“A real desperado,” J said passionately. “Aren’t we going to help him?”
“Yes, let’s rescue him if we can,” the old man answered. Side by side they approached the man who had caught the youth. They were pale with excitement, as if they were the ones being rescued.
“We’ll give him to the police, the rotten chikan,” the old man said to the indignant man who was holding him. The old man’s cheeks were stiff with tension, but he finally managed a slight smile and tried to soften his glittering eyes, which were glazed like a hawk’s. The captor looked like a firefighter, but J’s friend’s imposing physique didn’t compare unfavorably. Gently but firmly, the older man overcame the young one. The old man’s physical bearing had always fascinated J, and he felt vaguely jealous of the masses of muscle he must have had in his thirties. But J—and J only—could also see that the blades of dissatisfaction were solidly planted in this wild old bull and constantly shivering like the tentacles of bog moss.
“A pervert like this deserves a good beating, doing that to an innocent girl!” The self-righteous citizen had begun to overact.
The wrinkled skin around the old man’s eyes was the color of dead leaves, but in an instant of fierce anger, he blushed. The other, mistaking the old man’s anger for sympathy with his own indignation, gave him a good-natured nod. J noted how the old man’s face, red with anger, resembled the dog on the Gordon’s Gin label—it was a resemblance he had noticed the day he first met the old man.
J intervened before the old man got out of hand. “We’ll hand him over to the police. If you’ll give me your card, we’ll let the chief know that it was really you who caught him.”
“It is a pleasure to meet people like you who believe in justice. If I had the time, I’d go to the police with you. The damned chikan!” the middle-aged man said. He took a creased old business card from the wallet in his inside pocket and handed it to J.
The old man and J held their captive from both sides. They felt his trembling against their sides and hips. “Don’t cry, and don’t be so stupid as to scream or beg,” J whispered in a voice which sounded only in the back of his throat, as the boy shook silently with his eyes downcast. His opponent was comforting the sobbing girl whose orange coat was stained. When he tired to wipe the semen off with his mouse-gray handkerchief, the girl started to scream again. She was pale and seemed about to vomit up bile. The passengers who’d gathered around them laughed in happy and excited voices. For J, seeing this hurt, ugly girl was the only thing that made him feel slightly repelled by the boy who was the cause of this. Why had he rubbed his penis against a girl who was so repulsive and self-righteous and, at the same time, so miserably frightened?
“Listen, miss, this sort of thing won’t get you pregnant and you haven’t lost your virginity. You are still pure,” the man whispered to the girl. His efforts to win himself further glory made the other passengers laugh again. Only now did J and the old man realize that the girl’s benefactor smelled of alcohol.
At the next station, the old man and J took the boy’s arms and stepped down onto the platform. When the door closed, the departing man waved and smiled, baring his teeth like a monkey. They looked like yellow grains of Indian corn. J tore up the man’s business card and threw it away. Then, he turned to the train and, deadly serious, pulled down his lower eyelid to show him the red eye of contempt. Without waiting to see the man’s reaction, J and the old man took the boy’s arms again (they looked, now, like a happy tri-generational family). As they followed the platform to the stairs, J and the old man took turns giving him advice.
“Your methods are a total mess. It’d be a wonder if you didn’t get caught. Why aren’t you a little more careful?”
“Besides, you’re looking for trouble if you don’t do it when there are more people on the train. If you want that kind of excitement, you have to do it when the train is packed.”
The old man and J dropped the boy’s arms, stopped, and let him go on walking. The rescue had succeeded. Even though he was free, the young man took two or three more steps in the same posture, as if still restrained. Then he paused abruptly and turned around, looking at the old man and J suspiciously. His small nose was no longer bulging, and his eyes were no longer those of a sick dog. The physical serenity that comes after orgasm had given an angelic look to his large face. He looked like a dying martyr after an ordeal, a saint whose sufferings had ended.
“You guys are letting me . . . ?” he asked in a shrill voice. He was unsure, ready to run at any moment.
“No, we’re not going to turn you over to the police. That was just a stupid joke,” J stammered, as if admitting something difficult. The boy was so serious that his rescuers almost felt ashamed of themselves.
“Today I’d made up my mind to get caught. I wanted to suffer. I meant it, and I went to the point of no return,” he said. It was a kind of challenge.
J and the old man looked at each other amazed. When J saw his friend finally manage a smile, he reluctantly smiled himself. It was the smile of a magnanimous boxer who appreciates the strength of his opponent after being fooled by a quick punch to his weak spot. Both were now curious and they gave the boy a more careful look. There was something irritated and resentful about him, but also something sad. The post-orgasmic calm, which had given him the appearance of a gentle saint a few moments before, had disappeared, and the dark shadow of an extremely sharp discontent had replaced it.
“I’m not wearing anything but this coat and these boots. I really suffered before I finally made up my mind to go out like this. And making that final leap into pleasure, with everyone watching me, was as frightening an adventure as closing my eyes and letting go of the handlebars when I’m on a bike doing eighty. I’m like a member of a suicide squad, and you guys turn me into a game?”
Tears filled his bloodshot eyes. Suddenly he threw a punch at J, who ruthlessly blocked his forearm, using the boxing techniques he’d learned in college. Groaning in pain, the boy dropped his arms limply and cried a little.
“If you like, we can still hand you over to the subway guards or the police,” J threatened. Panting, he glared at the boy and rubbed his wrists, which were starting to turn red.
“That won’t be necessary,” the boy said. His bleary eyes openly showed signs again of the fear from which he had momentarily recovered.
J saw that the boy was very agitated and emotionally unbalanced, as if he had taken sleeping pills and had yet to fall asleep. This could have been due to some new drug that J didn’t know about, but it reminded him of the terribly appealing white tablets of a German sleeping drug to which he had become hopelessly addicted several years earlier. It was the drug J’s first wife had used to kill herself. After her death that night, J had tried in vain to redeem himself, but he finally fell into the depths of the fearful unconscious . . .
J’s memories took over and dissipated his anger at the boy trying to hit him. Finally, J was smiling.
“Instead of going to the police, why not come to our usual drinking place?” J said with a smile. “It’s a bar in a hotel in Unebi-machi.”
“I’ll go as long as you guys aren’t queer. I am not some cute little chick that does fairies, you know,” the boy said with a sneer.
J didn’t answer. He hadn’t slept with a lover of the same sex for a long time. But still there were times when the sudden craving for a young man’s naked body and penis came upon him. But, he thought in self-punishment, I definitely will not have that kind of exciting sexual relationship again. J absolutely wasn’t the type to think that a homosexual essence exists inherently in a man as a result of his birth and determines that man to be a life-long homosexual.
“We’re not queers, and you can stop calling us ‘you guys,’” the old man said.
The old man, J, and the boy had emerged above ground into the dusk of winter. A bit of snow, carried by an intermittent wind, blew against them with persistent repetition. The boy shivered, and several times he hiccuped.
First, the old man and J took the boy to a clothing store and bought him some underwear. They had to convince him to go into the toilet to put it on. The boy’s lips were swollen blue-black from too much cold and looked like mulberries, and he fell asleep snoring as soon as they got into a taxi. J realized that, after all, he was under the influence of a sleeping drug. The boy slept all the way as the taxi sped through the dangerous snowy evening streets toward Unebi-machi. Occasionally he let out a small yawn and said something in his sleep in a tiny voice. J couldn’t get the meaning of his words, but the old man finally understood.
“He seems to have met a monster in his dream, ‘I’m afraid, I’m afraid,’ he’s saying.”
“Don’t you think it’d be a pretty frightening experience, getting on the subway in nothing but a trench coat and boots? The monster in his dream is probably himself, turned into a chikan. He’s at that age.”
“What do you mean, that age?”
“You know, the age when you have the sensation of fear that feels like there’s a monster alive inside you, waiting to be born. From when you’re eighteen until about twenty-one or -two.”
“I can’t imagine such a deep gap between your age and this boy’s age. I’m sixty. . .” the old man started to say and then fell silent. Once he had fallen silent, the old man seemed to be at a complete loss, and before long, he appeared to be tightly closed off, as though he was covered from head to foot in medieval armor. It happened more often that the old man fell silent in the middle of a conversation. With age, his teeth had become like pumice, but he wouldn’t let the fierce beast of words escape once he’d bitten into it. When that happened, he would purse his lips and remain silent, casting his hawk-like eyes around him. Whenever J saw an old person like him, he would fantasize about what kind of life they’d lived through. J and the old man were “street friends.” J didn’t know anything about the old man’s past or his present position in society. Since they had formed an anti-social relationship, J for his part had never told the old man what kind of person he was either. But J didn’t think that he could tell even himself what kind of person he was at the moment. J assumed that the old man was someone who had gone abroad as a diplomat, or had worked as a politician. He guessed as much because they would sometimes meet beside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the Diet, and when they did, the old man would be escorted respectfully by a government official or Dietman, looking like he’d just left a really spirited dialogue. Nowadays the old man had none of the fishy smell of somebody who’s involved in politics. But that day when he’d spotted J standing and waiting at the stairs leading to the subway at the Diet station, he’d waved his hand toward J with an all-too obvious feeling of release in his face. J had felt as though he was being greeted by an ugly old woman. I’m sixty. . . J thought about the second half of the man’s unfinished sentence. It probably had something to do with old age and death. The old man sometimes talked to J about the fear of death that threatened him, vividly, specifically in the form of cancer or cardiac infarction. I’m sixty, and I know the fearful feeling that the monster called death is rapidly growing inside me: was that what the old man wanted to say? It was as if the old man was giving himself arteriosclerosis of the heart, or he’d secretly stashed a cancer somewhere inside himself, for which an operation would be meaningless, exactly as though he was leaving a precious wine to sleep in a wine cellar. But the old man kept his silence, and didn’t speak directly about it. . .
“Is this boy really a chikan? Is he maybe somebody who can’t help but be a pervert?” J said to the old man with a smile.
“He seems convinced that he is. And the way he operated today was unique. If you talk about perverts the way a sumo commentator would, you’d say that he has a truly idiosyncratic technique.”
“Yes, it sure was unique. That style of attacking while cutting off his path of retreat, it smacked of the overly courageous soldier who has a dangerous suicidal tendency. Still, he’s such a child. He must be all of eighteen. Do you think it’s possible that he’s discovered he can only be a pervert? Or is he one who can’t be satisfied with masturbation when he can’t find a girlfriend, or who’s hysterically afraid of syphilis, or who simply doesn’t have the money to buy a whore? In other words, a case of frustrated desire?”
“No, he’s probably more of a conscious pervert,” the old man said, carefully studying the boy’s sleeping face. J felt that like his own, the old man’s feelings of goodwill toward the boy were growing deeper. Up until that time, J had continued to be shocked by the violence of the old man’s concrete disgust with human beings. He felt that this was the first time since he had become friends from the sidewalk he’d seen him show this kind of magnanimity toward a stranger. Considering the reason why he felt attracted to the boy, J thought it was perhaps because, as the old man had said, his pervert’s method of action today had been truly unique. Certainly the boy was alone, filled with fear, a pathetic pervert. . .
“What he said on the platform, his protest, I don’t think was the inspiration of the moment,” the old man said. “In any case, he’s an interesting boy.”
Dirty snow was piled in heaps like earthworks on both sides of the entrance to the hotel in Unebi-machi. When the old man and J shook the boy awake, he shivered with cold as he saw the dirty snow, and a few tears oozed like gum from between his eyelids.
“Can you walk?” J asked.
“What do you think I am?” the boy said arrogantly, knitting his brows and giving J back a look of reproach.
The uniformed bellboy who opened the hotel door for the three of them dragged his big unsightly overshoes like a pair of weights. They definitely didn’t suit his deep green jacket, or the gold lace frills or his light blue pants. He’d probably been intimidated by the snow. Shivering, they went straight to the bar behind the front desk on the first floor. They were all relieved it had heating. The old man and J arranged a pair of chairs in a fan shape facing the chair where the boy was sitting, as though they’d naturally be keeping an eye on him. The boy reacted.
“I’m sleepy, so I’ll have a whisky,” he said before anyone else could speak. He gave his order to the bellboy, who was still in his overshoes. Both J and the old man asked for the same. Each drank in silence. The boy came back to life almost immediately. The three ordered another round of straight whisky. Trying to save himself some work, the bellboy brought the bottle itself to the table.
“What do you want to ask me? Or do you want me to say I’m sorry?” the boy said. His defiant attitude hadn’t changed. “Do you have some nasty trick in mind for me?”
“Of course, we’d like to ask you how you got to be a chikan at such a young age. Was it because you wanted to know how hard a girl’s ass is? If that’s it, you could’ve just given your own a feel,” J said, taking up the boy’s challenge.
“You’re asking for it, aren’t you?” the boy said in a hoarse voice. His whole body began to swell with rage like a mongoose that’s come upon a cobra.
“Don’t get excited. We want to ask you why you became a chikan, and what do you think about being one. We’ve never seen one as young as you,” J said.
“I’m a poet,” the boy said proudly.
“A poet?”
“For a long time I’ve been planning to write a great poem called ‘Solemn Tightrope-Walking,’” the boy said with passion. “It’s a poem like a tempest, with perversion as its theme. So there’s a chicken-and-egg relationship between the poem and me as a pervert. I’ve been a pervert since I was kid, so I hoped to write a poem about perversion. And to make it an even greater poem, I’m trying to be the most courageous, desperate pervert of them all.”
J thought of another young poet he had known. That young poet had once been the lover of J’s second wife. While his wife was making her first short film, the lover had been constantly, tenaciously, observing J and his wife in J’s apartment and vacation house and in his Jaguar. He had resentful eyes that lurked in the depths of a fog of incombustible desire.
In the end, it seemed, the young poet didn’t resume his sexual relationship with J’s wife. That pacifist with his starved cat’s eyes had unexpectedly disappeared from J’s world, but what would he be doing now? Had he gone on writing his enervated self-enclosed poetry, trying to pay off the cancer of his unsatisfied desire for J’s wife on the installment plan? Whatever the answer, J thought that this boy probably had a richer talent as a poet. As a person, at least, the boy made a more disturbing impression than the docile, plaintive young poet. Here was a man who, with only a trench coat and boots to protect his nakedness, had ejaculated into a crowd of strangers on the subway!
“What’s it like then, this poem of yours? Have you written a few lines?” the old man asked enthusiastically, his curiosity aroused.
“Written a few lines? Poetry isn’t like that. At least mine isn’t. One day I’ll know that I’ve finished the necessary preparation to write this poem. Then I’ll start writing, one word per second. It’ll take an incredible amount of time, but I won’t stop until it’s finished,” the boy said haughtily.
“But you must have some kind of notes, even if they’re only notes in your memory?” J said.
“Oh, those I have, and I’ve suffered a lot for them. After all, I want to write poetry from experience.”
The boy talked about the concept of his poem endlessly. His eloquence increased as he became more and more intoxicated. Chikans, you can count tens of thousands of them in Tokyo alone, but they’re all solitary, spiritually impoverished matadors of everyday life, filled with a fruitless, dangerous passion, that most solemn of tightrope walkers. . .
With a look on their faces so stern it’s almost beseeching, earnest to the point of ridiculousness, they bare their positions and reputations, at times even their lives to imminent danger. Empty-handed, they act for the merest scrap of trivial passing pleasure. After all, this isn’t exactly a golden age for adventurers, is it? Except for those who have the amazing courage to climb into a space ship and then leave the machines to do whatever they want. For two thousand years mankind has joined forces to rebuild this world into a fully rubber-lined nursery, with all danger nipped in the bud! But chikans can change this safe nursery into a jungle of savage beasts. As if in a religious ritual, with one action the chikan, by putting his fingers on a little girl’s thigh for just an instant, puts everything he’s built up in life so far in jeopardy.