“I did notice that you were watching me,” Kogito replied. “But it just seemed like too much of an effort to turn around and look at you.”
“What’s the matter?”
“There was a guy called Arimatsu, remember? The one who seemed to be one of Goro’s hangers-on, but then again, maybe he wasn’t; it was hard to tell. Anyway, today after you and Akari had left to go to the hospital to pick up Akari’s medicine, I got a letter from Arimatsu, sent by express registered mail—what do they call it now, ‘simplified registered mail’? I guess it’s a quick and easy variation on the certified delivery that big-shot journalist always used to use when he sent me poison-pen letters. It’s just a kind of precautionary device for the journalist, so he can insert a postscript to his defamatory article stating that he had sent a certain letter that way, and therefore he was confident it had been delivered.
“It’s the same old technique; the journalistic weasels of today learn their tricks by emulating the weasels of yesteryear. In any case, I knew from the start that it would have been pointless for me to rise to the bait. He knew that too, of course, but he’ll still lead off his article by proclaiming that I willfully disregarded his so-called ‘polite letter.’ Arimatsu’s letter was honest on one point, at least: it didn’t hide the fact that it was a copy of an original written on graph-style manuscript paper, the kind that holds two hundred characters per page.”
“Was it something to do with Goro?”
Kogito nodded. “It wasn’t clear which weekly tabloid magazine he was talking about, but anyway the letter said that the woman who was mentioned in some article about the ‘scandal’ had been hiding out abroad, but she got tired of being in exile, so now she’s back in Japan, and didn’t I feel that it was my duty to meet with this woman and hear her story? The letter also said that he had heard from a number of journalists that while I tended to be very overprotective of my family, especially Akari, when it came to helping out some unnamed underdog, I would flatly refuse.”
“I don’t think you have any sort of obligation at all in this case, and besides, what good could possibly come of your meeting with that woman?”
“That’s exactly why Arimatsu is probably planning to make up a scurrilous story based on the premise that I ignored his proposition. It’s all rather unclear, but even if a woman like that does exist, I would be surprised if she had hired him to play a part in some sleazy scheme.”
“And that’s what you’ve been brooding about all day?” Chikashi asked.
There didn’t seem to be any sort of hidden agenda behind her question, but Kogito’s snowy-stubbled face showed a disproportionate degree of consternation as he replied, “All I can think of is that there was a girl Goro met three years ago at the Berlin Film Festival—remember, he told us about her?—and maybe she has somehow fallen on hard times to the point where a cad like Arimatsu would call her a ‘wretched woman.’ But that’s pure speculation on my part; it could be someone else entirely.”
“Speculation or not, surely he wouldn’t venture a theory like that without some basis in fact. Did you hear anything about such a woman while you were in Berlin?” Chikashi asked.
“To be sure, I did hear some confusing rumors about a vengeful girl Friday or some such,” Kogito replied. “But I have a feeling that particular gossip isn’t related to the case Arimatsu’s talking about. There’s something else that keeps running through my head, though. There was a girl in Berlin the last time Goro was there; he spoke about her at great length on some of the cassette tapes he made for me. And that drawing he sent of Berlin in wintertime—you were saying that he drew it with someone standing next to him, and I can’t help thinking it might have been the same young woman. From what I heard, those tapes seem like an unusually joyful memento that Goro left behind for the world on this side. When I realize that he made this sort of happy human connection toward the end of his life, I feel as if we, too, can take positive encouragement from that. But now even those good feelings seem to have been polluted by Arimatsu’s toxic letter.”
“This is hard to say, especially since I’m the one who asked you to stop your midnight, um ... interactions with Goro’s recordings, but I would really like to listen to those tapes,” Chikashi said slowly. “Though since you’ve never mentioned this before, I imagine the monologue in question might have been meant for your ears only. But if it truly is a memento of something joyful that Goro experienced toward the end of his life, I’d like to hear that, too.”
When Chikashi said this, Kogito—unusual, for him—didn’t reply right away. But when she went into the kitchen the next morning, there they were on the table: a small stack of cassette tapes, in consecutive order, each labeled with its sequential number and a brief summary of the contents. Next to the tapes was the Tagame apparatus: batteries inserted, ready to go. Cooking breakfast can wait, Chikashi thought as she returned to her bedroom. There were three tapes, with the pertinent passages of each one clearly marked. She pressed PLAY, and her late brother’s voice filled the room.
You know something about my checkered past, of course, but here I am, at this rather advanced age, learning amazing new things about the realm of sex from a mere slip of a girl. You might even say that I’ve been allowed to see sexuality in a completely new light. I can just picture the complicated expression on your face when you hear me saying this sort of thing, but believe me, it has nothing to do with any unseemly dirty-old-man perversions. It’s just the carefree, open, wholesome world of sexual delight, that’s all. So anyway, this is what happened, and I hereby swear that everything I’m about to tell you is the whole truth and nothing but the truth, from my own strange and wonderful experience!
The first thing (and for that matter the last, as well, and everything in between) is the kiss. To put it simply: we kiss. In the beginning, I thought this young girl—she was only seventeen when we first met—had probably never kissed anyone except in the way a child kisses its mother. That was the way she kissed me at first, innocently, and that was the way she returned my early kisses, too. However, things progressed rather rapidly from there; I suppose that’s not too surprising, since we spent half a day doing nothing but kissing. She was a natural-born master of the art of passionate kissing, and she was incredibly innovative and creative, as well. Every part of the lips, every trick of the tongue, every nook and cranny of the mouth—those were her instruments, and each variation and every repetition would bring some thrilling new revelation. (The way she used her teeth!) Before long I, too, had mastered the art of creating the most epic, ardent kisses of all time. I even invented some new variations myself! That’s right, me: the battle-scarred veteran of the sexual wars. For an entire hour, sometimes two, we would do nothing but kiss, until my entire mind and body were aflame with desire. To put it in your terms, for the first time in a long while my sex life was radically transmogrified.
So there we are, lying on the bed in my hotel room in Berlin, and I’m putting my finger into the left side of her half-opened mouth. Her teeth, wet and glistening with saliva, are nibbling gently on my finger. All the while, she’s kissing me with the right side of her mouth. My mouth is partly open, too, and my tongue is in constant motion. The girl’s face is as flushed as if she’d just finished a strenuous workout. Suddenly, she throws back her head and says with a laugh, “I can’t handle this—you have too much sex appeal.”
Now, the phrase “sex appeal” may have been in her vocabulary for a while, but I’m pretty sure this is the first time she’s ever used it in this context. That’s what I thought, anyway. There was something endearing about her unconventional use of that term (after all, people usually talk about sex appeal as part of early-stage courtship, not in bed, right?), but it struck me as a perfectly vivid remark—just amazingly cool and chic and candid. It seemed like the brash, straightforward sort of thing a man might say, but not a young girl. It really was the epitome of Professor Musumi’s definition of “chic,” in its original meaning.
Anyway, while we’re kissing I slide both my hands under her casual slacks—she’s astride me, sitting on my lap—and I start to stroke her smooth, satiny skin, from the loins all the way around to her rear end. I can’t get over the shapeliness of her small, perfect buttocks: tight and sleek, without an ounce of extra fat. She’s fresh and unsullied, and the eroticism we’re sharing is utterly pellucid and pure. Before long, my right hand steals up to explore her flat abdomen. The reconnaissance progresses very slowly, over several days, but eventually my fingers wend their way into the uncharted territory below her waist. Tentatively, I caress the outer edges of her pubic hair, and she doesn’t seem to mind. From then on, touching that secret meadow becomes routine. It’s like a military campaign: once I gain a victory in a strategic location, that site is mine, and it can’t be taken back. However, she absolutely refuses to let my fingers descend any lower. She vetoes any such attempts clearly but not unkindly, being careful not to hurt my feelings. And thus it’s settled: she places certain limits on my ongoing survey of her terrain, and I must abide by those rules.
Clinging tightly to each other, we tumble onto the sofa in my hotel room. The hand that has slipped under her slacks doesn’t run along the periphery of her panties; rather, following the imaginary line of a high-cut bikini bottom, it traces a long, slow arc from the lower reaches of her pelvic bone down to her groin. I know that if I touch her private parts, even by accident, I’ll be firmly pushed away and may never get a chance to try again. Very carefully, my hands continue their delicate infiltration of the upper reaches of her thighs, almost as if there were a counterweight keeping them within bounds at all times. But instead of wanting to hurry things along, I’m savoring the exquisite eroticism of my hand’s slow progress. The only way I can express my male sexual power is by rubbing my tumescent member against her thighs, through my trousers, and my epic desire can only find release in a kiss. And so we go on like that, kissing till the end of time.
It’s her eighteenth birthday, the day I gave her a soft, cream-colored dress to wear to our celebratory dinner (I remember the understated elegance of that Berlin department store and the dedication of the employees who helped us choose the perfect frock). The girl—still wearing that dress, and a trifle tipsy on half a glass of Sauternes—is abandoning herself to our kissing, heart and soul. We’re lying intertwined on the sofa, and she doesn’t seem to care if her new dress gets covered with wrinkles. Before I know it my finger, following the line of her groin, ends up losing its way along the rim of her underwear. While our legs have been chafing violently against each other, the girl has probably gotten her stylish, gossamer-thin knickers into a twist, quite literally. Hesitating a bit, I try to return to the previously approved course, and somehow the tip of my index finger wanders into a thick, fleshy place. I feel the dampness around the edges. The bulb of my finger, which had been touching the soft, downy fuzz on the outer margins, now enters the jungle of thick, tightly curled hair. The girl decisively torques her abdomen, driving away not just the renegade finger but my entire palm, and my hand ends up back in the safe zone on the outside of her thighs.
“We had a deal, remember? You mustn’t break the rules,” she says in a brave voice. Now her private parts are wet to the point of overflowing the outer periphery, and the joy of discovery beats wildly in my heart like a second pulse. The eros of only kissing is being transformed into something strong and systemic: a kind of pansomatic desire.
How can merely kissing feel so rich, so complex, so—I really don’t want to use this old cliché, but here goes: so profound? I ask that question almost rhetorically, half talking to myself, but the girl surprises me by answering. “Because,” she whispers, “you’re about to be taken as far as you can go, just by kissing.” She says this as if she’d given the matter a lot of thought. “Do you remember the time I stopped in the middle of a kiss and said, ‘You have too much sex appeal,’ and you kindly told me that I was using that term improperly and set me straight? I actually said that out of embarrassment because I was on the verge of crossing a ‘certain line,’ as they say, and I thought I was the only one who was starting to have those feelings. But after that you said, ‘If we go on like this, I’m afraid I’m going to end up coming.’ And I was so happy that I shouted, ‘Go ahead and come!’” And then the girl said earnestly, trying to steer the conversation back to the original topic, “It’s because I know I can’t have sex with you, that’s why a kiss can take me all the way, as high as I can go.”
As the day approached for my return to Tokyo, she consented to take off her slacks, just once. We were lying on the bed at the time, and somehow, purely by accident, her panties ending up coming off, as well. I couldn’t see her private parts, but I did get a glimpse of the pale, circular mound of fat around her navel, like a rice cake, and (echoing that shape) the perfectly round halo of pubic hair below.
“Let’s try lying on top of each other,” the girl says. “And since that big, thick thing looks kind of cramped in your pants—it seems to be especially big and thick today, for some reason—you can put it between my thighs, just this once.” Like someone who has done this sort of thing before (or maybe it was because she had never done it), the girl even elevates her knees, but by mutual agreement we don’t allow my penis to follow its natural inclinations. She does let me ejaculate into her hand, but as she put it at the time, what she experienced with me was beyond sex, even though technically, by her definition, it wasn’t “real sex.” Afterward she said, “This is the best feeling I’ve ever had in my life, but even so, I didn’t come.” As for me, I’m certain that I’ll always remember this, in its tantalizing totality, as one of the top one or two erotic experiences of my life.
So why didn’t I have “real sex” with this lovely and passionate young girl? Well, apart from the matter of her chastity boundaries, it was because I couldn’t help seeing in her an uncanny resemblance to myself—that is, to the way I looked when I was young. (I realize not everyone would agree, but it was very obvious to me.) Chikashi and I look a lot alike, but even more clearly than my younger sister, this girl is really the spitting image of me during the time when I was very young and it was hard to tell whether I was a girl or a boy. Even if she had been willing, there’s no way I could have had sexual intercourse with a girl who seemed to have my own face from childhood. That would be exceedingly dangerous, and weird, too, if you know what I mean. And besides, our erotic experiences had already accumulated to the point where it was almost starting to feel like too much of a good thing ...
At this point, Chikashi stopped the tape, cutting off her brother’s narrative. Akari had crawled out of bed and was now in the living room, listening to Hidetomo’s Yoshida classical-music program on the radio with the volume turned down low. He had been listening to that show every week for the past twenty years, and he had never missed a single broadcast. It had become a family touchstone; if Akari’s radio program was on, it must be Sunday.
Chikashi had been deeply moved by the sound of Goro’s exuberant voice, but now it was time to pull herself together and make breakfast for her family. She decided to keep the “Berlin tapes” for herself, rather than returning them to her husband. For the first time in a very long while, mixed in with a complex stew of other emotions, she even felt a faint stirring of sexuality.
And based on what she’d gleaned from Goro’s recorded narrative, Chikashi felt absolutely certain that the girl in question would never turn into the type of person who could be called a “wretched woman” by some third-rate tabloid journalist.
7
Three months went by, or thereabouts. And then, out of the blue, who should appear in Chikashi’s life but the young woman Goro had talked about with so much passion? First, there was a phone call from the girl, which was an unexpectedly pleasant experience in itself.
After Goro’s death, there had been a sudden increase in phone calls from complete strangers, and as a result Chikashi had developed a not entirely irrational feeling of d
read and aversion toward the telephone itself. In one sense, those calls had been harder to deal with than the complaints about Kogito’s always-controversial work that had flooded in on numerous occasions in the past, from both ends of the political spectrum. But when the call came from the girl, and even before Chikashi had any idea who the caller was or what her business might be, she somehow got the feeling, just from the young woman’s voice and way of talking, that maybe the telephone wasn’t such a bad thing, after all. This quasi-magical system that could link two human beings together by way of a feeble electrical current flowing over a telephone line: why had she forgotten how comforting that connection could be? And that very phenomenon—two strangers on either end of a telephone line—turned out to have the power to rescue Chikashi from the submerged feelings of isolation and helplessness that had been haunting her for so long she wasn’t really conscious of them anymore.
“Three years ago, in Berlin, I was working for Goro Hanawa, and he gave me this number,” the girl began. “Is this Chikashi, by any chance? If you don’t mind, I’d like to talk to you for a minute. My name is Ura Shima.”
The voice on the telephone had the affectless quality so often heard in the voices of young women these days, a sort of unobtrusive monotone from which any tinge of emotion had been erased, but even so, it gave Chikashi a good feeling. It was as if the initial surprise at hearing that the voice belonged to the girl who was with Goro in Berlin had been quickly subsumed in a sensation of warmth and consolation.
“I’ll be happy to talk to you,” Chikashi said with complete sincerity.
“Thank you very much. I’ll get right to the point, then. I know this is rather sudden, but I have a favor to ask. Three years ago, at the time of the Berlin Film Festival, Goro sent you a watercolor painting. What I’m wondering is, would it be possible to get a color copy? When Goro was painting it, I was working as his interpreter/attendant, and I was at his side the entire time. I’m just back in Japan for a short time, and I’ve set my mind on taking a color copy of that painting with me when I return to Germany, no matter what. So I’m asking you to help me make that happen.”