Vita Sexualis

by Ogai Mori

  When I consider the question of sexual desire, my fellow students in those days consisted of the "mashers," who were dandies and affected elegance of dress and manner, and the "queers," who were more manly and casual in their dress. The mashers belonged to that group which enjoyed looking at those strange drawings I've already mentioned. The keeper of the lending library at that time would gather up a pile of books and walk around carrying them on his back like a pannier. At the base of the pack he carried was a box with an attached drawer. It was in this drawer that those odd drawings were always kept. In addition to borrowing such pictures from the circulating library, some students owned their own collections of erotic sketchbooks. The queers never looked at these books. The one thing they could hardly wait to devour, each waiting his turn, was a handwritten manuscript about a boy named Sangoro Hirata. It was said that at private schools in Kagoshima, this story was to be the very first one read on the first day of the new year. It described the history of a love affair between Sangoro, who wore his hair in bangs, and an older man, his hair in the forelock style, shaved except for a small portion above each ear. It was about their jealousy and rivalry in love. I believe the closing chapter finds the two men, one after the other, dead on the battlefield. The manuscript also had illustrations, but they were not particularly indecent.

  The mashers were superior in number for the simple reason that the queers were made up mostly of men from Kyushu. Because there were few men from Kagoshima in the college preparatory schools at that time, Kyushu students were composed mainly of people from Saga and Kumamoto. They were joined by some students from Yamaguchi. The rest of the students were mashers who came from places as far as those extending over the whole of Chugoku and up to the Tohoku districts.

  And yet it seemed as if the queers had the real characteristics of students and that the mashers went about more or less with a guilty conscience. Although the student outfit of the skirt of duck cloth and the dark blue socks was the basic costume of the queers, the mashers imitated it. And in spite of the fact that the mashers put on the same clothing, they did not tuck up their kimono sleeves as high as the queers did. The mashers moderately perked up their shoulders. Even when they walked along with canes, these were thinner. When a masher went out to celebrate the holidays, he secretly wore a silk kimono and white socks.

  And where do you think these feet in white socks were headed? Toward those archery "shops" at Shiba and Asakusa and the houses of ill-fame in Nezu, Yoshiwara, and Shinagawa. When the mashers went out in their usual dark blue socks, they often frequented the bathhouses. Not that the queers failed to go to the public baths, but they never went upstairs. The mashers counted on taking that trip upstairs. Without fail women would be there waiting. In those days some students even promised to marry such bathhouse women. It goes without saying that these women were creatures one step lower than boardinghouse daughters.

  I was victimized by the queers, for the simple reason that in our dormitory at the time my classmate Shonosuke Hanyu and I were the youngest members. Hanyu was the son of an oculist in Tokyo. His complexion was white, his eyes bright and clear, his lips pure red, his body supple. My skin was dark, my body awkward, and to make matters worse I had been raised in the country. Yet contrary to what I expected, the queers dangled after me, not Hanyu. I concluded to myself that Hanyu was a born masher and so he was safe.

  I had entered the school in January and had been assigned an upstairs room in the dorm. Yuzuru Waniguchi was my roommate. He had started his education rather late in life, so he was one of the oldest in my class. His long white face was full of pockmarks, his pointed chin sticking out in front. He was lean and tall. If he belonged to the queers, I felt I'd never be safe.

  Luckily Waniguchi didn't. He was more of a masher than not, for he seemed to be an authority on female charm. Yet he was not the usual type of masher. Ordinary mashers tried to win a woman's heart. Even if Waniguchi had made an attempt to, it was certain he couldn't have succeeded, for he looked on women as so much roadside dust. To him a woman was no more than a machine for gratifying his sexual desires. He grasped every opportunity to satisfy these desires. Until he was satiated, his calm piercing eyes were on the lookout for women in the same way a snake waits to pounce on a frog. Those occasions that were there to be taken, Waniguchi would cleverly seize. That was why in spite of his ugliness he was never short of women. The way he expressed it, women could easily be bought with money, so it wasn't necessary to be loved by them.

  Waniguchi didn't make fools of women only. He ridiculed everything and anything. In his eyes nothing at all was sacred. Every now and then my father visited me at the dorm. When he greeted Waniguchi by asking him to help me out since "my son is no more than a child," Waniguchi merely said, "Yes, yes," and proceeded to pay no further attention to the request. He simply listened quietly while my father gave me a lecture. Later he imitated my father's voice: "Just study hard. Listen to whatever Mr. Waniguchi or any other upperclassman says to you. If you fail to comprehend at times, tell them you do not and ask them to kindly teach you what they meant and why you should do it. Now I must return. On Saturday I await you at home. So come!" And then Waniguchi laughed.

  After that Waniguchi addressed my parent as "Come." "Maybe your Come will come to see you today," he would say. "And I'll get treated to some beanjam wafers again!" He never had any consideration for one's feelings about a parent or anything else. "Your Come coupled with your mother and made you," he once said laughing. He was no better than that old man at the wicket in our province.

  In the classroom Waniguchi's performance was about average. One of our teachers, a German, made it a practice to force students unable to answer his questions to stand at attention in front of the blackboard. On one occasion Waniguchi couldn't respond, so the teacher ordered him to stand there. Leaning against the board, Waniguchi assumed an air of complete indifference. The blackboard rang with a clattering sound. Our teacher was hot with anger. Finally he spoke to the school manager and had Waniguchi placed in confinement. But after that time the teacher was afraid of him.

  And because the teacher himself feared Waniguchi, there wasn't a single classmate of his who didn't fear him. Waniguchi did not really offer me any protection, but no one came to our room and so I was left unharmed. Whenever Waniguchi was leaving, he'd say to me, "If they find I'm out, some fool or other might come snooping around this hole, so you be careful!"

  I was. Since our dormitory was built in the style of a tenement, it had exits on both sides. If the enemy happened to approach from the right, I was ready to run to the left. And if the foe came from the left, I was set to escape toward the right. But since I still felt uneasy, I secretly carried off a dagger from our house at Mukojima and kept it hidden in my kimono.

  Around February the good weather continued for quite a while. Every day after classes were over, I went out into the school playground to have some fun with Hanyu. When a few other students saw us practicing sumo wrestling on a pile of sand, they teased us, telling us we were acting like pups. "Look!" they would shout, raising their voices in passing. "Blackie and Whitey are quarreling. Hey, Whitey, don't go down in defeat!" Though Hanyu and I amused ourselves in this way, we had nothing in particular to talk about. I kept reading books at random from the lending library and like a child lived in a daydream world. Outside the classroom Hanyu was very restless, so he didn't read any books. If we played together, it was just about limited to sumo.

  One intensely cold day something happened. Hanyu and I had gone to the playground and run a race to try to keep warm. I returned to my room to find a few classmates gathered discussing something with Waniguchi. It had to do with eating between meals. Usually our snacks consisted of parched beans or baked sweet potatoes, the students taking up a collection and sending off the school servant after giving him a small tip. That day was to be different, for they had decided on something quite extravagant, what they called mekurajiru, "blind soup." That is, each of the participa
nts would go out separately, buy something and return, throw it into a common pot, and eat what came out after all the ingredients had been cooked. One of the students looked over in my direction and asked, "What about Kanai?" Glancing at me out of the corner of his eye, Waniguchi said, "This isn't like buying sweet potatoes! It's better for little boys not to join us."

  Looking the other way, I pretended I hadn't heard. For a while they considered which students to take into their party and which to exclude, and before long all of them left.

  I was well acquainted with Waniguchi's character. He wouldn't yield to authority. He never agreed with anyone. As far as these points were concerned, he was all right. But because he recognized nothing as sacred, others were sometimes forced to suffer. In those days I felt he was cruel and brutal. I suppose a powerful factor in my view of his character was his being well versed in Chinese literature as well as his keeping a copy of Kanpishi on his desk. When I think now about his character, my comments on his coldbloodedness were far from hitting the bull's-eye. He was really a cynic. Later in my life while I was reading Theodor Vischer's Cynismus, I was continually thinking about Waniguchi. The word cynic comes from the Greek word kyon meaning dog. Since the Japanese equivalent of cynic is kengaku, "the science of dogs," it's probably correct to say kenteki, "doglike." In the same way that a dog enjoys poking its nose into dirt, a doglike man won't be satisfied until he has stained everything. That's why such a man cannot regard anything as sacred. And because a human being is blessed with many sacred things, he is bestowed with as many weak points. He suffers a great deal. I'm incapable of confronting a doglike man.

  Waniguchi always knew how to cause others pain. As a result, he thought nothing about the pain of another person. That was the source of his cruelty. A strong man who looks at one who is weak finds him ludicrous. And when he sees that person as ludicrous, he also finds him interesting. Apparently doglike men take a keen interest in the pain of others.

  To sit alone in something of a daze while watching that crowd gather, cook its meal, and begin to eat would have been quite painful for me. Knowing how I would feel, Waniguchi, half for the fun of it, had refused to let me join the party.

  I wondered if I ought to go outside while they were eating. But if I did, it would be like retreating. To let them have their own way and to retreat even though they were in my own room would have been mortifying. And yet if I merely let the spit in my mouth grow hot and swallow it down, I knew they'd laugh at me. I went out and returned with some beanjam wafers I bought for ten sen. Ten sen in those days would fill a large bag with these wafers. After I threw the bag under my desk, I lit my lamp and began reading a book.

  Meanwhile, one after another the members of the group returned. They poured oil on the charcoal to build up the fire. One of the students went to the dining hall for a pot, another to steal some soy sauce. Some peeled off slivers of dried bonito they had bought. The soup came to a boil. One by one the things they had purchased were tossed into the pot. Each time something was thrown in, it brought forth a burst of laughter. Someone said, "It's already cooked!" Another cried out, "Not yet!" Inside the pot a hand-to-hand fight with chopsticks began. As for drinking, they had bought some gin at a foreign goods store where it was sold in those days. The spirits were contained in a black bottle shaped square like the position of the shoulders when one is in a rage. It was probably an inferior drink because I had heard someone say the price was low.

  Every now and then they glanced in my direction. Looking quite unconcerned, I continued to pull out wafers, one after another, from the bag under my desk and to eat them.

  Gradually the gin began to have its effect on all of them. The blood rushed to their heads. Their talk fell to a new low. Both queers and mashers were at this mekurajiru party. Miyaura, a masher, said to Henmi, a queer, "Hey, Henmi! you so-and-so! If you look down to the bottom of a privy, you'll be as transported with joy as I am when I catch a flicker of scarlet crepe petticoat under a kimono! Right?"

  I thought Henmi would be angry, but quite the contrary he replied seriously, "Well, sometimes I do enjoy looking at it, thinking the stuff comes from that private part blessed with passion!"

  Miyaura laughed, saying, "When I negotiate for it with a woman, I grab her hand, but how about when you negotiate with a 'boy'?"

  "It's the same. I hold his hand. Like so!"

  He grabbed Miyaura's hand and with his finger pressed down on the masher's palm. Henmi explained that when a boy agrees, he grabs hold of the finger, and when he doesn't agree, he doesn't grab it.

  Someone urged Henmi to sing. And he began: "A devil thrust his arse through a rift in the clouds and let out a long sonorous fart!"

  Someone sang a lively folk song. Someone recited a poem. Someone imitated a prologue delivered at a peepshow. Someone mimicked. Meanwhile, the pot and the bottle gradually emptied. One of the mashers said he'd discovered something nice not too far away. Another said if such was the case, they ought to go investigate. He said the other day he had been prevented from going because only five minutes remained before the closing of the dormitory gate, but since they still had fifteen minutes left, there'd be time enough to go out. Once they did leave, it would be all right for they could return the next day with signed affidavits from their guardians. They concluded they could go out, for the affidavits were already in their possession stamped with their guardians' seals.

  The entire mekurajiru party left in an uproar. Waniguchi also left with them.

  While reading my book and getting sick and tired of eating those beanjam wafers, I heard footsteps stealing up the stairs. A bird accustomed to listening for the sound of a hunting gun never allows the hunter to draw near. Blowing out my lamp, I opened a window, climbed onto the roof, and quietly closed the window. I didn't know if it was from the dew or frost, but I found the tiles wet and slippery. Grouching in the shadow of a shutterbox, I held firmly to the hilt of the dagger in my kimono.

  All the dormitory shutters were closed, and only in the room of the school servant did light filter through the sliding screens. Those footsteps entered my room. They seemed to be walking all over the place.

  "Thought his lamp was lit until now. Wonder where he went?"

  It was Henmi's voice. I was holding my breath. After a while I heard those footsteps leave my room and go down the stairs.

  Luckily the incident ended without my using that dagger.

  ***

  When I was fourteen . . .

  As usual, my daily lessons still didn't give me any trouble. Whenever I had some free time, I read those books from the lending library. Because I was gradually able to read faster, I finished almost all the works of Bakin and Kyoden. Then I tried reading some other writers, those of the historical romances we call yomihon, but I found them uninteresting. I read some of the so-called ninjobon, novels which describe the love affairs of lower class people, borrowing the books secondhand from my friends. These relationships between men and women flashed through my mind as if in some beautiful dream. But then that dream faded without leaving any deep impression. Yet each time I received this impression, I felt that at least those handsome men and beautiful women were blessed with a splendid appearance, whereas a fellow like me was no match for them. It was a real torment to me.

  I still played with Hanyu. One Monday afternoon around the end of January as I went for a stroll with him, he told me he wanted to take me to some nice place. When I asked him where it was, he said he was going to escort me to a small restaurant in the neighborhood. I had already been to noodle and sukiyaki shops, but except for the time my father had brought me to dine at the Ogiya in Oji, I had never been to any place whose hanging signboard was inscribed with the characters for "restaurant," so I was really surprised.

  "Can you go to such a place all by yourself?"

  "I'm not going alone. I'm suggesting I go with you."

  "Of course I understand that. By alone, though, I meant going there without an adult. Have you ever really b
een there by yourself?"

  "Sure I have. Just the other day."

  Hanyu looked quite triumphant. The two of us passed under the restaurant shop curtain. One of the maids greeted us, and then looking at us, she pulled another servant by her kimono sleeve and flinging a glance at her began laughing. Embarrassed, I wanted to turn back, but Hanyu, without a moment's delay, went on in, so I followed reluctantly.

  He ordered some dishes. He ordered some sake. When I asked him if he could drink, he told me that even though he couldn't, he had ordered drinks anyway. Each time a maid carried in some of the food, she would stand there a while, watching us, smiling at us. I'd become rigid, stiff, merely eating something from one of the side dishes, anything, until Hanyu began talking to me.

  "Yesterday I was really happy."

  "How come?"

  "My father invited me along to one of his New Year parties. Quite a few geisha were there as well as some of the young apprenticed girls, and since none of the other guests had arrived yet, I was idling away my time. Suddenly one of the apprentices asked me to show her the garden. So I went out with her. When we came to a miniature hill of rocks while going around the edge of the pond, she took hold of my hand without saying a word. I walked along leading her by the hand. I was really delighted!"

  "I bet you were."

  I couldn't help uttering those words of praise. Again that same beautiful dreamlike image flashed through my mind. I felt Hanyu and that pretty apprenticed geisha were a perfect match as he walked along leading her by the hand. Not only was Hanyu a good-looking boy. He was always in an altogether suitable kimono.

  At the same time I was absorbed in these thoughts, I felt the event had absolutely nothing to do with me. Strangely enough, I didn't experience any of the pain I had felt while indulging in those idle reveries during my reading of ninjobon novels on lower-class love affairs. Confronting the truth of these assertions, I realized, on the contrary, it was quite natural for me to feel this way.