The Pornographers Page 6

  “Now the important thing is that we have to check into an inn somewhere. Now of course, we could use my apartment, but you can’t move the camera around too much there and so you can’t get much variety in your angles, which is something you really have to have. So what I want is two rooms together.”

  “Isn’t that sort of risky?” asked the always fearful Subuyan.

  “Well, we’ll get Cocky to help us. He can go reserve the room for us and tell them that we want it for a Mah-Jongg game. That would do it, don’t you think? If we shoot at night, all the bright lights might attract attention; but if we do it during the day, nobody will notice.” All in all, Banteki’s response was weighed with prudence and manifested perspicacity.

  On a clear, sunny day, the Senbayashi scene was filmed without mishap, despite a certain amount of uneasiness caused by the presence of a fair-sized crowd of onlookers, including not a few hecklers who wanted to know what kind of movie, which TV station, and so on, and even a policeman.

  For the interior scene, they at first decided upon a room in one of the not too highly esteemed inns in Umegae—a choice daring enough since it was just to the rear of Sonezaki Police Headquarters—but when they entered the double room they had reserved, they discovered that the bed was completely surrounded by mirrors, so that Banteki and his camera would inevitably appear in the film. So, again using the Mah Jongg cover, they tried once more, this time picking a place with a comparatively good reputation. The day happened to be January 15, Adults’ Day; and from noon on, the shoe boxes at the entrance were filled to overflowing with men’s and women’s shoes in promiscuous array, symbolic of their owners’ new-won legal freedom—a happy omen which stirred the movie makers to the roots when they came in.

  “Look at that! They must be really going at it!” said someone in admiration.

  This scene was to depict a woman who, in an agony of sexual frustration, tries one device after another—a beer bottle, a sausage, a long-nosed Tengu mask, a banana, a cologne bottle—to stir up some pleasure. Banteki’s direction was incredibly exact and minute.

  “Now this time we have a close-up of your face, see? So I want you to put on this look, like your almost going out of your mind, see.”

  Then he would show her just what he wanted, clenching his teeth and gasping for breath in horrible fashion. At first the model laughed hilariously, but gradually she, too, began to get caught up in the spirit of the thing and moaned as though in ecstasy, finally going so far as to become glassy-eyed. Cocky and Subuyan dithered about, saying try this, try that, and from time to time made themselves useful by rearranging the lights as Banteki directed or by wiping the sweat from the model’s forehead.

  “For the bit with the cologne bottle, I think we ought to go into the bathroom—just for the sake of some variety. Cocky, fill the tub with water, will you?” New ideas were always springing from Banteki’s fertile brain.

  “And don’t make it hot, whatever you do. Just tepid. If it’s hot the steam will fog the lens.”

  Since the room was unheated and it was midwinter, it was not surprising that the model lowered her goosepimpled flesh into the water only with extreme reluctance. And if one still had pity to spare, one could bestow it upon Subuyan and Cocky, who were crouched on all fours just beneath the camera puffing frantically away on cigarettes in order to supply the steamy atmosphere so essential to the mood of the scene.

  For a final touch, Banteki placed a glass of water on the mat floor of the adjoining room.

  “Hey, Subuyan. I hate to ask you, but would you jump up and down beside this?”

  When Subuyan demanded to know the why and wherefore of the ritual he was being asked to perform, Banteki explained it. “The thing is that you don’t want to film the action directly all the way through. You do that too much and it doesn’t go over. Here the woman gets all in a frenzy, see, and starts working her hips, and you show that by the water jiggling around, see? Subtle, indirect, you see?”

  So Subuyan, like a good sport, jumped up and down unremittingly in the room adjoining so that the noise wouldn’t be recorded; but when Banteki began to make time-consuming calculations of the proper camera angles, he naturally became fatigued, and Cocky had to relieve him. But finally, after just five hours’ work, the filming was completed.

  The job of developing, as well, fell to Banteki, who did it competently in some lengths of plastic rain gutter. And while the three of them were engaged in editing, arguing heatedly in the midst of a tangle of film the virtues of this or that section, they were interrupted by the janitor, who told Banteki that there was a telephone call for him. And who was it but the model from the day before, quite angry indeed.

  “I’m not kidding, you hear! It hurts a lot—especially when I gotta go.”

  After Banteki was able to get all the particulars from her, he learned that some paint had rubbed off the nose of the Tengu mask and had caused a painful swelling in a vital area. The model demanded five thousand yen for medical expenses.

  The film was edited in masterful fashion. The use of lighting and the delicacy of texture marked a notable advance in works of this genre. Since it was a solo performance, and there was no man involved for the catch-as-catch-can effect usually striven for, the market would be somewhat limited; but still there were customers available to whose taste it would appeal. They set the price at fifty thousand yen. Since not many prints would be made, this initial venture would end in the red; but since the breadth and depth of Banteki’s talent had shone to marvelous advantage, Subuyan felt that, though they were newcomers to the profession, the way lay open before them, bright and promising.

  “You can always get a woman. The headache is trying to find a male actor,” said Banteki, as Subuyan pressed him to start on their second production. “How about yourself? Don’t you have a tool you can be proud of? You take the role.”

  “Are you crazy? I wouldn’t do it no matter how much I was paid,” replied Subuyan in horror, and so another possibility was ruled out.

  “Well, then, Cocky, how about you?”

  “No, not me. I’m not even circumcised. Say, why not just ask some hood? Give one of them twenty thousand or so, and he’d be glad to do it.”

  But Subuyan was against having anything to do with gangsters. Just about the time that he had begun to become a full-fledged pornographer, there had appeared one day at his office a gentleman from a gang active in the north end of Osaka.

  “I beg your pardon, but we’d appreciate it very much if you’d let us in on the distribution of your material.” He had been very polite, but the reputation of his colleagues and the scars on his face said more than enough; and the upshot had been that he had made off at mere cost price with the batch of pictures on which Banteki had gone to such pains to switch faces.

  Most pornographers had tie-ups with gangsters; and, indeed, were it not for gang-controlled organizations, they would have been unable to distribute the large amounts of material they received. But Subuyan had his principles.

  “The whole idea I have in this business is to deal with decent, law-abiding customers—with the organization man, in other words. You have any connection with those hoods, and it’s like getting your hands dirty. I want to maintain an atmosphere of esteem between my clients and myself, and to do that, I’ve got to be part of the same world they live in.” And so except for that single incident, he had kept completely clear of gangsters.

  Then, too, another favorable aspect of dealing only with upright clients was that this made it far less likely that one’s material would end up in the hands of the police. The upper-echelon gangsters made a practice of picking up a bit of small change by passing packs of pictures bought at thirty yen apiece to their underlings for eighty yen or so. These, in turn, operating in the shadowy wholesale district behind the Japan Airline Building or on the grounds of Ohatten Shrine, would peddle their merchandise for perhaps five hundred or a thousand a pack, depending upon the susceptibility of their customers to intimida
tion. Despite their fierce demeanor, these salesmen, once the police got their hands on them, became remarkably cooperative. They were no sooner arrested than they eagerly began to spill everything they knew.

  “Where’d you get the stuff?”

  “Sure, sure, I’ll tell you. I got it from a guy called Subuyan at the back of the Dojima Building.”

  And so it had been that Subuyan first attracted the attention of the police, thanks to the pictures he had so reluctantly handed over to the gangster. He had steered clear of any tie-up with the gangs since then; and he realized that to resort to them now for an actor would only open the way to all sorts of pressure, whether from the gangsters themselves or from the police. Pornographic films would be too tempting a prize for either to pass up.

  “You can’t just look over the scene in a neighborhood bathhouse and walk up to a well-hung guy and say, ‘What about it, buddy?’ ”

  “What the hell! He gets a woman and gets paid for it besides. Put an ad in the paper and all kinds of guys would answer it.”

  They tossed all sorts of suggestions back and forth, but nothing really good materialized. At length the consensus was that Banteki should don a mask and undertake the role himself.

  Then Cocky made an unexpected offer.

  “What do you say we use my brother’s shrine for the filming?”

  “A shrine? A Shinto shrine?”

  “Yeah. I’ve seen an awful lot of these kind of movies, and I never yet saw one that was set in a shrine. Do it there, and you wouldn’t have to worry much about anybody barging in on you, and besides, think of the novelty.”

  Banteki was at once taken with the idea.

  “We’ll make the woman a schoolgirl. I’ll dress like a Shinto priest and rape her. What a sequence!”

  “Hey, be careful! That’s blasphemy,” said Subuyan, not sharing the general enthusiasm.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about! The Japanese gods are all lechers. They’re after women every minute, and there’s nothing they’d go for more than a film like this,” retorted Cocky, reassuring everyone. He was a priest’s son, after all; one had to defer to his theology.

  Banteki once again made up a painstakingly detailed list of items needed and showed it to Subuyan. This time the film would be in color.

  Cocky would furnish the priest’s robes, borrowing them under some pretext or other from his brother.

  “Well, if he’s going to do that, I suppose I could get one of Keiko’s uniforms for the schoolgirl’s outfit,” said Subuyan. Later, taking advantage of Keiko’s absence, he rummaged through her dresser, searching for one of the short-sleeved summer uniforms now out of season. In the process, under the newspaper lining a drawer, he came across a crudely mimeographed book, whose nature, professional that he was, he was able to ascertain at a glance.

  “Now what the hell would an ordinary father do in a situation like this?”

  The shrine where the film was to be made was dedicated to the Emperor Ojin and stood in a grove of trees, just across the lotus pond from Cocky’s shed.

  In Subuyan’s youth his father would take him to the Shrine of Kusonoki for the traditional prayers in the early morning of every New Year’s Day, just after the temple bells had sounded. So now, his scruples still not quieted, he stood with his palms pressed together reverently before doing anything else. But what could he pray for? There seemed to be no common ground between the world of Ojin and that of pornographic films. Cocky, in the meantime, fully at home, had gone into the inner shrine and was bustling about as he noisily chanted one of his favorite blessings.

  “Here’s a light plug over here. We’re lucky. Nowadays even the Sacred Candle is electric,” he said, brushing away the dust as he set the stage in order.

  Banteki presented a memorably exotic sight. As if the Shinto priest’s robes were not enough by themselves, an electric cord dangled from beneath the pleated skirt. This was a remote-control device; for Banteki, with a true artist’s passion, insisted on doing the camera work himself.

  According to the plot, a schoolgirl was to come to pray for something or other; and the priest, after smoothly enticing her into the inner shrine and chanting a prayer over her, vigorously goes at her. The girl’s role would be played by the model who had caught that unhappy infection while starring in the first movie. This would be her second appearance.

  “Well, how about it? Let’s get going,” said Banteki, who, camouflaged with glasses and mustache, proceeded forthwith to plunge boldly into the action, wholly undaunted by the glaring lights. Subuyan too gradually felt his spirits rising; and he hustled about, now urging this camera angle, now that. Still, in the midst of all this—was it the white stripes at the neck of the middy blouse or was it the pleated skirt that provoked the association?—he found himself all at once superimposing the image of Keiko upon that of the figure pinned squirming to the mat; and he felt himself suddenly choke up at the sight of the bared legs and general disarray.

  But then at the height of the action, the hollow sound of the shrine bell suddenly obtruded itself, to the horror of all participants. A devout old lady had come to offer worship at the outer shrine. Subuyan pressed his forefinger to his lips, softly hissing for silence; Banteki and the woman froze at an extremely awkward juncture; and Cocky, presumably with the intention of reassuring the old lady outside, began to give forth with the benediction, which was his forte: “Lo, in ages past, ye gods who descended to our mountain peaks, august Sumemutsu, sovereign Kamuromi, thou who shaped the world …” And the old lady, her innocent faith wholly unscathed, pulled the bell cord once more and, after its hollow toll had subsided, turned and went the way she had come.

  “Hey, let’s work that in!” said Banteki, whose genius it was to capitalize even upon misfortune. A worshipper, in other words, would come just at the crucial moment, and the camera would cut back and forth between the figure wrapped in tranquil prayer and the scene of wild lust being enacted just a door’s width away.

  “Just get out there and pray, that’s all,” ordered Banteki as he and Subuyan thrust Cocky through the door. And so the camera caught Cocky piously tolling the bell, with the lights turned up a bit to give the impression of sunset.

  This film was called The Bulging Pillar, and it was to achieve the reputation of a genre classic.

  March was hectic for Subuyan, since in order to cope with the inroads of the tax office he had to sell more than the usual number of films and so was always coming home late. Sometime toward the end of the month, however, Oharu ventured to bring something to his attention.

  “I’ve been to see the doctor,” she said, her voice hushed as though she were at last breaking out with something she had kept to herself as long as she dared.

  “Well, what’s the story? Do you have to go to the hospital to get made over from top to bottom?” asked Subuyan, thinking that it could be nothing else but the shadow which had appeared in her chest last fall. But he was in for a surprise.

  “I sort of thought that there was something funny, and … I’m going to have a baby, it seems.”

  “A baby?” shouted Subuyan, flabbergasted.

  “I’m sorry,” said Oharu wretchedly, hunching her shoulders in an apologetic bow.

  “ ‘I’m sorry!’ ‘I’m sorry!’ What the hell good does that do? How many months?”

  “About four months, he said.”

  Subuyan professed astonishment that she had suspected nothing up to now, but she replied that because of her sickness she had had no idea that something like this might get started. But, all things considered, Oharu at thirty-nine was a woman in her prime; and part of the blame for carelessness had to be shouldered by Subuyan himself.

  “Well, what are you going to do?”

  “Tomorrow I’m going to get another examination. I’m not young any more, and if that shadow is still pretty bad, I won’t go through with it.” But then Oharu said something more in a very faint voice. “But if you think you really want the baby, the
n I’ll go ahead and have it no matter what.”

  “Don’t be a damned fool! Of course I want a kid, but your safety comes first. You just do as the doctor says. Sure I want a kid, why not? But it’s two different things, you see?”

  Subuyan was unnerved. To have a child of your own! The very thought of an event so novel was earth-shaking.

  The next day, after Oharu had left for the hospital, Subuyan spoke casually to Keiko.

  “What do you think about having a little brother or sister? Would you like it?” He had thought he would surprise her, but her features betrayed nothing of the sort.

  “So it’s that way, huh? I thought so—all the vomiting and that.”

  “Well!” exclaimed Subuyan, astounded. “You don’t miss much, do you?”

  Keiko’s tone took on a challenging ring. “I’m no infant, you know. Maybe my biggest interest right now is to know just how a woman acts and feels if she gets pregnant.” Then, blunter still: “Little brother, little sister—what difference does it make? It’s nothing to me. If she has a baby, she has a baby, okay. But what’s it going to do to Mom if she does? You men, you got nothing to worry about, do you?” she went on, biting her lips savagely, all at once on the verge of hysteria.

  “Look, that’s why your mother went to the hospital, to get a thorough checkup. My big concern, too, is your mother.”

  “If there’s a baby, I won’t love him at all. I’ll hate him! I’ll hate him, you hear?” she shouted, her voice rising all the time. “Wouldn’t it be just fine if Mom had a baby and then died? Then I could do just what I want.” She glared at Subuyan, her eyes filled with tears.

  “What’s the matter, anyway? Take it easy, Keiko. There’s no need to get so worked up.” He put his hand on her shoulder, but she brushed it roughly away.

  “ ‘Don’t touch me,’ huh?” he said. “Okay, have it your own way, but don’t be going crazy like this. Your mother’s the one who’s got to suffer,” he admonished her as she broke into sobs.