SEVENTEEN
1
Today is my birthday. Seventeen years of age I am today: a Seventeen.* But nobody in my family realizes it’s my birthday. Not my father, not my mother or my brother. Or at least they act like they don’t. So I keep quiet about it too.
Toward evening, my older sister comes home from the Self-Defense Forces hospital, where she works as a nurse. I’m in the bathroom, lathering myself with soap. “Seventeen years old,” she calls out to me. “Doesn’t it just make you want to grab yourself?”
My sister is horribly nearsighted, and so ashamed of her glasses she’s made up her mind never to get married. That’s why she went to work for the SDF. In desperation, she does nothing but read. She’s ruining her eyes all the more, but she doesn’t care.
What she said to me now was probably stolen from a book. Still, at least one person in the family remembered my birthday. As I scrub myself down, I recover just a little from my loneliness. I repeat what my sister said. As I think about her words, my sex stands up out of the soap in a sudden erection. I go and lock the bathroom door.
It seems like I’m always having erections. I like erections. I like them because of the sensation of energy boiling up through my body. And I like to look at my sex in the state of erection. I sit down again and cover myself with soap from head to foot. Then I masturbate. My first masturbation since I turned seventeen.
At first I wondered if masturbation wasn’t bad for me, but I looked through some sexology books in the bookstore and made the liberating discovery that the only bad thing about masturbation is feeling guilty about it.
I don’t like the reddish-black adult sex, looking completely naked with the skin peeled back, and I don’t like kids’ sex, which looks like some kind of unripe plant. The sex I like is my own, when it’s ready for masturbation. My very own sex. I can pull back the foreskin if I want to, but when I have an erection, it covers the rose-colored head like a soft sweater. I can use it to warm the stuff under the skin and melt it into a lubricating oil.
During health class, the school doctor told us how to get rid of that stuff, but everybody laughed. That’s because we all masturbate, so there’s never any stuff to get rid of. I’ve gotten to be quite a “hand” at masturbation. I’ve even discovered how to grab the tip of my foreskin as I come, like I’m squeezing the neck of a bag, and catch the semen in it. As a further advance, I’ve also made a side door in the pocket of a pair of pants. When I wear those, I can masturbate even in class.
As I masturbate now, I recall a story I saw in the color feature of a women’s magazine, the confessions of a husband who gave his wife peritonitis by ramming his penis through the wall of her vagina on their wedding night. My erect sex is wrapped in its soft white foreskin, cloaked in a blue haze. It strains upward with the powerful beauty of a rocket. As I caress it, I realize for the very first time that the muscles of my arms are beginning to grow.
For a moment I stare in amazement at my muscles. They’re like new rubber straps. My muscles. I grab my own muscular flesh, like my sister said. Joy wells up inside me. I smile. I’m a Seventeen, with no love for anybody but myself. My triceps, my biceps, my thigh muscles, they’re all still young and immature, but with training they’ll grow unfettered into thick sinewy muscle.
I think about asking my father to buy me an expander or a barbell set for my birthday. The old man is a tightwad, and he’s not about to spend money on things like training equipment, but the warm steam and the soft soap bubbles have put me into the kind of rapture where it seems like I could talk him into it. By next summer my body will be solid, developed everywhere it ought to be. It’ll catch the eyes of the girls at the beach, and plant fervent roots of respect in the hearts of the boys in my class. The salt taste of the sea breeze, the hot sand, the itching powder dusted over sunburned skin, the smell of me and my friends, and amid the cries of the naked crowd of swimmers, an abyss of blissful dizziness into which I suddenly plunge, in silence and solitude. I cry out and close my eyes. The hard hot sex in my grip stiffens for an instant, and in that instant I feel the sperm that erupts from inside me flowing out to fill my hand. All the while, I know that the lucky crowd of naked bathers is peacefully swimming, sunken into silence in the clear summer afternoon sea within me.
Then the chill of an autumn afternoon comes to call on the sea inside my body. I shiver and open my eyes. The bathroom floor is spattered with semen from one end to the other. Already it’s nothing but a cold, hypocritical, murky white fluid. I don’t feel like it’s mine. I run hot water everywhere to wash it away, but the spongy last lumps get stuck between the boards and won’t wash out for love or money. If my sister sits down on there, she might get pregnant. That’s incest, and my sister will probably turn into a filthy lunatic.
I keep on running hot water, but while I’m at it, I get cold and feel like I’m about to start shivering. I get into the tub but I get out almost as soon as I get in, making a lot of noise as I splash around. If I’m in the bath too long, my mother’s sure to get suspicious. Then she gets sarcastic. “Until last year this kid was like a bird in the bath. What’s this sudden interest in the tub, I’d like to know.”
I’m fuming as I unlock the door, making sure I don’t make a sound. When I come out of the bathroom the happiness that came boiling up at the moment of orgasm, like something that was thronging together from inside and outside my body at the same time, the friendship I felt for people I didn’t know from Adam, the feeling of life lived in common, all the dregs of those feelings stay trapped in the steam, which has a slight tang of semen.
A large mirror is hanging against the wall of the little dressing room. I see my lonely self standing there naked and dejected in the yellow light. I’m a dejected Seventeen if there ever was one. My sex has shriveled back into my crotch where the hair, if you can even call it that, grows only in bare wisps. My foreskin has shrunk up to look like a wrinkled blue-black chrysalis. It hangs down wet and heavy, from sucking up water on the one hand and semen on the other. Only my balls are relaxed by the hot water, and they look like they want to hang down to my knees. It is an unappealing sight. What’s more, with the light behind me now, the body in the mirror is nothing but skin and bone, and anything but muscle. In the bathroom the lighting was better, that’s all. The realization takes the heart right out of me.
I’m utterly depressed as I put on my shirt. My face pops out of the collar, staring at me. I come up to the mirror and take a close look at my face. It’s a disgusting face. It’s not that it’s ugly or swarthy, it is simply a disgusting face. For starters, the skin is too thick. It’s white and thick like the skin of a pig. I like a face with thin, tanned skin stretched tight over good clean cheekbones, like a runner’s face, but under my skin there’s a mass of flesh and fat. It gives the impression that the one fat part of me is my face.
Then there’s my narrow forehead. With my coarse hair pressing in on it, it looks even smaller than it is. My cheeks are swollen, but my lips are small and red, and look like a girl’s. My eyebrows are heavy and short, growing without life, and have no clear shape, and my eyes are narrow and tend to roll back in my head, showing too much white around the bottoms, which gives me a nasty look.
And my ears. My ears are those fleshy “lucky Buddha ears” that stick straight out from the sides of my head.
My face seems to be ashamed of its flabby, girlish look. Every time I have my picture taken I end up feeling completely beaten. Especially when they take the class picture of everybody in my grade at school; the photo comes out so depressing I want to die. The photographer always makes a second print with my face retouched to look smooth and round as an egg.
I glare at my face in the mirror, wanting to groan. I’ve turned bluish-black. That’s the facial color of a chronic masturbator. At school and in town maybe I’m actually a walking advertisement for the fact that I’m always masturbating. Maybe other people know about my masturbation habit as soon as they see me. Maybe they can see thr
ough me, every time they see my big ugly nose: Look! He’s one who does you-know-what. Maybe they gossip about it.
I can’t help feeling the same way I did when I thought masturbation was bad for me. Come to think of it, things haven’t improved a bit since then. By things I mean that I’d be so ashamed if people knew about my masturbating that I’d want to die. Ah, that! people probably say. That guy’s a full-time masturbator. Look at the color of his face. Look at those cloudy eyes. They probably look at me and spit, like they’re seeing something disgusting. I’d like to kill them. I’d like to machine-gun them to death, every last one of them. I say it out loud. “I want to kill them. With a machine gun, every last one of them. I want to kill them all. If only I had a machine gun!”
My voice is low, and the breath which fails to become a voice steams up the mirror. Instantly I thrust my angry face out of sight behind the haze of dirty fog. What a liberating feeling of freedom it would be, I think spitefully, if my face could disappear this same way from the eyes of all the others who look at me and laugh. But that kind of miracle won’t happen. I’m a chronic masturbator who’ll always be naked to the eyes of others. A Seventeen who’s always doing you-know-what.
I realize this is the first time in my life I’ve felt so bad on my birthday. And for the rest of my life, all my birthdays will probably be just as bad, if not worse. There’s no doubt in my mind that this is a true premonition.
If only I hadn’t jerked off. I repent. I have a headache. In despair, as I pull on the rest of my clothes, I start to croon “Oh, Carol.”
You hurt me, and you made me cry, but if you leave me, I will surely die.
Oh, oh, Carol! You treat me cruel!
§ § §
During supper, nobody says anything suitable for my birthday. My sister refuses to repeat even as much as what she came into the bathroom to say to me. In the end, I realize that there just isn’t anything you can say about my seventeenth birthday. My family never had the habit of talking while we eat. My old man is the headmaster of a private high school, and hates talking at mealtime. He thinks it’s an unforgivably vulgar habit for families to talk while they eat.
I seem to be worn out after masturbating, and my head is throbbing. I feel like I’m mud-spattered with the nastiness of being a Seventeen, so I don’t want to say I’m unhappy, that they can finish their dinner in silence. I myself have come to think that my birthday should be treated with the same cold indifference as every other day of my life.
But after dinner I’m dawdling over my tea while I eat some Korean pickles. I’m not thinking about my birthday or about the expander, but it might just be that, after all, somewhere in my heart, there’s still some part of me left that wants to make an issue out of my birthday.
I’m rereading the evening paper and watching television out of the corner of my eye while I drink my tea and munch on the Korean pickles. I remember a big Korean boy in my class was always bullying me during my junior high school days, which I spent in the country. He said it was because I was a dwarf.
The television news shows the Crown Prince and the Crown Princess Michiko delivering a message about their trip overseas. The cunning eyes of the Crown Prince look into the distance as he says something like, “We intend to do our best to be able to live up to the expectations of all the people of Japan.”
Michiko is at his side, smiling a slightly forced smile and staring in the direction of us, the people of Japan. I mutter under my breath.
“The tax-stealing parasite has a lot of nerve, the way he talks. I don’t expect one damned thing from him.”
My sister has been stretched out beside the television reading a paperback, but when I say that she jumps up like an avenging angel and snaps at me.
“Who are you calling parasite?” she says. “You’re the one who’s got nerve.”
That stops me for a minute. I feel like I must’ve said something wrong. But my old man sits there puffing a cigarette, with his back turned like he could care less, and my older brother, who works for a television station, is oblivious to everything except the model airplane he’s putting together. My mother is working in the kitchen, but she has her head screwed around so she can see the television. She’s watching it with a fascination that borders on idiocy. Nobody has the least interest in the argument between me and my sister. I’m getting more and more fed up. I’m up on my feet, giving my sister back as good as I’m getting.
“The parasites are the Royal Couple. We don’t want anything from those bastards. And if we’re going to talk about parasites, I could name a few more. The Self-Defense Forces are at the top of the list. Or didn’t you know that? Maybe you’re too close to the lighthouse to see the light?”
“Let’s leave aside Their Majesties the Crown Prince and Princess,” my sister whispers in an ice-cold voice, with her narrow eyes strangely set behind her glasses. “Why are the Self-Defense Forces parasites? If there wasn’t any SDF, and if the American army wasn’t in Japan, what would Japan do for security? And what about the second and third sons from the farming villages who work for the SDF? If there wasn’t any SDF, where could they find work?”
I’m stuck. I go to the most progressive high school in Tokyo. We even have demonstrations. When one of my class friends starts badmouthing the SDF I come to their defense, thinking about my sister working as a nurse in an SDF hospital, but still I think I want to be in the left wing. And when it comes to feelings I fit right in with the Left. I’ve been in marches, and once I got myself called in by the social studies teacher, who’s advisor to the school paper, because I wrote a letter to the editor saying high school students ought to participate in the movement against the American bases. But now I have to say something to knock down my sister’s argument, and I’m stuck.
“That’s the official explanation. It’s the party line those Liberal-Democrat bastards use whenever they want to screw the people,” I sneer at her, bluffing all the way. “It’s what simple-minded people say. That’s what makes them such easy prey for those parasites.”
“So okay. I’m simple-minded. Why don’t you answer my simple question with that complicated mind of yours? Suppose all the foreign forces get out of Japan, and we do away with the Self-Defense Forces. Since that makes Japan a military vacuum do you think, to give one hypothetical example, we’re going to be able to turn our relationship with South Korea to Japan’s advantage? Japanese fishing boats are already being held around the Syngman Rhee Line. And if some country lands even a handful of troops on Japanese soil, what can we do if we don’t have a military of our own?”
“Can’t we appeal to the UN? And except for South Korea, you’re just trying to stir up trouble when you talk about a handful of troops from some country. No country on earth is going to land an army in Japan. You’re just inventing imaginary enemies.”
“The UN isn’t almighty, you know. And I’m not talking about an invasion from Mars. When some army from this world invades you, that country has its own voice in the UN too. And the UN won’t necessarily think about the welfare of Japan. Anyway, just look at the Korean War, or the wars all over Africa. By the time the UN gets there, the war’s already on. If there’s fighting on Japanese soil for even three days, an awful lot of Japanese are going to die. A UN army isn’t going to mean anything to those dead Japanese. You can say what you like about Japan, but whether some country has Japan for a base or not makes a big difference in the Far East. If America goes home, don’t you think the left-wingers are going to want to invite in Soviet military bases so they can sleep a little easier? I have chances to meet American soldiers from the bases, you know, more than you do. So I can say it’s not good to have foreign soldiers in Japan. It’d be better to build up the SDF. That way we can also save the second and third farming village sons from unemployment.”
I feel like I’m getting beaten on one thing after another, and I don’t like it. I don’t want to lose. Besides, my position is supposed to be right. When I talk with friends at school,
ideas like my sister’s get thrown out and beaten into the ground. Nobody takes them seriously for even a second. So I tell myself I have to win now. Shit, I think to spur myself on. The wisdom of woman, I guess. I’ve never really thought about whether the rearmament is correct.
“Aren’t those second and third farmer sons unemployed because of the rotten politics of the Conservative cabinet?” I say. “The unemployed are the result of bad politics, and aren’t they just being used again for the sake of more bad politics?”
I’m hot now, but my sister isn’t ruffled at all.
“Then what about the postwar recovery and the growth of the economy? That was achieved under the Conservative government that’s supposed to be so bad. The Conservative government lets Japan prosper. That’s the truth, isn’t it? Isn’t that why most Japanese support the Conservative party?”
“Japan’s prosperity is shit, and the Japanese who vote for the Conservative party are shit. It’s all disgusting,” I shout. Tears are running down my face. I feel like an ignorant fool, and I don’t know what to do about it.