The Pornographers Page 7

  The doctor’s decision after the examination was for a termination of pregnancy; and the sooner she entered the hospital and had it over with, the better.

  Keiko stopped every afternoon on the way home from school to visit her mother at the hospital in Moriguchi, and she also took great pains to get Subuyan’s meals for him.

  “This is a lot of trouble for you, Keiko. Why don’t I get a woman to come in?” Subuyan offered one day.

  “It’s okay. Mom’s got trouble enough without worrying about a young woman being here,” Keiko answered, indicating just how much she had taken her mother’s condition to heart.

  Her words struck a chord of misgiving within Subuyan. Call her a daughter, but still the truth of the matter was that he was living under the same roof with a young woman, and there was neither inhibiting blood tie nor third person between them. And then, Keiko’s behavior was puzzling.

  “You’ve got a stiff shoulder there, Keiko? Want me to rub it?”

  “Yeah, would you? But keep away from the erogenous zones. I’m at the age where I get stirred up quick, you know,” she answered tranquilly, flustering Subuyan, who had been making great effort to dissimulate his lecherous instincts.

  Sensing that he was being made a fool of, Subuyan decided to strike back, taking advantage of Keiko’s weak spot, the pornographic book at the bottom of the drawer.

  “Since you have time to be reading a funny sort of book, maybe you might be able to study a little more,” he probed maliciously.

  “Oh, that, you mean, I suppose. That’s for research. A girl’s got to learn all kinds of things for her own protection later,” she answered, her self-possession not shaken in the least.

  Subuyan’s mind raced madly. So she’d like to know all kinds of things, eh? Maybe I could show her some of the films and really get her excited, he thought, feeling a growing itch within him; but when he remembered that Oharu was now in the hosiptal, he realized that there was nothing to do but bear it.

  At the beginning of April, Cocky turned up one day with some remarkable news. He had discovered some new talent for their production, a man and woman who had no tie at all with gangsters and who specialized in performing for private groups. “Pay them forty thousand,” said Cocky, “and they’ll do whatever you want.” The man was somewhere around fifty, and the woman was not only much younger but a real beauty. And they really seemed to be in love with each other.

  Subuyan and Banteki had been making the rounds of bars and Turkish baths, waving money under the noses of women and trying to sign up a likely actress, but the results had been disappointing. And as for a male actor the situation was even less promising. True, there were more than a few seemly bartenders and waiters around; but to go up to one and ask: “How about it, buddy? Would you like to appear in a pornographic movie?” was to run the risk of being knocked out on the spot, and this fear always prevented Subuyan and Banteki from following through.

  “I probably ought to tell you that the woman is not quite all there. In fact, she’s sort of an idiot,” said Cocky.

  “Idiot or not, when they’re doing it, they’re all the same. It’s a deal,” said Subuyan, thoroughly enthused. A new development was that a doctor in Fusé, who had been quite taken with The Bulging Pillar, had expressed himself as willing to advance any amount of money, provided Subuyan and Banteki produced a film tailored to his directions. This doctor had been rendered impotent by diabetes, and therefore his plot concept was not without some bizarre touches.

  “He wants the man to wear spectacles and the girl a middy blouse. The man attacks her while she’s studying—ties her up and then rapes her. He’s not much interested in us showing the last part directly but wants us to give a lot of attention to everything that leads up to it. We got to give him every detail of the woman’s resistance. And if it’s possible, he’d like to have the woman a little on the plump side,” explained Banteki, who had gone over the doctor’s specifications with him. “What this old fart wants, of course, is to watch somebody do the job in his place, and so that’s why he wants the man to wear a doctor’s gown if it can be arranged.” No nuance of the poor lecher’s earnest entreaty had escaped Banteki. “So the question is how soon can we get to it. Our customer is really anxious for us to start in.”

  Oharu’s therapeutic abortion, however, was soon to take place. The doctors at the Moriguchi hospital had decided that since the fetus had already attained such a large size it would not be advisable to perform the abortion by curettage but that a method of artificially induced birth would be best, one which would take close to twenty hours. At any rate, starting work on the film was out of the question while this was pending.

  Subuyan outlined the operation in detail to Cocky and Banteki, according to the explanation the doctor had given him.

  “So what they do then is to tie this string around the mouth of the balloon and pull it like this.” Subuyan demonstrated, as though drawing a string out from his crotch. “Then they put this string through a pulley, and then—how would you say it—just like with a bucket in a well, they add weights to the end of the string.” Then it was a matter of increasing the weight bit by bit until it was up to ten kilograms, at which point the tension began to pull out the balloon; and the opening of the womb, of course, widened until the balloon emerged with a plop, to be followed immediately by the not so happily born fetus, fated to die within a few moments. Anyway it would be brought into the world by what was reputed to be the most natural method yet developed for pregnancy termination.

  “This is what you could really call being on a string,” said Subuyan, making a pun on a term meaning gangster-controlled, a bad joke that roused a laugh from neither Banteki nor Cocky.

  “If they can do it so nice, couldn’t they make the poor baby live somehow?” wondered Cocky.

  But Banteki admonished him with a brusque wave of his hand. “Don’t waste your sympathy there. Think of Subuyan’s poor wife and all she’ll have to go through, pulled with that string.”

  Three days later, just as the doctor had explained, the five-month fetus, drawn after the balloon, came reluctantly out. Oharu’s condition seemed excellent, but unforeseen peril lay ahead. As for the disposition of the fetus, Subuyan had thought that the hospital would certainly attend to that, but a few words from the doctor gave him pause. “As the father, what would you say to burying this unfortunate infant in your family plot?” he was asked.

  “Well, Doctor, to tell the truth, I had pretty much decided to ask if I could leave all that to the hospital here, but then … well, when I took a look at him in that cold little plastic case … well, what I mean is that, kid though he was, he was a man and had all the equipment. There it was, penis and all, and I had a sudden change of heart. So it’s all right. I’ll do as you say and take him with me.”

  Now, in a subdued tone of voice, Subuyan was asking Banteki’s advice. The boy’s tiny body lay in a syringe case, silent testimony to how ephemeral life is.

  “What should I do?” he asked, but this time even the ever-inventive Banteki was at a loss.

  “Could you bury him?”

  “No, no, that’s out,” said Cocky forcefully. “No matter how deep, the dogs will smell it and dig it up.”

  “He’s a man, huh?” asked Cocky after a pause. And when Subuyan nodded, “Well, if he’s a man, what do you say we bury him at sea? A corpse pickled in seawater—there’s a manly concept for you,” Cocky declared.

  “Burial at sea? Do we have to go all the way to the ocean?” asked Subuyan.

  “No, the Yodo River’s good enough. It’s pretty dirty around here, but if we go upstream a ways the water gets sort of clean. The three of us will bury him, okay?”

  The next day the three walked solemnly across the field bordering the bank of the Yodo, Banteki and Cocky following Subuyan, who clutched firmly the Yamamoto Seaweed can, in which, together with some earth, lay the five-month-old fetus. At the edge of the river, the three removed their shoes and stepped into
the water, which reached their knees and which, now in late spring, was warm enough at the surface but chilling beneath.

  “Subuyan, from now on it gets pretty deep. So I guess this is good enough. You’d better throw it in,” said Cocky.

  Subuyan was all at once overwhelmed with regret. “This is really sad. Here he had a little penis and everything, a regular man. May we all be forgiven our sins,” he muttered, keeping back his tears; and then with a decisive gesture, he threw the can. The same instant Cocky barked an order: “Reverence!” and all three bowed with palms pressed together. Finally Cocky, a former soldier in the imperial army, skillfully simulating a bugle, solemnly hummed a few bars of taps. The three stood perfectly still for a few moments as the bright sunshine poured down upon them. The white smoke from their cigarettes and the yellow spring flowers that lined the banks gave a touch of color to the passing of this nameless infant.

  On the way home Subuyan stopped in at the hospital. He found Oharu’s mood quite the contrary of his own somber one. Nothing at all seemed to be amiss in her world.

  “Oh! I feel just like a heavy weight slid off my shoulders. My stomach got empty so quick. It feels so empty!”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear it,” said Subuyan in reply, but his thoughts were running in another direction. A mother really can be coldblooded, I guess—It looks like she forgot all about the kid, he mused. Then, reflecting upon his own mother’s behavior, Subuyan found himself feeling a certain mistrust toward women in general. But then, of course, Oharu knew nothing at all of the circumstances of the river burial.

  “He would have been your son, Subuyan, wouldn’t he? Well, then, when he got big, it’d have been a sure thing that he’d go for pornography. So as a kind of prayer, then, for his eternal rest, let’s get to it and make some good blue films,” said Cocky, resorting to a most novel form of encouragement. It had its effect upon Subuyan, however, and gradually he started to become his old self.

  “What do you say to this? I was thinking that from now on it would be a good thing to hire an assistant,” said Banteki. Using two more cameras would make it possible to vary the angles to such a degree that Banteki could make at least one more film with a different story line during the editing process, even though the actors would collect only one fee. Therefore, on the basis of greater efficiency, Banteki, in his joint capacity of cameraman-promoter, vigorously urged the necessity of hiring an assistant.

  “But if you just go around picking up anybody at all, you’re in for trouble,” grumbled Subuyan, and his misgivings were not without foundation. Almost always when pornographers landed in the clutches of the police, this misfortune was due either to a falling-out among themselves or else to a newly hired man’s carelessly blabbing to a hotel maid or other aquaintance.

  “In this case, I don’t think there’s any worry, Subuyan. There’s this hack writer living in Sekimé. I think you must have handled some of his stuff before, Confessions of a Mattress, I think, and a book called Passion’s Wardrobe or something like that. This guy is not doing so well now because his books won’t sell, and he doesn’t know how to do anything else. So he’s a professional like us, you see, and since he’s a writer he ought to be able to help us out on the stories.”

  Since the doctor in Fusé was willing to advance so much money, the profit on a single film was certain. But at the same time to turn out another one on the sly—there was a prospect worth taking the risk which hiring another man entailed.

  “If you’re still worried, how about this? We’ll get Cocky and go and see this guy. He likes to play Mah Jongg. So we’ll say we’ve come over for a game, and then you can size him up. If you think he’s all right, I’ll talk to him.”

  The hack writer’s tiny room was near Sekimé Station, just above a paint shop, and had all the marks of advanced destitution flush upon it. The ancestral furniture in evidence was limited to one battered brown chest of drawers. However, Hack himself, as everyone called him, was another matter, a giant well over six feet; the confines of his room must have forced him to sleep on a diagonal. He bowed profusely upon being introduced: “I’m just the same height as the wrestler Sadanoyama.”

  “Well, now, I should think that even for a professional like you, it must take a lot out of you to turn out stories one after another,” said Subuyan, trying a bit of flattery to start things off. But Hack seemed stricken with embarrassment and muttered something unintelligible.

  Subuyan made another attempt. “How do you go about thinking them up? I wouldn’t have the least idea how to go about it.”

  Hack sat up a bit straighter before answering.

  “Well, now, the thing of it is, the secret of my work is my reverence for my dead mother,” he said, his expression growing earnest. “You might say that I want to wipe out something shameful in the past for my mother’s sake. She was frigid, you see. And there’s nothing more pitiful than a frigid woman. Even though I was no more than a kid I just felt with all my heart how bad it was for her.”

  “You mean a kid could understand something like that?” asked Cocky, leaning forward with keen interest.

  “I understood it, I tell you.” The quickly aroused Hack now began to hold forth with a voluble apologia, which, however, Banteki was to miss since he had gone out to rent the Mah Jongg equipment.

  The earliest memory Hack had of his mother was that of her underneath a man. She had left her husband and, with her three-year-old son, had gone to live as the mistress of a rice speculator. This gentleman, whether Hack was asleep beside his mother or not, hadn’t hesitated to throw himself on top of her; and his mother, in order to protect her son’s innocence, had done her best to empty herself of all feeling.

  “She did it all the time, and you might say that it finally became second nature to her. She really became frigid. I used to hear her grinding her teeth so many times beside me, and I knew just what was going on. Even though I was a kid, I knew that I had to pretend to be sleeping through it all, and so I kept my eyes shut tight. I remember that the old man was always muttering, ‘Like ice. She’s cold as a cake of ice.’ And then afterward, when she’d turn toward me and I could feel how warm her chest and hands were, I used to wonder what he meant.”

  Probably because of her iciness, this affair had come to an end about the time that Hack had started school, and his mother had begun to go from man to man.

  “It wasn’t that she was a slut or anything like that. It was just that even though she didn’t have to fake being frigid any more, she had already killed something inside herself and had cut herself off from the only joy a woman has. When I got out of high school, I knew just the way people were and I knew what they must have thought of my mother running around with all her thick make-up on. But I wasn’t ashamed of her. One night she got back smelling of saké after I had gone to bed, and she threw herself down on the quilt beside me without even untying her obi. Her eyes were looking at me and were nothing more than slits, just like they were when the old man used to hold her, eyes with no light at all in them. The eyes of a frigid woman. The eyes of a poor, miserable frigid woman, who had got that way trying to protect her little boy.”

  After the war some sort of painful disease had begun to eat into his mother’s bones and she had become unsteady on her feet and was finally confined to bed. Then, about a year later, while Hack was away at the neighborhood bathhouse, she had died. After that he had gone to work for a small construction company that laid sewer pipe. And during this period, as he was idly putting together some written reflections on his dead mother, the person he was writing about had evolved, somehow or other, into a figure quite the opposite of her, a woman who writhed passionately in the arms of her lovers and cried out with the joy of life, heedless of all restraint.

  “Well, would you say then, Sensei, that the woman who appears in all your works is basically your mother?” asked Subuyan, avidly pursuing the matter.

  “No, I wouldn’t say that exactly. Look at it this way: what I do is try to pi
cture just as it is, in the raw like, the kind of woman’s passion that Mom missed out on. And for me, her kid, to do this is a kind of prayer offering for her eternal rest, do you see?”

  At any rate, one day a fragment of this sort had been discovered by the foreman, who found it most stimulating. “Write some more like this,” he had told Hack, “and I’ll give you fifty yen.” For the eighteen-year-old Hack in 1947, this was a huge sum; and in his time off work he wrote as much as he could and saved the money. And so it came about that he eventually had attained some reputation in the field.

  “But there’s no money in it now. There’s just no market for pornographic books.”

  “Now don’t be so pessimistic. I don’t pretend to any great importance in this field, but I do manage to make my way,” put in Subuyan modestly.

  Actually, there was no need for Hack to have gone so far as to confess that there was nothing in it now. One look at his room, where there wasn’t even a teacup to adorn his style of living, told more than enough. As recently as five years before, he had been able to pick up ten orders or so a month at ten thousand each for fifty-page sketches. But now the bottom had fallen out, and blame could be laid neither to a depression nor to Hack’s skill having worn thin.

  “The whole trouble is that young people nowadays just aren’t educated right.” Hack had had the unhappy experience of going to the cheap back-alley printers who handled pornographic books and discovering that the young men who worked in these shops were unable to understand his sentences.

  “Hey, mister, what’s this ‘jade gate’ business?” they would ask. And after Hack had given an exhaustive explanation, “Oh, you mean the labia minora, huh?” they’d reply. The same went for “crystal inlet,” “moist pearl,” “swan’s perch,” and all the other vocabulary sanctified by tradition. None of it registered with these young men, who seemed to be familiar only with ridiculous and colorless terminology like “clitoris” and “secretion of Bartholin’s gland.” Hack did his best to stand up for the old terminology, but the printers, complaining that it was too much trouble to do right now, would put his work aside, and as a result, he was left high and dry every time.