Personal Matter

by Kenzaburo Oe

  “You just think you’re no good,” Himiko said carelessly and dropping the towel around her feet, she moved to cover Bird’s body with her own, her small breasts thrusting like fangs. Bird, like a child, fell captive to the self-defense instinct; still clutching his penis with one hand, he drove his other arm straight at Himiko’s belly. His hand sinking into her soft flesh made his skin crawl.

  “It was your shouting ‘pregnancy’ just now that did it,” he said in hurried justification.

  “I did not shout,” Himiko objected with a look of outrage.

  “It hit me awfully hard. Pregnancy is the one word I just can’t take!”

  Himiko covered her breasts and abdomen with her arms, probably because Bird was doggedly concealing his penis. Like the wrestlers of antiquity who wrestled in the nude, they first defended their most vulnerable parts with their bare hands and then stood their ground, eyeing each other warily.

  “What’s wrong, Bird?” Himiko said without anger. Gradually she had realized the gravity of the situation.

  “I thought about pregnancy and—fell apart.”

  Himiko brought her legs together and sat down next to Bird’s thigh. Bird twisted away on the narrow bed to make more room for her. Himiko, lowering the arm that still covered her breasts, gently touched the hand that Bird still clenched around his penis.

  “Bird, I can make you hard enough,” she said quietly but with conviction. “A lot of time has passed since that lumberyard.”

  Bird submerged in a feeling of dark, clammy helplessness, and endured the ticklish play of Himiko’s fingers on his hand. Would he be able to present his own case convincingly? He had his doubts. But he had to explain, to leap the wall of his predicament.

  “It’s not a question of technique,” he said, turning his eyes away from the earnest, sorrowful aspect of Himiko’s breasts. “The problem is fear.”

  “Fear?” Himiko appeared to be turning over the word in her mind in hope of discovering the bud of a joke.

  “I’m afraid of the dark recesses where that grotesque baby was created,” Bird said in an attempt at explanation in a joking vein, which, failing, sank him even deeper into gloom. “When I saw the baby with his head wrapped in bandages, I thought of Apollinaire. It sounds sentimental, but I felt as if the baby had been wounded in the head on a battlefield, like Apollinaire. My baby got hit in solitary battle inside a dark, sealed hole I’ve never seen. …” As he spoke, Bird recalled the sweet, redeemable tears he had shed in the ambulance—but the tears of shame I wept in the hospital corridor today are already beyond redemption. “... I can’t send my weakling penis onto that battleground!”

  “But isn’t that confined to you and your wife? I mean, isn’t it a fear you ought to experience when she first approaches you about sex after she’s recovered?”

  “Assuming we ever make it again—” Bird faltered, already oppressed by a moment of consternation still weeks away, “—I know I’ll feel as if I’m having incest with my baby son on top of this fear of mine. Now wouldn’t that make even a steel penis go limp?”

  “Poor Bird! If I gave you enough time, you’d count off a hundred and one complexes in defense of your own impotence.”

  Satisfied with her little joke, Himiko lay face down in the narrow space alongside Bird’s body. Bird, trying to make himself even smaller on the bed as it sagged like a hammock under the added weight, listened in mortal terror to the sound of Himiko’s restrained breathing next to his ear. If she had already plugged in the coil of desire he would be obliged to do something for her. But burrow his baby mole of a fragile penis into the dark, closed culvert beyond those dank and unaccountable folds—that he could not do. Himiko’s earlobe brushed Bird’s temple hotly. Though she lay in limp silence, her body seemed to be under attack by a million gadflies of desire. Bird considered easing her need a little at a time with his fingers, or lips, or tongue. But she had gone on record the night before as having the same distaste for that as masturbation. If he brought it up again and was refused in the same words, both of them would feel as if they had cruelly spurned each other. It occurred to Bird that something might be managed if Himiko only had a little of the sadist in her. He would try anything, so long as it didn’t involve the hole from which calamity had welled. She could beat or kick or stomp him and he would bear it quietly; he wouldn’t even hesitate to drink her urine. For the first time in his life, Bird now discovered the masochist in himself. And since this was after he had mired in a bottomless swamp of shame, he even felt attracted in a self-abusive way to these new, and trifling, disgraces. It was just in this fashion, he supposed, that one inclined toward masochism. But why not say himself and be frank about it! Not so many years from now, as a forty-year-old masochist, Bird might remember this day as the anniversary of his conversion to the cult. Bird pursued a fixation: that his degeneracy was self, and no place other, centered.

  “Bird?”

  “Yes?” Bird said in resignation; so the attack had begun at last!

  “You’ve got to destroy the sexual taboos that you’ve created for yourself. Otherwise, your sexual world will warp terribly!”

  “I know. I was just thinking about masochism,” Bird said. Contemptibly enough, he expected Himiko to leap at the fly he had cast and to extend a base probe of her own with a wistful reply that she, on her part, had thought often about sadism. Bird lacked even the reckless honesty of the aspiring pervert. Clearly the poisons of shame had brought him to a debased extreme.

  But when Himiko spoke after what seemed a puzzled silence, it was not to pursue Bird’s riddle:

  “If you’re going to conquer your fear, Bird, you’ll have to isolate it by defining its object precisely.”

  Uncertain for the moment of what Himiko intended, Bird was silent.

  “Is your fear limited to the vagina and the womb? Or are you afraid of everything female, of my entire existence as a woman, for example?”

  Bird thought for a minute. “Of the vagina and the womb, I suppose. Since you personally have nothing to do with my misfortune, the only reason I can’t face you when you’re naked has to be that you’re armed with a vagina and a womb!”

  “In that case, wouldn’t you simply have to eliminate the vagina and the womb?” Himiko said with careful impartiality. “If you can confine your fear to the vagina and the womb, then the enemy you have to fight lives only in that realm. Bird! What are the attributes of the vagina and the womb that frighten you?”

  “It’s the kind of thing I was talking about. I have this feeling there’s what you’d call another universe back in there. It’s dark, it’s infinite, it’s teeming with everything antihuman: a grotesque universe. And I’m afraid that if I entered it, I’d get trapped in the time system of another dimension and wouldn’t be able to return—my fear has certain resemblances to an astronaut’s fantastic acrophobia!”

  Bird had sensed that Himiko’s logic was leading to something that would aggravate his sense of shame, and he was hiding behind a screen of language because he wanted to avoid whatever it might be. But Himiko wasn’t to be put off: “Do you suppose you wouldn’t be particularly afraid of the female body if the vagina and womb were excluded from it?”

  Bird hesitated. Then he said, blushing, “It’s not terribly important but, well, the breasts—”

  “What you’re saying is that you wouldn’t have to be afraid if you approached me from behind.”

  “But—”

  “Bird!” Himiko would accept no more protests. “I always think of you as the type of man younger men tend to idolize. Haven’t you ever been to bed with one of those younger brothers?”

  The plan Himiko outlined was more than sufficient to overcome Bird’s own fastidiousness about sexual morality. Bird was stunned. Never mind how it would be for me, he thought, released for just an instant from preoccupation with himself. Himiko would have to endure considerable pain, probably her body would tear and she would bleed: we both might be smeared in filth! But suddenly, twisted i
nto his disgust like a length of rope, Bird felt a new desire welling.

  “Won’t you feel humiliated afterward?” Bird whispered in a voice hoarse with desire: this was a final demonstration of reluctance.

  “I didn’t feel humiliated even when I got covered in blood and mud and wood shavings in the middle of a winter night in that lumberyard.”

  “But I wonder,” Bird said, “will there be any pleasure in it for you?”

  “At the moment I’m only interested in doing something for you, Bird,” Himiko said. Then she added with unbounded gentleness, as if to make certain Bird wouldn’t have to feel awkward, “Besides, as I said before, I can discover what I’d call something genuine in any imaginable brand of sex.”

  Bird was silent. Without moving on the bed, he watched Himiko select something from the city of little jars on her dresser, walk into the bathroom, take out of a drawer a large clean towel. The tides of anxiety rose slowly, trying to submerge him. Bird sat up abruptly, lifted the whisky bottle from the side of the bed where it had rolled, and swigged from the bottle. He recalled how, at the bus stop in front of the hospital under the noonday sun, he had longed for the most malefic sex, a fuck rife with ignominy. And now it was possible. Bird took another swallow of the whisky and fell back on the bed. Now his penis was keen and hard, pulsing hotly. Himiko avoided his eyes as she returned to the bed, a mournful, leaden expression on her face. Was she also in the grip of some extraordinary desire? With satisfaction Bird felt a smile spread from his lips to his cheeks. I’ve leaped the highest wall first, I should be able to clear all the hurdles of shame now, like a track man in infinite time.

  “Bird, there’s nothing to be so uneasy about,” Himiko said, detecting indications contrary to Bird’s perception of himself. “Chances are it’ll be nothing at all.”

  … in the beginning he was solicitous of Himiko. But as failure followed on failure he began to feel that the small ludicrous noises and the peculiar odor were a kind of mockery, and his resentment gradually deprived him of all feeling but an egotistical engrossment in himself. Before long, Bird had forgotten Himiko, and the moment he felt himself succeed he grew hectically intent. Fragments of thought—hate floppy breasts and harsh animal genitals, desire lonely orgasm all to myself, avoid woman’s eyes peering up into your face—burst like shining shrapnel across Bird’s mind: this was the prelude to pleasure. To worry about the woman’s orgasm as you screwed, registering in your mind the responsibility for her after she was pregnant, was to do battle with your shuddering rear in order to put shackles around your own neck. Bird raised a war-cry at the back of his flaming head: I’m trampling a woman now in the most ignominious way! I’m capable of all that’s meanest and most vile, I’m shame itself, the hot mass my penis is rending now is really me, he raged, and was smitten by an orgasm of such intensity that it made his head swim.

  Bird convulsed with pleasure, and each convulsion drove a cry of agony from Himiko. Only half conscious, Bird listened to her screams. Abruptly, as if hatred had grown too much for him, he bit into Himiko’s neck where it joined her shoulder. Again she screamed. Opening his eyes, Bird saw a drop of blood trickling past her ashen earlobe toward her cheek. He groaned once more.

  Bird sensed the horror of what he had done only after the orgasm had passed, and he felt turned to stone. He wondered if the humanity could be restored to their relationship after coition this inhuman. He lay on his stomach like a rock, breathing raggedly, and wished he could extinguish himself. But Himiko was good enough to whisper in a gentle voice rich with everyday peace:

  “Come into the bathroom without touching yourself; I’ll finish up for you.”

  With amazement came succor and liberation. Himiko handled him as if he were a paralyzed invalid while he looked away with a flaming face. Surprise gradually sank into Bird and settled. There was no doubting that he was in the hands of a sexual expert. In what fashion had his girlfriend traversed the long road since that night in the middle of winter? Bird requited Himiko’s attentions only by bathing with disinfectant the wounds his own teeth had inflicted on her shoulder. He bathed the three scattered bites clumsily, like a timid child. Relieved, he watched the color quietly returning to Himiko’s cheeks and eyelids.

  The sheets freshly changed, Bird and his friend again lay side by side on the bed. Their breathing now was regular. Himiko’s silence distressed Bird, but he was reassurred by her quiet breathing and by the calmness of her eyes as she stared up into the dimness. Besides, Bird was immersed himself in a deep feeling of peace, far from any inclination to psychological excavation. He was savoring gratefulness. Not so much confined to Himiko alone as gratefulness for the peace he had discovered, though certainly it could not last long, at the vortex of the maelstrom whirling around him with its vicious traps. Of course the ring of shame enclosing him was expanding even now: a symbol of his shame was already enshrined in a distant hospital ward. But Bird was reclining in a warm tub of peace. He noticed then that an internal obstacle, overcome, had passed away.

  “Shall we try again, the regular way?” Bird said. “I don’t think I’m afraid anymore.”

  “Thank you, Bird. Why don’t you take some sleeping pills if you need them, and then let’s sleep until tonight. If you’re still free of your fear when you wake up—”

  Bird agreed; he felt he wouldn’t need sleeping pills in his present state.

  “You’re a comfort to me,” he said simply.

  “I mean to be. I bet you haven’t been comforted once since all this began. And that’s not good, Bird. At a time like this you must be careful to have someone comfort you almost more than you need at least once. Otherwise you’ll find yourself helpless when the time comes to summon up your courage and break away from chaos.”

  “Courage?” Bird said without considering what Himiko might mean. “When am I going to have to call on courage?”

  “Oh you will, Bird, lots of times from now on,” Himiko said carelessly, yet with unsmiling authority in her voice.

  Bird found himself looking at Himiko as an old and tested warrior in the campaigns of daily life, with incomparably more experience than himself. Not only was she a sexual expert, her competence extended to a myriad other aspects of life in this real world. Bird acknowledged to himself that he was coming under Himiko’s influence: it was thanks to help from her that he had just overcome one of his fears. Had he ever felt so uncomplicated talking with a woman after intercourse? He didn’t think so. After sex, even sex with his wife, Bird had always fallen captive to feelings of self-pity and disgust. He mentioned this to Himiko, without mentioning his wife.

  “Self-pity? disgust? Bird, then you couldn’t have been sexually mature. And the women you slept with probably felt self-pity and disgust, too. I bet it was never completely satisfying, was it, Bird?”

  Bird was envious; jealous, too. That youth and the little dandy like an egg ogre who had called Himiko from outside her window in the middle of the night must both have had, he felt certain, completely satisfying intercourse with her. As Bird lay in petulant silence, Himiko said, carelessly again, though clearly she was displeased: “There’s nothing as arrogant and shitty as having sex with somebody and then feeling sorry for yourself. Bird, even disgust is better than that!”

  “You’re right. But the kind of people who feel sorry for themselves after sex don’t ordinarily have help from an expert like you, and they’ve lost all their confidence.”

  Bird felt as if he were reclining on a psychiatrist’s couch, and when he had emptied himself of unabashed and self-indulgent talk, he began drifting off to sleep, wondering how a young man married to this woman of gold could have committed suicide. Into the dulled emptiness the sleep virus had created in his head, a notion climbed: might Himiko not be making her amends to her dead husband by tolerating Bird and those other two? He had hanged himself in this very room, stepping off this bed, precisely as naked as Bird was now. Summoned that day by a phone call from Himiko, Bird had freed the dead boy’
s neck from the noose thrown over the rafters and had helped lower him to the floor, like a butcher in a freezer lowering a side of slaughtered beef from a frosted hook. In the pale dream just below the surface of sleep, Bird saw himself and the dead youth as one. With the part of himself that was awake he could feel Himiko’s hands sponging him dry, while in his dream he apprehended the movement of her trembling hands on his own body as she purified the dead boy. I am the dead boy, Bird thought, and the summer about to get under way will be easy to endure, because a dead boy’s body is icy as a winter tree! Trembling then as he struggled toward the surface of his dream, Bird whispered but I won’t commit suicide! and sank into the darkness of a deeper sleep.

  … Bird’s waking dream was harsh, the reverse face of the innocent dream that had ushered him into sleep, a thing armored in burrs that inspired anguish. Sleep for Bird was a funnel which he entered through the wide and easy entrance and had to leave by the narrow exit. Inflating like a blimp, his body was slowly traversing the dimness of infinite space. He has been subpoenaed by the tribunal beyond the darkness, and he is pondering a means of blinding them to his responsibility for the baby’s death. Ultimately, he knows he will not be able to dupe the jurors, but he feels at the same time that he would like to make an appeal—those people in the hospital did it! Is there nothing I can do to escape punishment? But his suffering grows only more ignoble as he continues to drift, a puny zeppelin.

  Bird woke up. Not a muscle that wasn’t stiff and aching, as though he had been lying in the lair of a creature whose body was constructed differently from his own. He felt as though his body were wrapped in layers of plaster cast. Where the hell could I be—at a crucial time like this! he whispered, thrusting only the antlers of wariness through a vague fog. At a crucial time like this, when he was fighting hand to hand with a baby like a monster! Bird recalled his conversation with the doctor in the ward, and the sensations of peril gave way to those of shame. Not that peril had vanished; it was encysted behind the sensations of shame. Where the hell am I—at a crucial time like this!