Chikans have a terribly profound fear of being discovered and punished, but at the same time, without that feeling of danger, their pleasure is diluted, it becomes vague and attenuated, and in the end it’s nothing at all. The taboo guarantees the pleasure of the adventure to the tightrope-walkers. But when the chikans safely pass their test, in that instant the safe ending destroys the revolutionary meaning the curriculum had when it was still going forward with its results unknown. Eventually the chikans realize that, since there wasn’t really any danger, the feeling of danger that was the true creature of their pleasure up to that point is nothing but a fake. So the pleasure itself, which they only just finished tasting, is a false pleasure. Thus they have to start their barren tightrope-walking all over again, and continue until they’re caught and their lives are in danger. Then, all the dry runs they’ve undergone up to then make the flower of ecstasy bloom.
Chikans usually perform in silence. When they do talk, both their actions and their words amount to nothing but a lot of laughable running around in circles. The chikan is silent, just like a tightrope walker in the circus. But once he’s caught, and the hostile eyes of strangers give him his ID badge as a pervert and his true identity as a pervert is confirmed, he can sometimes launch into a kind of self-advertisement that can be moving. During one of the most violent political upheavals in Japan after the war, one chikan was caught in the middle of a demonstration of a hundred thousand people who’d surrounded the Diet. When he confessed to the police, he said, “Right now a hundred thousand angry political activists are renouncing their sexual arousal. Now is not the time for that, they say. I was going for the ass of a girl, a nobody in that crowd, and the sexual arousal of all one hundred thousand people was apparently concentrated on my privileged fingers and nothing else. My fingers ignited into a fire of ecstatic, supreme bliss. And, even better, it happened in front of that gigantic police force of the armed Fourth Riot Squad!” It is they who are the serious tightrope walkers of everyday life. . .
“Not bad,” the old man said, “You should write your poem. If you need money to publish it, I’ll help you out.” J had been about to say the same thing. A boy who was willing to get on the subway on this winter evening with nothing but a trench coat to protect his naked body and face that danger for the sake of a poem, that tempest that he wanted to describe, a terribly anguished boy who, with that desperate look on his face, had soiled the back of an ugly girl’s fluffy coat by ejaculating on it, wasn’t he what you’d have to call a unique boy, a unique being?
“But the poem forming in my head so far isn’t anything like a tempest,” the boy said unhappily. “It’s what you’d call observational.”
“Isn’t ‘observational’ all right?” J said.
“‘Observational’ doesn’t give a poem the greatness of a tempest,” the boy said, deep in thought, as though he were a veteran when it came to poetry.
“Well, didn’t you take a pretty deep step into the world of your poem today?” J said. “At least you were more than a third-party observer.”
“No, it was no good. I was rescued. So my intense fear and my great courage turned into imitations of themselves because today, I felt like I was anticipating, without any reason, that some lifeboat like you two would appear,” the boy said.
“But you didn’t feel like you were anticipating us until you saw us there. When that public-spirited bogey-man had you, you looked like you were going to have a heart attack any minute,” J consoled the boy, half in jest.
“No, I don’t think so now. I myself am beginning to feel that it’s not true, now that I’ve been rescued. So it was all wrong,” the boy whispered sadly. He sounded dead tired. His childish face looked infinitely gloomy.
J and the old man became silent and just stared, with pity, at the boy. Couldn’t they turn this boy in some other direction, away from the fall into the endless exitless hole that is itself the definition of perversion? Or, because he was burning with desire to write this stormy poem, obsessed by a perversion, should J and the old man have left him in the arms of that despicable, grandiose moralist tied up by the bonds of his own ambition? If they had, he might even now be shivering with cold and shame in a cell in some police station, and be writing, at a single stretch, at a speed of one word per second, for an endlessly long period of time, his poem about “Solemn Tightrope-Walking,” a poem with such violence that it would satisfy him.
“Do you plan to have another try tomorrow at that suicidal adventure with no exit, this time making sure that nobody like us can come to your rescue?” J said.
“Tomorrow? It’s totally out of the question. I am tired, and I think it’s going to take me a long time and a lot more suffering before I can make up my mind about the next adventure. I feel like an idiot who tried to kill himself but was dragged up from the river bottom and, pooh pooh, he started breathing again. His rescuers don’t even bother to think about all the bitter ordeals the idiot experienced before he tried to kill himself. All they do is smile and enjoy the rescue, since they pulled him back into the hell-fires of this world using the fire-rake of humanism.”
“But why are you so stubborn about getting arrested? Aren’t you overestimating the importance of that? Even if you do escape safely, surely that doesn’t do anything to harm the meaning of your adventure, does it? You still acted like a pervert,” the old man said.
“There are probably all kinds of perverts. I am a poet, so I looked at the sample box and adopted the action methods of the most dangerous type,” the boy said, easily evading the old man.
The old man and J looked admiringly at the boy. He certainly gave the impression of being an unfortunate zealot, stuffed full with dangerous and incendiary tension. That was appealing. He seemed to have just passed through the long years of ugliness after escaping the period of infancy. Now he would become more and more beautiful and attractive. But even more than his beauty, the malicious arrogance of the boy had that brilliance particular to his age, and that captured J and the old man.
“When that moralist attacked you, I wanted to give you a shot of camphor so you wouldn’t drop dead of a heart attack. For a brave man who chose the most dangerous way to be a pervert, you were pretty scared, weren’t you?” J said to the boy after a while.
“Was I really that scared? Then maybe I am gradually approaching the true pervert. Not the conscious pervert whom I’ve invented in my mind and designed from head to toe, but the pervert who’s the true living other, who’s more than what’s in my head. I’m getting closer to the pervert who’s the unexpected other inside me,” the boy said. He was concentrating too much passion on his own words to hear J’s mockery. J liked this kind of narcissistic person, so he was able to continue his good-natured derision without losing his smile.
“When I was your age I had the same desire to become the other inside me,” J said. “To put it simply, it’s the child’s ardent desire to be an adult.” Now he was treating the boy like he was really a child. “We wanted to rescue you, just like any adult who sees a child standing on tiptoe and about to fall over would reach out to support it. In the world of adults, no matter how close you come to the pervert inside your head, you’ll always be saved by the adults around you, and you’ll be right back where you started. You’re Sisyphus Junior, the Pervert, you poor little thing!”
“Maybe that’s true, but even so, before that next time, I have to plan my own deadly fatal pattern of perversion, one that’s impossible to cancel out, one with which the adults can’t interfere. One where instead of keeping me from falling over, the adults of this world will band together to turn me upside down and trample me into the ground,” the boy said. He sounded genuinely pathetic, as he again palely shaded the depths of his sleepy, infantile eyes with his dark, miserable weariness. He seemed forlorn, and more like a backward student who doesn’t know what to do after failing his exams than a man who would write a violent poem resembling a tempest.
J regretted that he’d carried his ridi
cule of the boy too far. Feeling embarrassed with himself, he looked at the old man. The old man stared back at him with an air of discomfort. J could imagine what the old man must be thinking: Compared with the straightforward self-confession of this boy, wasn’t their own self-defensiveness disgusting? Weren’t they protecting themselves like a pair of psychoanalysts in front of a patient? J nodded back at the old man, suggesting, well, aren’t we going to tell this boy about ourselves?
“We are perverts who’ve chosen our sample from the safe side. Of course, being a pervert means there’s no such thing as perfect safety, but the two of us follow a policy of joint defense,” the old man said.
“What, this bar is a chikan club?” the boy shouted out, like he found it all too funny. “Now I see why you saved me, and why you’re showing so much interest in me. But why have you formed a chikan club instead of being independent perverts?”
“Because it’s exactly the perverts who ought to make a club of their own, assuming you want to call it a club,” the old man said. “You might take a look at homosexuals. They’re oppressed now, like a distinctive group of new blacks. But all around the world they’re forming small groups to fight back. Maybe they’re thinking they’ll make a country for their own kind in the twenty-first century and declare their independence. At the very least, they’ll probably elect themselves a few representatives in every country. For people like me, death is only a matter of time and I can only imagine it. But you’ll live to see the twenty-first century. You’ll see precisely that happen. No doubt they’ll produce representatives who are excellent and powerful. But in case you’ve forgotten, perverts are even more anti-social than homosexuals. The day when homosexuality is no longer a crime probably isn’t very far away, but perverts can’t expect to see a time when they’re exempt from criminality. That’s exactly because there are types like you who make arrest and punishment a basic condition of being a pervert. But shouldn’t perverts also work out some system of self-defense? That’s why we’ve created this little mutual-aid society. Like we saved you today, we also help each other when one of us is in a tight spot.”
This time it was the boy who looked at J and the old man intently. He seemed deeply interested. His expression showed a kind of respect (an attitude of recognizing some individuality in the existence of his counterparts) which had been completely lacking in his speech and actions so far.
“Are you finding a lot of new members for this chikan club of yours?” he asked.
“No, there are still just the two of us. But even that’s an invention, and a great stride forward in this age of completely solitary perverts. So far this young man and I have been able to avoid arrest,” the old man replied with a smile. “How about it, don’t you want to join?”
“I don’t want anybody to save me, but I could join as a special member and play life-guard to the two of you. Anyway, I haven’t decided my next plan of action, and I’m bored. Besides, I’d like to watch some other perverts. The hero of my powerful poem is a dangerous chikan like myself, of course, but it might be effective to complicate the structure by casting some more cautious, everyday perverts in supporting roles.”
“Well, next time you go out, drop by this bar and meet us, and let’s go for a ride on a subway or a train or bus. But until you come up with a new plan for self-destruction, you’ll only play the role of rescuing us. After all, that’s all you want,” J said.
“Yes, that’s what I want,” the boy said happily. His eyes were no longer shaded with blue-black clouds. Rather, they were just at the point of flaming up with curiosity. The boy put his whisky glass back on the table and sank deep into the sofa. He gave a big yawn and rubbed his eyes hard with his fists, acting as though he’d been blinded. “I’m relieved,” he said. “I’ve gotten sleepy, really sleepy. I thought you might be queers, so I was careful not to go to sleep, but if you’re only interested in me as a fellow pervert, I know I don’t have anything to worry about. But how did you two happen to organize a chikan club? In the very beginning, how did you talk about it? Or are you parent and child by any chance? Don’t tell me you’re father and son!”
“No, we’re not father and son, and we’re not brothers either,” the old man laughed.
“So first one of you introduced himself as a pervert and said let’s start a chikan club? That must’ve taken plenty of courage,” the boy said, making a sensitive guess. Psychologically he was now very close to meeting J and the old man halfway. Showing such unguarded curiosity, the boy gave an impression of childishness that was difficult to believe.
“Yes, it took courage. Especially because perverts are not like homosexuals. They don’t have something special about them, like a scent you can sniff out. But like today, when we met you, you could say it was the hand of fate that brought us together. If not for that, we never would’ve even spoken to each other.” The old man’s voice was happy, and he smiled as he looked at J.
§ § §
One morning, J had decided to become a chikan. He had felt very far from the sexual world and had wanted an anti-sexual form of self-punishment, as it were. At the same time, he was driven by a certain sexual excitement, a violent hunger. But at the time of that first conversion he wasn’t really aware of the two-headed sex monster that lived inside him. One early winter morning at nine, still in bed after a sleepless night, he had simply thought to himself, I want to be a chikan. He’d walked from the bedroom into the main room that his wife used as a work space. She was discussing the script of her new film with her partner, the cameraman.
“You can use the Jaguar if you like,” he said. “I’m going to take the train.”
“Where are you going?” his wife and the cameraman asked. He said it didn’t matter as long as he went by train. So began J’s daily routine of roaming the city. Early each morning he left the apartment. Late at night he returned. Usually he found his wife sleeping on the couch in the work space, exhausted, with a blanket drawn up to her chest. Sometimes they barely spoke for days at a time.
Now his wife and the cameraman were planning a completely new film. She had finally succeeded in finishing her first film, but only those who’d taken part in the production had seen it at a few trial screenings. Then the film was bought by a film company for two million yen and burned. At first J’s wife had been violently opposed to the idea, but eventually she had no choice but to accept it. This time she wanted to make a film that would show nothing but landscapes and trees. It would be a color film, made with the two million yen as funding. The reason things had turned out the way they had was because of the twenty-year-old actor whom everybody called Boy. He was the cause of all the confusion and bad luck. After the shooting of that first film was finished, while J’s wife was persevering in the meandering, time-consuming process of editing the film with her own two hands, the actor appeared in a serial television drama and suddenly became a glittering star. J’s wife finished editing her first short film about the same time he was hired by a studio and given his first leading role in a commercial film. The young actor began to dread the scandal that was sure to follow the release of a film that showed him completely naked, living his day-to-day life in hell. He confessed his fear to the producer, and it was conveyed to the chief executives of the studio. That was the start of a difficult dispute, but finally J’s wife had yielded. Since the young actor had become a star, J had seen him only once, in a television interview. He hadn’t been the same unstable, sharp-witted, freely sexual twenty-year-old youth who was simply floating on the tide. He gave the impression now of firmly planted stability, of being a stolid conformist who only believes in sex within the petty limitations of bourgeois morality. J thought about how he had once wanted to sleep with the actor, but now he felt that it was impossible for him even to think back on the passion he must have had. He wrote this version of “A Star Is Born” in a long letter to his sister, the sculptor, who had returned to Paris. It was a funny, pleasant letter, which apparently had delighted his sister. The film
starring the young actor was well received but, according to the cameraman, his beauty in J’s wife’s film was still beyond comparison. The boy was better in “our film,” he said. The young actor no longer appeared at J’s apartment.
The exhibitionist jazz singer had also drifted away from the apartment. Rather than becoming a conformist, she was living freely as an increasingly rebellious individual. She’d quit working as a nightclub singer after her involvement in a call-girl ring became the subject of an expose. Then she began a new life, traveling around Japan with political negotiators visiting from Southeast Asia or staying in hotels with American buyers. The jazz singer was now a high-class prostitute. Occasionally J still received a call from her, but she didn’t come to his apartment either. After all, the new film didn’t need an actress, and they’d stopped having parties.
While J spent his days roaming the city, his wife and the middle-aged cameraman were alone creating the screenplay for the new film. They’d locked themselves up in J’s apartment for this solitary, gloomy business. Even J didn’t go into the room when they were at work. True enough, J’s high-spirited, pleasurable salon of that morning at the vacation house looking out over Miminashi Bay had fallen to pieces. J’s wife and the cameraman had developed an even firmer bond, but all the others had ended up alone and lonely. They had each begun to live according to their personal choice. In spite of being a pair, his wife and his old friend the cameraman gave J the same extremely lonely, self-enclosed impression as the others. Even though the two of them were making plans for the new film with almost too much enthusiasm, they didn’t seem to find any particular pleasure in the job. But then J was almost constantly out of the house, so it was only by accident that he had time to observe them at work. His Jaguar had been left in the garage for them to use, but since the film hadn’t yet reached the stage of outdoor locations, it was never driven. Its ivory body was covered with dust and had lost its sparkle.