Vita Sexualis

by Ogai Mori

  Ogai's novel does not whitewash the very real world of sexual awareness, for the book deals with the problems of autoeroticism, homosexuality, and the erotic worlds of art and literature. Eventually the hero must cope with the problem of the world of women, from the painted caricature faces of the prostitutes in the archery shops to the assistants of the oiran, the high-class courtesan of the Yoshiwara. At school and in the dorms he must carry a dagger to protect himself from the "queers." And during all of these possible sexual escapades, confrontations, tightrope excursions, Ogai's hero keeps his balance, observing, commenting, sometimes humorously, sometimes seriously, always self-critically.

  When the anonymous reviewer in the August 1909 issue of the Teikoku Bungaku magazine said, "I . . . firmly believe . . . Mr. Ogai has become deranged of late," and advised Ogai "not to write this kind of worthless work and by so doing join the younger writers of our time," the critic must have been quite unaware of Ogai's intentions. For while it is true that the philosopher-protagonist of Vita Sexualis had misgivings about the worth of his performance, Ogai did manage to write a believably vivid portrait of boyhood and adolescence and young manhood. The mystery of sex is set forth in Ogai's clear logical style, and that he could place sex in a rational perspective in Meiji with its turbulent conflict of manners and values once more reveals Ogai's talent.

  Kazuji Ninomiya

  Niigata University

  Sanford Goldstein

  Purdue University

  Niigata, Japan & Lafayette, Indiana

  Acknowledgments

  The translators acknowledge, with gratitude, the kind assistance of Professor Seishi Shinoda, Chairman of the Department of English, and Akira Ikari, Professor of Japanese Literature, at Niigata University, Niigata, Japan, in helping to clarify some of the complexities of language and literature in Ogai's Vita Sexualis.

  Vita Sexualis

  Mr. Shizuka Kanai is a philosopher by profession.

  The notion a man is a philosopher is accompanied by the thought that he is writing a book. Philosopher by profession though he be, Mr. Kanai is not writing anything. They say that when he graduated from the College of Literature, his thesis was on the unusual topic of a comparative study of non-Buddhist Indian philosophy and pre-Socratic Greek philosophy. He hasn't written anything since.

  However, because of his occupation he gives lectures. Having received a professorship in the history of philosophy, he offers lectures that deal with the history of modern philosophy. Students claim Kanai Sensei's lectures are more interesting than those of his colleagues who have written a great many books. His lectures are based on immediate perception, at times strongly illuminating some particular topic. At such moments his students gain indelible impressions. Often his listeners are startled into comprehension when he explains a certain phenomenon by applying something utterly foreign to it, something that has nothing to do with the problem under consideration. They say Schopenhauer kept in his notebooks ordinary topics, like those items of general interest found in newspapers, and used them to illustrate his philosophy, but Mr. Kanai employs everything and anything as material for explaining the history of philosophy. At times his students are surprised when in the middle of a serious lecture, he clarifies his point by quoting from some current novel popular among the younger generation.

  He reads a good many novels. When he picks up a newspaper or magazine, he doesn't look at any of the controversial articles, only at the fiction. Still, if the authors of these stories knew why he was reading them, they'd be quite angry. He doesn't read them as works of art. Since he demands a very high standard for anything to qualify as a work of art, such commonplace newspaper stories fail to meet his requirements. What interests him in these stories is the psychological condition under which the authors wrote. And that is why when he discovers an author has written with the intention of creating something sad or pathetic, it strikes him as quite funny, and when the intention of the author is to be humorous, he feels instead quite sad about it.

  Every once in a while it occurs to him to write something himself. Though a philosopher by profession, he has no intention of establishing his own system of philosophy, so he has no interest in writing along this line. Instead, he would like to write a novel or a play. But because of those high demands he imposes on works of art, it is not easy for him to begin.

  In due course of time Soseki Natsume began writing his novels. Mr. Kanai read them with great interest. And he felt stimulated by them. But then in rivalry to Soseki's I Am a Cat, something came out called I Too Am a Cat. A book appeared entitled I Am a Dog. Mr. Kanai was quite disgusted on seeing these stories and ended by not writing anything himself.

  In the meantime, naturalism was well under way in Japan. When Mr. Kanai read the works of this school, he was not particularly stimulated. But what he found interesting in these novels was extremely interesting. At the same time he felt them interesting, he thought there was something odd about them.

  Each time he read a naturalistic novel, he discovered that the author never failed to use every occasion in daily life to represent his hero in reference to sexual desire and that the critics themselves acknowledged these novels accurately depicted life. At the same time he was wondering if such representations were actually true to life, he suspected that perhaps unlike the rest of the human race he might be indifferent to such desires, that he might have an extraordinary natural disposition which might be called frigiditas. Especially when he read Zola's novels could he not deny that this thought about himself was probably justified. The suspicion about himself had occurred when he came to a passage in Zola's Germinal in which the hero secretly observes intercourse between a man and a woman in a village of laborers living under conditions of utmost adversity. His thought at the moment was not that such a scene was probably impossible, but why the author had deliberately taken the trouble to depict it. A situation of this sort was probably true to life, but he wondered why the author had described it. That is, he wondered if the author's focusing on sexual desire itself was not abnormal. Novelists or poets probably have an extraordinary capacity for sexual desire. This problem has some connection to what Lambroso expounded in his theory about men of genius. It is also grounded in the supposition that Mobius and his school make in their sweeping criticism of famous poets and philosophers as mattoids. However, the naturalistic school so popular in Japan of late presented a quite different phenomenon. All at once a great many authors began writing on the same subject. Criticism kept acknowledging that human life involved sex. And when it seemed psychiatrists were saying that every aspect of a man's life is tinged with sexual desire, Mr. Kanai became even more suspicious.

  Meanwhile, the Debakame affair came to light. A workman by that name had the habit of spying on women in their section of the public bath, and one day he followed someone on her way home from the bathhouse and raped her. Such an event is a quite common occurrence no matter what the country. If it had been mentioned in a European newspaper, the item would have taken up no more than two or three lines along the corner of a page. But all at once throughout Japan the case expanded into an enormous problem. It was linked with the so-called naturalist movement. A new term, debakame-ism, was used as a pseudonym for naturalism. The verb debaru became fashionable. Mr. Kanai could not help suspecting that either people in general had become erotomaniacs or he himself was abnormally frigid.

  One day during this period he noticed a student in his class had a small volume with him entitled Einleitung in Die Philosophie by Jerusalem. When his lecture was over, Mr. Kanai picked up the book and asked his student what he thought of it. "I found it at Nankodo's bookstore," the young man said. "I bought it thinking it might be a good reference. I haven't read it yet, but please take it, Sensei, if you want to look it over." Mr. Kanai borrowed it and, free that evening, read it. When he came to the section on aesthetics, it really caught him by surprise. Written were these surprising comments: Each and every art is Liebeswerbung. It seduces. It demon
strates to the public sexual desire. When art is viewed in this manner, in much the same way that the menstrual flow is at times disoriented and emerges through the nose, sexual craving becomes embodied in drawings, engravings, music, novels, and plays.

  Mr. Kanai was startled, yet at the same time he felt the author was quite witty. However, he wondered why, as long as the author was being so clever, he had not pushed his theory a bit further and maintained that every incident in life is a manifestation of sexual desire. If he had carried his doctrine this far, he probably could have used the same reasoning to demonstrate that sexual desire permeates everything. Even religion can most easily be explained by it. A common way of referring to Christ is as a bridegroom. There are many nuns who have been revered as saints, but who in reality have merely manifested their sexual desires perversely. Many among those who have dedicated their lives to self-sacrifice and good works are sadists and masochists. If we observe life through the lens of sexual desire, the driving force behind every human act is no more than sexual yearning. Cherchez lafemme can be applied to every personal and social aspect of life. Mr. Kanai felt that if he observed human life from this viewpoint, he probably could not have escaped being a social outcast.

  So his long-cherished desire to write something began to be oriented toward a strange direction. He considered the problem in this way: There were very few documents to refer to that measured the steps by which sexual desire appears in human life and the ways in which it affects that life. Just as many erotic drawings appear in the fine arts, so pornography exists in every country. There are salacious books. But these are not the books one takes seriously. In the vast field of poetry, many poems are written about love. But love is not the same as sexual desire even though love may be closely related to it. Judicial and medical records contain some entries on this question, but these are mostly concerned with sexual perversion. Rousseau's Confessions are written boldly and bluntly on all aspects of sexual desire. During his childhood when he forgot what he had been taught, the daughter of his clergyman grabbed hold of him and thrashed him on the buttocks. Because Rousseau found the beating indescribably delicious, he deliberately pretended he did not know what he actually knew so that giving the girl the wrong answers, he received a beating from her. Rousseau wrote that when the girl reached the age where she knew what love was, she stopped beating him. This was her first move toward sexual desire, but never toward a first love. There are other accounts of sexual desire during Rousseau's younger days. But since his book was not written mainly for the purpose of explaining sexual desire, Mr. Kanai found it wasn't satisfying enough.

  Mr. Kanai felt Casanova was the perfect man about whom it could be said an entire life was devoted to sexual desire. His Memoirs was one of the world's great books, the majority of its content from first to last nothing more than sexual desire, yet a sexual desire not to be confused with love. In the same way, however, that it would be difficult to use Napoleon's autobiography as reliable information for a research project on man's desire for fame, due to the fact that Napoleon's extraordinary passion for fame far surpassed that of the ordinary man, so too would Casanova's book, the world's greatest reference work on sexual desire, be unsuitable for research on that question. And to take another example, the Colossos of Rhodes and the great image of Buddha at Nara would be inappropriate objects of study on the human form. Mr. Kanai felt he wanted to write something, but he didn't want to imitate his predecessors. He wondered if this was not exactly the right moment to attempt a history of his own sexuality. To be perfectly frank, he had never carefully thought about the way his sexual desires had germinated or the way they had developed. Might he not probe those desires and write about them? If he set them down clearly in black and white, he might understand them himself. Then he would probably know whether or not his sexual life was normal. Of course, before attempting to write it, he could not tell what the results would be. And so he did not even know if it would be something he could show to others or even to the public at large. He thought, at any rate, he might try writing about it little by little when he was free.

  While he was indulging himself in these thoughts, a parcel of books arrived from Germany. As usual they had been sent to him from the same bookstore there. Among the publications was a report on the problem of sexual education investigated at a certain conference. The word "sexual" did not seem to him appropriate. The word "sexual" was related to sex generally, not directly to sexual desire. But because the Chinese character for "sex" has various meanings, he found unfortunately that in order to translate the title of the report into Japanese he had to add to it the Chinese character for "desire" . At any rate, in the realm of education was the problem of whether or not sex education was necessary, and in the event they concluded it was, was it at all possible to educate one in this way? The conference had selected authorities concerned with this issue, an educator, a clergyman, and a medical doctor, and their views having been solicited, these had been published in the report. Whereas the approach of each of the three authorities was different, all of them had answered "Yes" to the question "Is sex education necessary?" and "Yes" to the question "Is sex education possible?" One man was of the opinion that it was better to give that education at home. Another said it should be done at school. At any rate, it was worth trying and was certainly possible. Of course, it should be given to children after they had reached the age where they could use discretion. Just before marriage young people are shown certain kinds of pictures, a custom that takes place in Japan too, but the report suggested a somewhat earlier age for sex education. To wait until just previous to marriage might lead to some problems before that time. The discussion began by taking up the subject of the reproduction of lower creatures and gradually expanded to the propagation of the human race. Though they had begun with lower forms of life, merely with the stamen and pistil of plants, and though they had concluded that human reproduction was similar, they decided this approach was not particularly helpful. They said it was absolutely necessary to give detailed explanations about the sexual life of man.

  After reading the report, Mr. Kanai, arms folded, sat and thought about it a long while. That year his eldest son would graduate from high school. Supposing he had to teach his own son, he wondered what the best way to approach him would be. He felt it would be extremely difficult. The more concretely he thought about it, the more words failed him. Finally he wondered if he might not be able to solve the problem by writing the history of his own sex life, which he had been thinking of attempting. He would try it and at least find out what the results would be. Rather than seeing if what he wrote would be worth showing to other people or to the public at large, he wanted to discover if it would be worth showing to his son. Speculating on the problem in this way, he picked up his pen.

  When I was six . . .

  We lived in the Chugoku district in a small castle town which had been ruled over by a feudal lord. With the abolition of the clans and the establishment of prefectures, the prefectural office was set up in an adjacent province, so our town suddenly became a solitary place.

  My father stayed in Tokyo with his former lord. Because my mother thought that I—Shizuka—was getting much more grown up, she felt she ought to instruct me in a few things, so every morning she taught me the kana syllabary and made me practice my penmanship.

  Though my father had been only a foot soldier at the time of the feudal clans, we were living in a house furnished with a gate and surrounded by an earthen wall. In front of the gate was a moat, and on the opposite bank stood a clan government storehouse.

  One day after my lesson was over, my mother began her weaving. "I'm going out to play!" I said, and I ran from the house, my voice trailing behind me.

  We lived in a section of town composed of government-owned houses, so even in spring we couldn't see any willow trees or cherry blossoms. Only some red camellias could be viewed beyond the wall surrounding our house, and next to the rice granary citrus plants were seen sprou
ting their pale green buds.

  To the west of our house was a vacant lot. Among the stone tiles scattered along the ground were flowering clover and violets. I began picking some clover. After gathering them a while, I remembered that on the previous day a boy in our neighborhood had said it was a strange habit for a boy to be gathering flowers, and suddenly looking around, I threw the flowers down. Fortunately no one had seen me. I stood there in something of a daze. The day was clear and bright. I could hear the sounds from my mother's weaving—giiton! giiton!

  Across the vacant lot was the Ohara house. The husband had died, and the widow, who was about forty, lived there alone. All of a sudden I felt like calling on her, and I ran around to the front of the house and rushed inside.

  Kicking off my straw sandals and clattering open the sliding doors, I hurried in, only to find the widow and a young woman I had never seen before examining a book together. The girl's kimono was adorned with red patterns, her shimada hairdo in the style of an unmarried woman. Even though I was only a small boy, I knew that she came from the center of town. They looked up at me as if I had really startled them. The face of each was deep red. I was merely a child, but I felt their behavior was unusual, quite strange. When I happened to glance down at the page of their opened book, I noticed it was beautifully printed in color.

  "Madam, what kind of picture book's that?"

  I walked straight up to them. The girl laid the book face down and looked at the widow and laughed. The cover of the book was also in colored print, and I happened to notice on it the large face of a woman.