J confided to the boy that he suspected the old man had a nest of cancer lodged in his strong body or that he was deeply worried about his heart symptoms. After that, the boy became more devoted to the old man. Perhaps he was considering giving the dying chikan a supporting role in his poem.
The boy often discussed with J his plans for his next decisive deviant action. These plans frightened J. They were clearly criminal, and once the boy had enacted one of them, there would be no way for J and the old man to help him. His plans went beyond the realm of perversity and into that of brutal, sexual crime.
“Forget it. Even if you think only of yourself, you can’t do such things. If you do, you’ll be forced out of society before you can write your stormy poem. Why do you have to carry things so far to write your violent poem?”
“If you think about it, it might be something I have to do, not for the poem, but so that I can become my true self,” the boy said mysteriously.
J didn’t really believe the teenager’s daydreams, but he had gradually developed a deep feeling of friendship for the boy, and he wanted to try to free him from his fantasies. Perhaps something else was at work in J’s mind: J knew that, as a deviant himself, he risked becoming a dangerously spined sea urchin like the boy and that frightened him. So in removing the boy’s spines, he was in fact hoping to protect himself. . .
Late one night, when J and the old man were alone in the hotel bar in Unebi-machi, J made a suggestion.
“I think I’ll take the boy to see a girl I’ve known for a while, a kind of semi-prostitute. It might be better for him if we could shift his poetic interest away from perverted heroes to more lyrical poems about sensual love.”
“You should try. If he wants to become a chikan, he’s still got plenty of time to change—he can do it at sixty,” the old man laughed.
So J called his friend the jazz singer and took the boy to her place. She had been living for quite a long time in a hotel in Shinbashi. He explained the situation and persuaded her that the boy should experience a completely normal sexual relationship at least once. The boy smiled vaguely as he listened to J’s pleading. He asked J to wait in the hotel bar because he felt a little nervous. The boy’s words seemed to flatter the reckless jazz singer. But it was the jazz singer who called J on the phone, practically in tears as she screamed, “Come and get this monster out of here!” J had barely finished his first glass of Pernod. By the time he got to the room, the boy was sitting serenely on a chair, with his tie carefully knotted, smiling the way he always did. The woman was in the shower, making frantic, violent sounds as if out of her mind. J looked into the bathroom to say he was taking the boy with him. When she turned to look at him, she was ghostly pale, perhaps (or perhaps not) because of the icy shower, “I’m finished with you too,” she screamed at J. As J closed the door, he noticed some drops of blood on the tiles beside the bathtub. The boy didn’t say anything, and J didn’t question him. He had done something terrible. From then on, neither J nor the old man made any special attempt to intervene in the boy’s affairs. The three calmly resumed their “street friends” habit of cruising the city, but they knew that, ultimately, the boy was not there to stay. He was merely resting, sheltered by J and the old man, before embarking on his second major deviant act. He was a traveler taking a brief respite.
§ § §
Winter was coming to an end. At night, thunder rolled through the sky and intermittent rain poured down. In early morning, the sun spread its warmth, still tepid as a cat’s belly. J’s wife made a schedule of outdoor locations with the cameraman and pasted it to the wall of the work space. They would probably be shooting her new film from spring through early summer. One morning J met the old man and the two of them went to the bar in Unebi-machi. For several days, the boy had stayed away from them. He seemed to have fallen into a depression. And by now, when the boy wasn’t around, both J and the old man felt their excitement at a lower level when they entered the crowd. So, that morning, neither of them could resist a warm smile when they discovered the boy waiting for them at the hotel bar in Unebi-machi. J remembered—though only vaguely—how the old man’s face used to fill with such pleasure that it was nearly ugly when he caught sight of J in the days when they were still only two. And just as J had been then, the boy was clearly in a bad mood, as if he disliked both of them. He placed a bottle of sleeping pills and a tumbler of whisky on the low table in front of his chair. They said nothing about the fact that he was mixing liquor and pills so early in the morning, but they couldn’t watch his behavior with indifference. They tried to relax and smile as they shifted in their chairs, in silence, facing the boy.
“I’ve finished my second period of preparation,” the boy said. “I’m going to do it.”
The old man and J looked at him. Their smiling cheeks and lips stiffened. The boy’s face was flushed with warmth by the sleeping pills and whisky. He had a cunning expression that vividly reminded the old man and J of the night they had met him, desperate, wearing only boots and a trench coat over his naked body. His eyes were bloodshot and seemed to bulge, and his face was deadly pale and dirty. His voice quavered hysterically, the hoarse voice of an angry child.
“But you’re wearing a suit today. And you even have your pants on, haven’t you? Are you going to lock yourself up in a restroom somewhere and change into your lightweight uniform?” the old man said to the boy. His awkwardly derisive tone seemed to be meant to hide his uneasiness.
“No, I won’t do the same thing as before. Didn’t I tell you so the first time when you got in my way?” the boy said. When he said “got in my way” instead of “rescued me,” J felt as if the boy were spitting on his friendship.
“You aren’t seriously going to carry out one of the crazy fantasies you told me about—raping someone on the train or stabbing an old woman to death on the subway,” J said, trying to stay calm.
“I’m not telling anyone about my plans. The minute I do, they will vanish into thin air like a mirage. Anyway, can’t you just leave me alone now? All I promised when I joined you was to be the special lifeguard for this chikan club. So from now on, just leave me alone!” the boy said.
“If that’s the case, why did you go to so much trouble to tell us you’ve finished your preparations and you’re ready for your second big adventure? Shouldn’t you have kept quiet and gone off somewhere to carry it out alone?”
“I only came to say goodbye,” the boy said. “After all, aren’t we friends?” He was so frank and honest that it moved J and the old man. Then his radiant, bloodshot eyes clouded with tears, and he stood up roughly, like a violent child. “Don’t get in my way. It nearly killed me, the pain and suffering it took to make up my mind to go through with it this time. I’ve made my sacrifices, and I’ve made up my mind, so I want you to get out of my way. I really can’t stand you safe deviants, in it half for the fun. If you try to stop me, I’ll go to the police and tell them what a pair of chikan you two really are!”
The boy left the hotel at a run. The old man and J paid the bill and followed him. The sidewalk was dry and no longer showed any trace of snow. J and the old man were breathing hard as they tailed the boy, who was taking long strides, as if driven by anger. He was heading toward the National Railways Unebi-machi Station. Suddenly he turned his head slyly. When he saw J and the old man, he made a gesture to show that his annoyance was getting the better of him. He stood motionless and continued to glare at them. J and the old man approached him hesitantly.
“Why are you following me?” the boy shouted. He had lost his equilibrium under the repeated assault of sleeping pills and whisky. He was no longer his normal self. His sturdy upper body was slowly tilting to one side, then suddenly became erect, and then began to lean again.
“It’s gone to your Head. Go home and sleep. We’ll take you there by taxi.”
“Why are you following me? Don’t you know this is none of your business? This is important to me!” the boy was screaming and waving his ar
ms as if to threaten them. They were in a busy shopping street, and people began to gather immediately.
“Okay, we won’t interfere. But you can’t stop us from watching your adventure, can you? We want to be there when you become a chikan of the dangerous type. I mean, I can’t imagine you’re going to have the freedom to write your stormy poem after you go through with this adventure. So go on and do what you have to do. Don’t worry about us rescuing you or getting in your way. If you’re afraid now, I guess it must be real fear you’re feeling,” J said. He had gradually become more and more irritated, and in the end he’d spoken with hatred.
For just an instant, a meek, surprised expression returned to the boy’s face, and he stared at J. Then suddenly he turned and began to walk away. He didn’t look back again, and was absorbed in himself, as if he’d already completely forgotten them. They followed him at a distance of about a hundred feet, without speaking.
The boy went into the Unebi-machi Station. After he’d passed through the gate, J and the old man went to the ticket window. They bought their tickets without hurrying, and by the time they passed through the gate, the boy had already begun to work. He was standing next to a vendor’s booth sandwiched between two sets of stairs that diverged in a fan shape toward the platforms for Kanda and Ikebukuro. In his right hand, he held the hand of a little girl. With his left hand, he was holding up a toy for her to see. It was a red battery-powered monkey. He leaned forward a little and said something to the girl. Then he gave her the toy monkey and, side by side, the two of them climbed the stairs to the platform on the Kanda-bound side. They gave an impression of shared, secret intimacy, as if they were brother and sister, which made the people who watched them smile. Only J and the old man did not smile. They realized that the boy intended to kidnap the girl, but they were struck dumb by the fear that realization aroused.
When the teenager and the child had reached the top of the stairs and disappeared from sight, the door of the bathroom behind the vendor’s booth was pushed open and a young woman came out. She looked around and called out to someone in a low timid voice. Then, as if prompted by fear, she started up the stairs toward the Ikebukuro platform, crying out the child’s name. She seemed about to fall several times, but she climbed the stairs with agility. At the same time, the old man and J took one step forward. They wanted to shout to the woman, to warn her to take the other stairs. But they both remained silent. Their lips were tightly closed, and their hands dangled uselessly. Could they be still under the spell of the teenager’s words?
A second later, the woman’s cry of protest descended on them like a plummeting kite. J didn’t have time to look back at the old man. He ran up the stairs the boy and the little girl had climbed, taking several steps at a time. He arrived at an excruciating, pathetic scene. A Yamanote Line train was rumbling in along the platform. On the opposite platform, the young woman was stretching out her arms, about to dive onto the tracks. The little girl who was clutching the red monkey was struggling in the ditch of iron-colored gravel between the tracks. The boy was on his knees on the track where the train was approaching. Throwing the girl into the safe ditch, he had twisted the top half of his body upward like a fallen horse. His arms were now empty and he seemed about to neigh at the sky. He folded them tightly against his chest. Just before J closed his eyes, he saw something that was like a strange, wondrous vision: the front of the train was suddenly dyed crimson red with the boy’s blood. J screamed and started to cry.
An hour later, J and the old man were sitting shoulder to shoulder on a couch in the hotel bar in Unebi-machi. In silence, each of them stared at the other’s trembling glass. J recalled the words of the sobbing young woman as she appealed over and over to the crowd that had gathered around her. “That man was a god,” she said, holding the little girl to her chest. “My little girl saw me and jumped from the platform down onto the tracks. Everybody could see she was going to be killed! I could see it too. But that man, like a god he was, he saved her, and then the poor thing . . .”
“When’s all said and done, that boy was simply trying to live his life as a chikan. If I think of that, it gives me a miserable bit of peace of mind,” the old man said. “But a chikan, even if he risks his life as that boy did, cannot but continue to be a chikan. He was a dangerous man. A club of safe deviants like us is, in my opinion, simply a way of diluting the poison.”
“The boy said the same thing to me more than once,” J said.
“In the end, there’s something fraudulent about us. I’ve realized that we either have to become dangerous deviants who take risks like him, or we have to give it up altogether. Those are the only two possible roads,” the old man said.
“I feel the same way. I’ll probably never come to this bar after today, and I doubt I’ll have the honor of meeting you again,” J said with deep sorrow.
“You’ll probably stop being a chikan. And I’ll become a more dangerous one, I suppose. I’ve had this presentiment that someday I’ll be arrested in a crowd on the subway and die of a cardiac infarction.”
J stood up. The old man remained seated, looked up at J, and shook his head. He blushed around his eyes and smiled sadly—like the drunken wild dog on the Gordon’s Gin label—as he did when he was burning with anger or sexually aroused. A mist of white tears covered his predatory eyes. They were the gentlest eyes the old man had ever shown to J. J was moved to tears again. Like the old man, he smiled slightly, shook his head, and remained silent. He left the bar and the hotel. He was lightheaded and afraid that he might collapse while the old man was watching him. In the taxi the bellboy had found for him, J was utterly desperate and choked with tears. He’d just lost the two best friends he’d ever had.
§ § §
J spent the next couple of weeks holed up in his apartment. During that time, he realized that it was a burden and a source of pain for his wife that he never went out of the house anymore. And not only for his wife. The cameraman, who was coming regularly to the work space to do pre-production work on the film, showed the same reaction to J’s presence. But since J was thinking about nothing but the boy and the old man, he didn’t pursue the deeper meaning of these reactions. He was as uncomprehending as an infant. His own feelings were such that even when the cameraman finally came into his bedroom late one morning and solemnly said there was something he wanted to talk about, J still thought it must have to do with the film’s production costs or the need to use the Jaguar. But the cameraman confessed that he had fallen in love with J’s wife and, as a result, she was pregnant. J stared in disbelief at the middle-aged man with his ridiculous moustache planted on a face that was big and round and black as a whale’s, staring at him with bloodshot eyes. It seemed perfectly natural to J that he experienced no particularly cruel feelings of pain. How on earth could this be? How could something like this possibly happen between this passionate outsider, a middle-aged man who loved precision instruments, and J’s wife, with her meager, boyish body, who was only interested in making films? J found it hard to believe. And could his wife, with her unfeminine hips, really be capable of pregnancy? She’d probably die during childbirth.
“I know it must be a shock to you to be betrayed by your oldest friend. Isn’t it, J?” the cameraman said, as though he was trying to comfort him. Oldest friend? J objected to that. The only beings the word friend truly evoked for him now were a dead teenager and a solitary old man who at this very minute was undoubtedly roaming the crowded streets.
“Well, how long has it been going on?” J asked. It was a stupid question, and he blushed at the meaninglessness of his own words. Once he found out how long they’d been betraying him, then what would he do?
But the cameraman gave him an earnest answer. “Ever since you started staying away from home, J.”
“And you got her pregnant in the middle of the afternoon?” J said derisively.
The cameraman’s large, round, dark face blushed copper red. He stammered and spoke in a trembling voice.
>
“J, you are sexually perverted. From what Mitsuko has told me, it’s clear that you’ve been using her sexually as a substitute for a boy, as a homosexual partner. To be blunt about it, when a sexually perverted man is married, another man should have a sexual relationship with the wife. It’s his duty.”
J imagined the cameraman and his wife gossiping about his sexual proclivities, and, for the first time, he was seized with a fierce anger. The cameraman seemed to be waiting for a beating, which he intended to endure without resistance. In the end, J didn’t resort to violence. Instead he felt the cancer of self-loathing, which had lodged itself so persistently in the recesses of his heart since he’d beaten the cameraman in the mountain house overlooking Miminashi Bay, beginning to dissolve.
“So what do you intend to do?” J asked with affection while he looked into the cameraman’s red, insecure eyes, which had become so familiar to him over these last years.
“I’ll marry Mitsuko and we’ll have the child, assuming you’ll give her a divorce,” the cameraman said excitedly.
“And what about your own wife and child?”
“I suppose I’ll give them an allowance. If I can, I’d like to take care of the child myself, though.”
“It’s going to be tough,” J said.
“Yes, it’ll be tough. And we still have to finish the film,” the cameraman said. His dull, fixed expression, so middle-aged, was gradually changing, beginning to glow with a proud self-confidence. J felt pity and compassion for him, but he wondered how many people would have to suffer the hardships of the real world for the sake of this man’s recklessness, this man who could easily have been a tribal leader in some patriarchal society.
“I’ll file the divorce papers as soon as I can,” J said. “Have you already looked for somewhere to live with Mitsuko?”
“No, not yet.”
“Then I’ll leave. I can move in with my father for a while,” J said.