to talk all the time. You’ve got to leave intervals, you know.”

  Cocky did his best to defend his protégé; but even as the action became more frenzied and the man had reached the point where he had the woman laid out and was working various combinations, Joyboy merely sat there without a word. And this was the time when according to the agreement he was supposed to be bringing to bear all his erudition to explain that this was the pillow-of-waves position, this was the falling-pine approach, or whatever it happened to be. But Joyboy, his face lit by the rays reflected from the screen, leaned comfortably back in his chair, doing no more than occasionally clearing his throat. The violinist, too—who, however, had the excuse of being young—had become engrossed by the drama on screen; for “The Gondolier’s Song” with which he followed “Nature’s Fair Bosom” had stopped.

  Subuyan quivered with indignation but could do nothing while the film was running. As it turned out, aside from the introduction, the only sound that Joyboy uttered during the entire first reel came at the moment when the hero laid bare an especially voluptuous portion of the heroine’s abundance. “Look at that. Look at that.” He sighed and cleared his throat; but rather than a commentary, this was in truth no more than a simple expression of heartfelt admiration.

  “Sensei, I don’t know how to put this, but it’s just not going over.” Subuyan accompanied Joyboy to the men’s room between reels and took the occasion to admonish him quite candidly.

  “I see, I see. But, well, if you talk too much, you take all the fun out of it for them.”

  “Yeah, yeah, but just saying ‘Look at that! Look at that!’ and nothing else just won’t do, Sensei. Have a little fun with it. Use foreign words if you like. Like, you know, for example, ‘If you had a nice sausage the size of that long thing there, how much would it sell for? Think a butcher could get five hundred for one?’ So play it that way, why don’t you? And, Sensei, a fellow like you must have gotten plenty of it in your time. So you know all the different kinds of noises a woman makes just then, huh? The high-pitched voice and that? Do it, will you? I really would appreciate it if you’d come through that way for us.” Pleading, cajoling, Subuyan pressed the attack.

  The admission charge for these three films, rented for the usual fee of twelve thousand yen, had just this once been raised to the exorbitant price of two thousand per man, the only justification for which was the advertised presence of the benshi. Furthermore, tonight’s clientele were an elite group accustomed to shout out quite appropriate comments of their own during a screening; and unfortunately the degree of discerning sophistication they showed at such times far surpassed anything that poor Joyboy had displayed so far tonight. It wasn’t just a matter of the money involved. Rather, these gentlemen had come tonight, Subuyan thought, trusting his judgment; and now he was unable to look them in the face.

  “Now really give it to them and stir them up.”

  Joyboy heard Subuyan’s final exhortation with no sign of perturbation. Then the lights went out; and the second film, The Massage, got underway with a close-up of a woman’s bare leg.

  “You gentlemen are no doubt familiar with the great Junichiro Tanizaki’s magnificent novel The Fool in Love, and as you well remember, the white flesh of the heroine, Naomi—”

  “What the hell does the great Junichiro Tanizaki have to do with it! Can’t he come right out and say look how thick the hair is or how thin it is or some other damn thing?”

  Despite all Subuyan’s pleading, Joyboy came through as he had been asked in only two instances, uttering a high-pitched “Oh, oh, I’ll die! I’ll die” and “I’m ruined, I’m ruined!”

  After it was all over, the clients were, of course, reluctant to voice their displeasure in front of Joyboy himself; but when it came time to pay, the secretary did not mince words with Subuyan.

  “Don’t you think that two thousand yen was a little high?”

  So finally they agreed on fifteen hundred; and of the fifty-four thousand net, Joy
boy, though protesting, “My, my, this is far more than I deserve,” unhesitatingly snatched his promised twenty thousand. Then it was a matter of paying Banteki and Cocky, after which the full awareness of the debacle’s extent settled down upon Subuyan, making him weary with a weariness far beyond that which the night’s activities would ordinarily have called for.

  • • •

  “He wasn’t worth shit, that son of a bitch! I could have done it better than him.” In an attempt to forget his woes, the drunken Subuyan was taking the role of benshi at a reshowing of the films at Banteki’s apartment, into which they all had sailed for the conviviality which customarily followed a night’s work, heaping abuse as he did so upon Joyboy in a voice totally oblivious of the neighbors.

  Banteki, however, was preoccupied with assembling a dream cast for pornographic dubbing.

  “Yeah, if I really were to go into the thing, what I’d like to do would be to get somebody like that guy who plays Eliot Ness in “The Untouchables” for the man. And for the woman—I’ll bet Kyoko Kishida would be just the thing.”

  Meanwhile, Cocky, chanting sonorously through his nose, was solemnly invoking, as was his habit, some of the hundred thousand gods.

  “Lo in ages past, ye gods who descended to our mountain peaks, august Sumemutsu, sovereign Kamuromi, thou who shaped the world, thou whose deeds are glorified forever at the shrines of Amazu and Kunizu, deign to give ear to the humble petition which I dare to offer in the sight of all the gods.”

  Subuyan demanded to know what the hell that was, and Cocky informed him that it was the great purification prayer intoned every New Year’s Eve. At any rate, they had come through another year without major mishap.

  II

  NEW YEAR’S DAY is New Year’s Day, even if a man does happen to be a pornographer. And so, with Keiko and Oharu, Subuyan exchanged the traditional cup of spiced saké and, as head of the household, delivered the exhortation expected from him at the start of another year.

  “My lucky year’s come up again, and this time it’s going to mean something. I’m going to hit it. I can just feel it in my bones.”

  “Hit it? What are you going to hit?” Keiko asked coldly.

  “Well, honey, I’m going to—” Subuyan suddenly stopped short. Obviously it wouldn’t do at this point to disclose his intentions to go into the production of pornographic movies.

  “What say we leave it to later, huh? You just trust me, Keiko,” Subuyan said, his voice waxing affectionate. “If you’re thinking of going to college, you’ve got no worries. I’ll send you.”

  “Me? I’m not going to college.”

  “Okay, then go to work if you want. Then get married. And when you do, I’ll furnish you with everything you need for the house—nothing but top-quality stuff.”

  “My goodness, how you’re rushing things! She’s just barely entered senior high.” But Oharu too was in good spirits.

  “I’ve got to go over to my teacher’s place to wish him a happy new year.” Keiko got up to go, obviously unmoved by Subuyan’s promises; but Oharu stopped her.

  “Can’t you stay around for just a little while? Here it is New Year’s Day.”

  “Oh, let her go. It’s her teacher’s house, after all. So there’s no reason why she shouldn’t go.”

  “I might get back a little late. The thing is, too, he’ll probably give me some saké.”

  “Saké?”

  “Yeah. It’s kind of risky maybe. He’s a bachelor.” Whatever her motive, Keiko was pressing home the issue.

  “Well, a little bit won’t do any harm; but if you take too much of it, you won’t feel so good.”

  “Feel good or not feel good—the big thing is that New Year’s is the most risky time for high-school girls, they say.” Keiko stared hard at the startled Subuyan as she rattled on. “The seniors told us to go ahead and go to the men teachers’ houses but to watch our step. You got on a kimono, not a uniform, and that really stirs the men up, they told us. They’re liable to pat you on the breasts, and there’re some teachers who’ll do a whole lot worse than that.”

  “Now wait a minute, Keiko, I think you’re exaggerating.” Subuyan was quite shaken. Just to think of it! Even though his work didn’t bring in nearly that much money, he was sacrificing to send his daughter to an all-girls’ school, whose very name, Chrysanthemum Dew, was redolent of purity. And here there were teachers who couldn’t keep their hands off the girls!

  “There are always a whole lot of juniors and seniors who lose their virginity at New Year’s,” Keiko persisted.

  “Now just how would you know about that?”

  “Why you can tell during gym classes. They’re shaped different.”

  “There’s that many girls who fool around with men?” Subuyan was completely enthralled by this time, and his fascination for the topic upset Oharu.

  “Keiko, honey, please stop such nasty talk. As long as a person does what’s right, you don’t have to worry about how others behave.”

  “And there’s nothing so strange about Lesbianism at school either,” Keiko chattered on tranquilly. “I guess it happens because there’re no boys around and everybody’s so curious about things.”

  “Lesbianism! How do they go about that?”

  “Naughty, naughty! Well, all I know is that the girls say that the Lesbians always keep the nails on their middle and index fingers cut short.”

  Instinctively, Subuyan cast a quick glance at his own fingers and then became flustered.

  “Keiko, I hope you at least are behaving yourself.”

  “I don’t know—what would you say?” Carelessly tossing off her words, Keiko stood up, and Subuyan found his gaze irresistibly drawn to her full, already quite womanly hips. Oharu felt compelled to intervene in a low voice.

  “Dear, you’ve got such an odd look.”

  Poor Oharu! In contrast to Keiko her emaciated condition was all too obvious despite the heavy holiday make-up covering her face.

  “Well, don’t be late, and leave that saké alone,” Subuyan admonished the girl sternly, as she stood with her coat draped over her shoulders.

  “Oh, don’t worry about me,” she replied as she went out. “This is my period.”

  Subuyan, routed on every front, was totally at a loss. And come to think of it, this was the first time a topic like this had ever arisen between him and Keiko.

  “The little bitch—she’s really hot for it!” he muttered under his breath. Then, suddenly and inexplicably feeling the urge upon him, he took Oharu in his arms right on the spot. As he did so there suddenly flashed across his mind how the other boys used to tease him pitilessly about his being born in early October. “Your mother got it put to her at a New Year’s party!” they’d shout at him.

  “When you think of it, Oharu, the only fun people get out of life comes from eating and from this. If they can’t do this, no matter how proud a guy might be about being an executive or something, he’s got no reason for living. People buy hormone pills and tonics at the drugstore, don’t they? Well, look, my business is no different from that. You have this guy, and it’s all shrunk up on him, and he looks at some of my pictures or reads these good books I sell him, and—wham!—there it is, standing straight up for him again. I help men out, that’s what I do. You can store up merit doing work like this.”

  Thus, as he caressed Oharu, Subuyan forthrightly proclaimed his principles. True, he had gotten into pornography for the sake of the money; but more recently he had begun to see his profession as a genuine means of alleviating human suffering. The chairman of the board, so pathetically eager for a girl untouched, had been taken in in more ways than one; but still he lived now with the sense that he was truly a conqueror of virgins, and, thanks to this illusion, whenever the fatal moment came, he would die happy. And that old wood dealer in Amagazaki, after hearing Banteki’s smell-of-reality tape, how happily he had chortled: “I did it! I did it!”—an erection for the first time in ten years!

  “Who wo
uld have brought them salvation if it wasn’t for me, Oharu? Isn’t that right? So you see, there’s nothing at all to be ashamed of about this business.”

  As soon as the New Year’s decorations had come down, Banteki began to set in motion the plan for the production of pornographic films. He decided to get underway at once with a film to be titled Solitary Joy, which would delineate a woman’s experimenting pleasurably on her own and so would not require the services of a male actor. Subuyan gazed bewilderedly at the notebook in which Banteki had listed to the smallest detail all the film equipment and miscellaneous material which would be necessary. There were two cameras at sixty-eight thousand yen, a tripod for sixty-five hundred, five lights for six thousand, an exposure meter, film, and so on. Besides all this, a mask of the long-nosed devil Tengu, an ash tray, a glass, a sausage, a beer bottle, a banana, a cologne bottle, bed sheets, tobacco—all totaling a startling hundred thousand yen, to which had to be added the ten thousand to be paid to the woman.

  “The plot goes like this. This woman goes out shopping—we can shoot it near Senbayashi Station—and she’s got this deep sense of frustration. So what happens is that she sees in one of the stores something long and thin, and she makes a thought association, see? And so we go from there to the next scene where she plays with herself.”

  What a bold departure from standard technique! In the usual pornographic film, a room at an inn or a deserted beach or woods was de rigeur. But now to start off by showing a woman shopping in noisy, crowded Senbayashi—there was something that had the smell of reality about it!