Why had he chosen to be a chikan? J had never really given it much thought—somewhere in his heart, he was continually aware that he was not yet truly deviant. On the other hand, he realized that, when he finally found himself humiliated in the strong grip of an angry stranger, he would have no choice but to think it through. And at times, in the depths of his being, a flash of what it meant to be a chikan would rise flickering to the surface of his consciousness, like a sudden stay of execution.
One evening J was riding the outbound express from the Tokyo Station on the National Railways Chuo Line. Standing immediately in front of him was a woman of about his age. She was at a right angle to him, and their bodies were pressed together, with her chest, stomach, and thighs fitted to his. J caressed the woman. His right hand moved into the space between her buttocks, while his left hand traveled down her belly toward the space between her thighs. His erect penis was touching the outside of her leg. He and the woman were about the same height. His heavy breath stirred the down on her flushed earlobes. At first J trembled with fear and his breathing was irregular. Was the woman not going to cry out? Would she not seize his arms with her two free hands and call for help from the people around them? When his fear was at its peak, J’s penis was hardest. Now it was pressed tight against the woman’s thigh. He shook with profound fear as he stared straight at her chiseled profile. Her low, unwrinkled forehead, the bridge of her short, upturned nose, the large lips below a layer of coffee-colored down, the firm jaw, the splendid, dark eyes, cloudy and almost black. She barely blinked at all. As J caressed her rough woolen skirt, he suddenly seemed to lose consciousness. If the girl cried out in disgust or fear, he would have an orgasm. He held on to this fantasy like fear, like desire. But she didn’t cry out. She kept her lips firmly closed. Suddenly her eyes closed tightly, like a curtain with its ropes cut falling to the stage. At that instant the restraining pressure of her buttocks and thighs relaxed. Descending, J’s right hand reached the depths of her now-soft cheeks. His left hand went to the hollow between her outspread thighs.
J lost his fear and, at the same time, his desire weakened. Already his penis was beginning to wilt. He persisted with his caresses out of curiosity and a sense of duty. He became cool-headed. This is what always happens, he thought. When you can get away with anything, you can never get to that one reality that transcends this condition. It was nothing more than a step in the same process that had repeated itself time and again since the day he had decided to become a chikan, a deviant. Then, suddenly, his fingertips felt the solitary orgasm of this stranger.
A moment later, the train rumbled into Shinjuku Station. J saw the big glistening tears that slipped out from between the woman’s tightly shut eyelids rise steadily, break, and run down her cheeks. Her lips were pursed as if she’d bitten into a green plum, carving deep wrinkles that could have been cracks all around her mouth. But at that moment the doors opened and J was pushed out of the car by the human wave, away from the woman and onto the platform. After the train left, he continued to stand on the platform. She didn’t look at me for even a second, he thought, and he felt so terribly lonely that tears came to his eyes, as they had to hers. He thought of his overwhelming loneliness and fear on the night his first wife had taken sleeping pills and killed herself. He and his wife had been sleeping cheek to cheek. The drug had put her into a deep sleep, and she was snoring loudly. But even in her sleep she was still crying and her tears had awakened him. He knew it was a ridiculous idea, but J thought that if he could meet the woman on the train again, he would want to marry and live with her, even if he had to beg her. For several weeks, at the same time of day, toward evening, he watched out for her at Tokyo Station. But he’d already lost any distinct memory of her looks. It was only the shape and the color and the glistening and falling of her tears that he remembered clearly.
His single encounter with that woman was J’s happiest memory as a chikan. His dark, unhappy memories were countless. In the early days, all he did, in the trains and the buses, in the department store elevators, was stand petrified and immobilized, pale and dripping with sweat, as he burned with the desire for action. From the time he left his apartment in early morning until late at night, he roamed ceaselessly, like the Flying Dutchman, from one end of Tokyo to the other, but he was unable to actually touch the body of a stranger. That period lasted for several weeks. The day that J became an antisocial activist—in the form of a chikan, a molester—he also became extraordinarily sensitive to the presence of society. He discovered all of its various taboos, traps, and hostile restraints; never in his life had he felt this larger society rise up against him with such clamorous self-assertion. People who saw him on the street during that period no doubt believed that he was a man of incomparably firm morals. In those days, J was still in the painful period of apprenticeship . . .
Some of the social icons that aroused fear in J were the advertisements that hang down from the ceilings of the trains. If one of those ads bore the words “Encyclopedia for 80 Million,” J would feel like a solitary warlord launching an attack on the eighty million citizens of Japan who loved their encyclopedias. He would begin to shiver with the excitement of battle. At such times, the milk-white grips of the train straps, all swaying in unison, were nooses waiting to choke him. He would break out in a sweat and close his eyes.
Even after he’d survived those dark weeks and learned to act freely as a chikan, he wasn’t always happy. To be a loner in a crowd of strangers, stealthily touching their sexual parts, then escaping safely: that ideally perverse achievement, he thought, must be impossible to enact perfectly. He dreamt of a hunter entering a forest of wild animals, killing a deer, and then leaving it there. The hunter leaves the forest exhausted, but he has tasted a stoic, manly exaltation. When J did battle in the forest of strangers on a rush-hour train and retreated again, he was hoping for that hunter’s exaltation, but he almost always faltered halfway and was left dissatisfied, irritated, and humiliated, or he was filled with a useless hatred and found himself indulging in unbridled excesses . . .
One evening J was standing on a large bus that had started from Shibuya. His right hand held the strap, and his left was pressed from behind against the naked skin of a large woman, between her stockings and corset. He was staring straight at the abundant, heavy hair on her massive head, just inches from his eyes. As he smelled her hair, the tension and excitement made his throat so dry it hurt. To hide the fact that he’d raised the woman’s heavy woolen skirt, he was crouching forward with his knees thrust out in front of him, like somebody riding a horse. In this position, it was difficult for him to hold his left hand on the woman’s naked thigh. He felt an irritating pain that numbed his arm from his left shoulder to his fingertips, but he endured the pain without moving. Then the woman suddenly dropped her hips as if to lean over and rested her weight on J’s unstable left hand. He lost his balance and his head bumped hard against the woman’s shoulder. When he managed to stand back up, his left hand was caught firmly in the woman’s powerful hand. He was stunned, and began to spin around, to spiral down into a maelstrom of fear. When the bus came to the next stop, the woman pulled him by the hand through the crowd of passengers and out of the bus. He was pale and covered with sweat. His heart was soiled with his own fear and despair, but at the same time he felt some kind of deeper, preordained harmony. It was then he realized for the first time that a desire for self-punishment was part of his fervid lust for the pleasures of a chikan. He didn’t try to escape. Rather, he walked where the woman led him, like a boy with his mother, to the most contemptuous, cruel policeman of all. But the woman didn’t take J to the police. She took him to a room in a cheap hotel, where the walls and ceiling and floor were layered with cardboard to deaden the sound. He tried his best to put an end to his humiliating sexual service as quickly as possible, but he was impotent to the last. The woman lay down in the ugly light of the fluorescent lamp and closed her eyes as if in anguish. Her naked body was covered with ye
llow fat and looked like the larva of a wasp. She didn’t speak, didn’t move. J was naked beside her. He pulled up his knees and dropped his head flaccidly. He was in despair. He felt as though the only thing living and moving in that room was the smell of their two naked bodies. Finally he also closed his eyes, and sat huddled and motionless. Offering no resistance, he waited for those hundred years of hell to pass. The woman didn’t move either. She was a fox playing dead. It was as if her body was putrefying even as she lay there.
In a crowd, touching a woman’s sex beneath her underwear for even an instant excited him to the point where he was ready to risk his entire existence. But when he and the owner of that sex were skin to skin, all of his sexual instincts worked to refuse her. This he understood from such bitter experiences as this one. He was in a constant state of dissatisfaction, but for several months he hadn’t had intercourse, even with his wife. Wistfully seeking the slightest opportunity for sexual contact, he became part of the city’s crowd of strangers, roaming from morning until late at night. Until the day he met the old man, he had felt utterly alone, more alone than he had ever felt in his life. If he hadn’t chanced to meet him, J probably would have become an explosively dangerous deviant, a true chikan, and would already have been arrested. In that sense, he felt blessed by the relationship of mutual assistance that he and the old man had established . . .
J was on the Yamanote Line, planning to make a circuit of Tokyo. It was close to the end of morning and a faint winter sun was shining. Almost all the seats in the car were occupied but nobody was standing. The floor was like the gray-black back of a mouse, and dust was rising from it into the sunlight. The passengers were bored, but not so tired as to be distracted. It was a bad moment for a chikan.
The situation changed when the train pulled into Ueno Station. A group of about twenty laughing high school girls entered J’s car. Their teacher had probably just taken them to see the mummies or the Jomon pottery at the museum. J promptly rose from his seat and made his way into the throng of girls, searching for the most advantageous position for a chikan, but before he could get there, he saw a tall old man get up from his seat. The man moved with real agility, but behaved as though nothing unusual was happening. J had a premonition and, his heart pounding, he became an onlooker. The old man was well-built and imposing. In his luxurious camel overcoat, his large chest and broad shoulders towered over the swarm of disagreeable schoolgirls’ heads. He had a white silk scarf tied around his thick neck, and a soft hat pulled down over his head. Except for the skin on his face, which was covered with wrinkles the color of dead leaves, and his eyes, which were keen like those of a bird of prey, he was the ideal image of old age, the man you see clutching a golf club in ads for health tonics. Looking at him made you feel better. It let you nurse illusions about your own old age. The high school girls saw several empty seats, but didn’t move to sit down. They stood talking with their bodies pressed tightly together, like a herd of zebras threatened by a lion or a flock of scared chickens. Their voices rose above the noise of the train and filled the entire car.
The man’s head and upper body didn’t show the slightest movement. He slowly let his eyelids droop and, like a child fighting against drowsiness who finally gives in, he closed his eyes. J saw how his skin, and the wrinkles the color of dead leaves around his closed eyelids, gradually turned the color of roses. Now he resembled the drunken, vacuous wild dog on the Gordon’s Gin label. Suddenly J realized that the entire group of high school girls had stopped talking. Only the noise of the train could still be heard. The schoolgirls’ expressions were ugly and afraid. They were young maidens now, with rough underdeveloped faces, frozen by fear. Only the man with his eyes closed looked happy as he stood there, enraptured, with that rosy glow. J was stricken with fear, as if he himself were in danger. One more minute, and the girls would begin to cry and scream. The stranger would be arrested for indecency.
Just then the train stopped in Nippori, and the doors opened. J jumped up and pushed his way through the schoolgirls until he was in front of the chikan. He seized the arm of his camel overcoat, and dragged him by force out onto the platform. The doors closed behind them as soon as they were out of the train. J looked back at the schoolgirls who were glaring at him and the old man from the other side of the glass. The smallest girl in the group, J could see, was blushing crimson red and seemed ready to burst into tears. Probably the old man had touched her breasts or something as he surrendered to his solitary sexual rapture . . .
“You were a little too careless,” J apologized as he released his arms from the old man’s chest. By this time, he was becoming upset and even felt some self-disgust.
“Thank you. If you hadn’t been so kind as to help me, I’m afraid I might’ve gone all the way,” the old man said frankly.
That was how J and the old man became “street friends” and went on to the bar in Unebi-machi to have a drink together.
§ § §
The young man joined J and the old man, and they began to meet regularly at the bar in Unebi-machi before setting out into the crowds of the city. After graduating from high school, the boy hadn’t gone on to college or looked for a job. Instead, he had focused all of his passion on writing a stormy poem on perversion. Neither J nor the old man tried to make the boy talk about himself in more detail than that. There was no need for it. They didn’t even know one another’s names. But almost every day, from morning until evening, sometimes even through the night, the three of them were together, riding subways, loitering on trains and streetcars, on jolting bus trips from Shinbashi to Shibuya. They were a harmoniously matched group. To each other, they were the most loyal of “street friends.”
Everything the boy wore was of the highest quality, from his English trench coat (somewhat out of season in mid-winter) to his suits, shirts, ties, and shoes—all somewhat extravagant for his age. But there were many days when he had only a few coins in his pockets and sometimes the old man and J would slip money into his trench coat. It didn’t bother him at all and he never refused. He would spend all the money they gave him the same day, on things like garishly decorated leather ski gloves. If he touched a girl’s backside with those gloves, she would suspect nothing. Instead, she would imagine that a miniature military tank was running down her flank, they were such completely impractical, ornate gloves.
J, the old man, and the boy went out into the crowds together but, since the boy had joined them, only the old man acted as a pervert while J and the boy devoted themselves entirely to security duties. The boy had made it clear from the start that his intentions were limited to that role, and J unexpectedly found himself standing next to the boy. The old man carried on as before, acting like a veteran chikan and showed no interest in the change in J. His zeal bordered on the fanatical and, like J before him, the boy seemed willing to bow before the superiority of the older monster chikan.
As they watched over the old man’s activities from another corner of the car, J and the boy sometimes discussed what it meant to be a chikan. The boy thought incessantly about his stormy poem in praise of sexual deviance, and whenever the conversation turned to the topic, he would become obsessive and talk at length, regardless of their surroundings. The boy, on principle, could not accept deviants who took precautionary measures against danger. He confessed that he had come to feel an awe for the old man, but he, too, had something of the fanatic about him. It was difficult for him to find anything admirable in safety and he consistently rejected anything that muddied the image of the fearless chikan, the hero of his stormy poem.
“You, yourself,” the boy would say, “you barely get excited by these deviant acts which don’t involve any risk in places where there’s no danger at all. Isn’t it only because this mutual aid between chikans isn’t one-hundred-percent safe that you can feel some excitement, no matter how small? Didn’t the old man say so himself that night when we first talked in Unebi-machi? There’s no such thing as perfect safety. A chikan is just like a
big-game hunter. Most hunters would be bored in a great savanna where the lions and rhinos come purring up to them meek as kittens. A hunter would become neurotic in a place like that!”
J never lost interest in these discussions with the teenager, probably because they forced him to think about his own decision to become a chikan.
“Doesn’t the idea of a safe chikan bother you?” the boy repeated.
“You’re right, it does. But if it really is the destiny of the deviant to be caught and to experience the ultimate humiliation and taste the greatest danger, there’s no need to hurry it, is there? It’s the same as death. We’re all going to die sooner or later, so what’s the point in rushing it?”
“No, it’s a mistake to put it that way. If death were the only thing that revealed the meaning of life, I’d want to die as soon as I could. If running the risk of being arrested is one of the intrinsic characteristics of the deviant, then whoever excludes that element can’t be a true deviant. He’s a fake. In the end he’s nothing at all. He’ll get bored and fed up with it. The hero of my poem isn’t that kind of contemptible character. But what I don’t understand is how the old man can be so completely alone when the two of us are here to protect him. It’s almost more than I can stand to watch. He looks like a stark naked-chikan in real danger,” the boy said, watching the old man, who was lost in his own world in the crowded bus, with his eyes closed. His eyelids had already taken on that rosy coloring.