Vita Sexualis

by Ogai Mori

  It wasn't long before Hanyu paid the bill and left the restaurant. Because he had held hands with that young girl, I assumed he had given this banquet to celebrate the event and so had treated me.

  When I think back to those days, I find them rather strange. Somehow those beautiful dreams that flashed through my mind when I read a ninjobon or when I talked of Hanyu's stroll with an apprenticed geisha as he led her by the hand had in them some of the seeds of love and affection, but they weren't closely related to sexual desire itself. The word "sexual" is probably not appropriate for these situations. These stirrings of love and affection, it seemed to me, were quite different, somehow quite separate, from Copulationtrieb.

  While reading these romantic novels involving commoners, I discovered the kisses described were completely different from those described in European literature. Even someone like me couldn't help but reason that some relationship exists between love and sexual desire. Yet even though I had a longing for love and affection, I didn't feel, as one normally would have expected, any real sexual drive.

  One event branded on my memory seems to directly prove this statement. In those days I picked up a bad habit. I find it very difficult to record, but if I don't, the writing I'm doing will be worthless, and so I must set this down. A regulation in European dormitories requires all young students to sleep with both hands on top of the covers as a precaution against this habit, so dormitory supervisors on their nightly rounds must pay particular attention to the position of hands. I can't remember exactly how I came to acquire the habit. I won't deny that Waniguchi, who loved to talk about anything dirty, was always mentioning it. Furthermore, there were many people who each time they came across the face of a new boy asked him if he had this habit, and whenever the youngster happened to be a girl, they never failed to inquire if hair grew on a certain part of her anatomy. Such questions were inevitable, especially if the examiners were men of humble origin with no formal education. Yet many of these men looked as if they were gentlemen. In fact, quite a number of them were upperclassmen living in our dorm. The question about this habit became a household word used to tease small boys like me. I decided to try it out. But I found it wasn't as enjoyable as others had claimed. It left me with a severe headache. Over and over again I tried it out by forcing myself into imagining those weird drawings I had seen. The next time I did it, not only did I end up with a headache but with a wild pounding of the heart as well. Since then I have rarely indulged in it. Ultimately, I suppose, I received no real pleasure from it because I hadn't been stimulated by any inner desire. Because others had suggested it to me, the whole process was merely a borrowed superficial exercise.

  One Sunday I went home to Mukojima. On my return I found my father looking unusually annoyed about something without saying a word to me. My mother also seemed worried and withheld any of her gentle and kind words I so very much wanted to hear. Having come back in the best of spirits, I was quite disappointed, and for a while I glanced from one parent to the other.

  My father knocked the ashes out of the bamboostemmed pipe he'd been smoking, knocked them out with a much more vigorous pounding than usual, and began the conversation. He didn't smoke cigarettes. He always smoked a brand of tobacco called Kumoi. When I finally heard what my father had to say, I realized he had been told about some "crime" of mine which I had never even considered an offense. It had nothing to do with those dormitory hands I mentioned earlier. It was about my friendship with Hanyu.

  In the class above mine at school was a student called Nunami. I didn't even know him by sight, but apparently he had found it amusing to watch Hanyu and me playing together like pups. Nunami's sponsor at school lived at Mukojima and was my father's go-game companion. During the game my father was told what the sponsor had been told by Nunami.

  That is, Kanai—I—so Nunami's recitation to his sponsor goes—is the youngest member of the dormitory at school. He does quite well in his studies. He has a friend called Hanyu. He too does reasonably well at school. However, their personalities are completely different. Kanai is a quiet boy, one expected to make steady progress from this time on, but while Hanyu is precociously talented and overly sharp, his future prospects seem dubious. Apparently the boys are very close friends and enjoy being together, but it seems this congeniality is due to their having no other friends. Recently, though, this association with Hanyu has become quite dangerous for Kanai. Hanyu seems to be Kanai's senior by about two years. Because Hanyu was raised in Tokyo, he's been influenced by those bad aspects of a large city. Recently he's been observed going to restaurants by himself, enjoying the flattery of the maids there. It seems he's even started to drink sakfe. To make matters worse, he once bought an obi for a woman working at one of those "shops" where you can practice archery. He may be morally ruined. Nunami had told his sponsor he wanted to separate Kanai from Hanyu, lest he be morally ruined too.

  After giving this account, my father said, "Have you done anything bad with Hanyu? If so, it's better to come out with it. If you confess and say you'll never do it again, everything will be all right. In any event," my father said, "you have to stop associating with Hanyu."

  My mother put in a word from the side: "Mr. Nunami didn't say you did anything wrong. He said you'd probably never done anything bad. He said everything would be fine if only you stopped playing with that Hanyu."

  I was quite startled. But I proceeded to frankly inform my parents about having been taken to a restaurant by Hanyu. However, because it was too difficult to tell them that the occasion was in honor of Hanyu's own lucky experience, I didn't mention it.

  I had thought breaking off my friendship with Hanyu would be very difficult to do, but actually it was carried out almost naturally. It wasn't long before he failed his exams. He withdrew from school. I lost all trace of him.

  It was after I had gone abroad, returned, and married that I discovered something about him. One day during my absence a man came to visit me and left his namecard, Shonosuke Hanyu. He went away after leaving a message for me that he was dealing in the buying and selling of shares.

  ***

  I returned to Mukojima during summer vacation the same year.

  At that time I found a good friend. He was a boy called Eiichi Bito, who was about my age and who was attending the preparatory course for the Tokyo Medical School at Izumibashi. Eiichi's father did the household accounts for our lord's estate so that he was treated as well as Hanno, who was in charge of drawing up drafts. In fact, they lived next door to one another in the same tenement building.

  My father purchased a house with a small lot near our lord's estate, where he enjoyed cultivating various vegetables in our narrow kitchen garden. Beyond the rice paddy was a path overlooking the towboat channel. Whether Eiichi would come along this path to play with me or I went over to his tenement house, we were almost always together.

  Eiichi, whose face was flat and yellowish, was morose and taciturn. He was quite good at Chinese literature. He was most enthusiastic about the famous poet and Confucian scholar Sankei Kikuchi. I read his anthology, Seisetsuroshisho, after borrowing it from Eiichi. I read Kikuchi's parody of a Chinese classic, Honcho-gushoshinshi. When I heard that Sankei had published some poems, I went to Asakusa and bought Kagetsushinshi, the magazine they appeared in, came home, and read them. The two of us even attempted composing some poems ourselves. We tried writing short essays in the manner of the Chinese classics. These were the kinds of things we enjoyed doing most.

  Eiichi was a petite man of virtue. In talking with Hanyu, I was careless and slovenly, never restrained, but if I happened to use even a little vulgarity or obscenity in speaking with Eiichi, he would immediately flare up. He pictured to himself conditions in which one did not enjoy sensual pleasures until, graduating with a degree and loved by his teacher's daughter or some such type, he makes her his wife. Then, should he become a prominent figure whose name is celebrated all over the land, he could, like the Chinese poet Toba, certainly be love
d by a geisha. At that time such a man could print a poem on a silk handkerchief and give it to her.

  When I went to Eiichi's house. I occasionally found he was out with his father. Often at those times I happened to meet Hanno, whose long hair was parted in two down to the nape of his neck. As I would be calling Eiichi from outside the house and even before I entered, Hanno would open a sliding door from inside, come out, and then go back in. After that Eiichi's mother would appear at the door and say some nice things to me.

  She was Eiichi's stepmother. One day when I was reading Seisetsuroshisho with him, we were reciting a poem about Mama-no-Tekona, who, because she was wooed by many young men, committed suicide by drowning. The poem having suddenly reminded me of Eiichi's stepmother, I asked, "They say your mother isn't your real one. Does she bully you?"

  "No, she doesn't," said Eiichi, but it seemed to me it was unpleasant for him to talk about her.

  Once at about two in the afternoon on a fine August day, I went over to Eiichi's house. Attached to every tenement building is a small garden surrounded by a bamboo fence. Placed at random in the Bito family garden were four or five plants which I presumed had been purchased at some festival. The sun was blazing down on the sandy soil. I could hear the locusts singing so noisily the sound seemed to fill the area of thickly luxurious plants in the garden of our lord's mansion. It was extremely quiet in the Bito house, its paper sliding doors closed. Opening the small wicket of twigs along the bamboo fence, I called out as usual, "Eiichi!"

  There was no reply.

  "Isn't Eiichi at home?"

  The sliding doors opened. Hanno came out, that same long hair of his parted in two down to the nape of his neck. A man with a white complexion, a tall man with drooping shapely shoulders, he used the pure Tokyo dialect.

  "Eiichi isn't at home. Please come over to my place for a while."

  With these words he returned inside to his apartment next door. All over the back of his dappled cotton kimono were loud flashy patterns. Eiichi's mother slowly came out to the threshold. Fingering with both her hands the sidelocks of her hair bound into a chignon by a light blue band of silk crepe, she began talking to me. They said she had only just come up to Tokyo, but to my surprise she too was using the pure Tokyo dialect.

  "Good heavens! Is it Mr. Kanai? Oh do please come in."

  "All right. But as long as Eiichi isn't home ..."

  "When he found out his father was going fishing, he decided to tag along. Even though he isn't at home, you needn't worry. There, now you sit right down."

  "All right."

  Reluctantly I sat down on the veranda. Mrs. Bito again came out slowly, almost indolently, and raising one knee sat down beside me, her body almost nestling against mine. I could smell her sweat, her face powder, the oil she used on her hair. I moved a little to the side. She smiled, though I didn't know why.

  "I've no idea why you're so kind as to play so often with a boy like Eiichi. I've never seen such an unsociable child."

  She had ridiculously large eyes and a ridiculously large nose and mouth. I even felt her mouth was square-shaped.

  "I like Eiichi very much."

  "You don't like me?"

  She almost seemed to press her cheek against mine as she peered at me from the side. Her breath fell against my face. I felt that breath was strangely hot. And at the same time it suddenly occurred to me that Eiichi's mother was a woman. For some reason or other I became terrified. I might have even turned pale.

  "I'll come some other time."

  "Oh dear! You can stay here a little longer, can't you?"

  Suddenly overcome with confusion and bowing three or four times, I broke into a run. Between the thick growth of plants in the garden of our lord's mansion was a ditch into which water from a small pond ran after passing over a small dam. On the sandy soil at the edge of this ditch where horsetails were growing, tall trees among the thick growth of vegetation were casting lingering shadows slightly to the west. Having run as far as this spot, I threw myself down on the sand and lay on my back.

  Directly above me clusters of trumpet flowers were blooming as if aflame. The cries of the locusts were vigorous, energetic. There were no other sounds. It was the hour when the great god Pan still sleeps. I pictured to myself a multitude of images.

  Afterwards, even when I talked things over with Eiichi, I never mentioned anything to him about his mother.

  ***

  When I was fifteen . . .

  After the final exams at the close of the past year there had been such a great weeding out of students that each class had some members who left school. The majority of these sacrificial candidates were mashers. Even little Hanyu was eliminated along with the others.

  Henmi also dropped out of school. But only recently had he suddenly turned into a masher, lengthening his kimono sleeves and his hakama skirt and plastering his hair with perfumed pomade, that hair of his which had formerly pointed to the heavens like the leaves of a palm tree.

  In those days I became acquainted with two friends, Koga and Kojima.

  Koga was a big fellow with prominent cheekbones on his square ruddy face. Due to the fact that he had taken special interest in a handsome beautiful boy named Adachi, in addition to the way he himself dressed, Koga certainly seemed to be one of the shining lights of the queers. From about the fall of the preceding year he had been trying to get to know me. I couldn't help but keep a firm grip on the handle of that dagger of mine.

  However, after the great shakeup in our school, a change occurred in the allotment of dormitory rooms, and I found Koga and I were roommates. Waniguchi said to me, a look of mockery on his face, "Well, go on over to Koga's place and he'll make you one of his pets," and he laughed.

  He spoke in that same imitation of my father's voice. And yet this was the man who had never offered to give me the slightest bit of protection. Instead of being troubled by this fact, I considered myself fortunate. Though from first to last I had been made uncomfortable by his cynical words and actions, he was at least an independent spirit. I remember the concluding lines a poet in his class had presented to him:

  Quiet evening,

  Calm brooding over the bamboo

  Beyond your window

  As you read

  Kanpi.

  Many were afraid of Waniguchi, were in fact in awe of him. I realized that had been a form of protection he offered me indirectly.

  I was about to lose this indirect protection. And I was about to move into the room of the notoriously dangerous Mr. Koga. I was instinctively terrified.

  I moved into that room as if I were entering a lion's den. Once Hanyu had said to me, "Your eyes are triangles with the base line standing up," and I suppose those same reversed triangular eyes of mine were now even more angular. Sitting cross-legged on an old woolen blanket which had discolored into a dirty grey and which he had spread over a broken desk without even a solitary book or anything on it, Koga was staring at me. His perfectly round eyes, too small for his large face, were overflowing with joy.

  "Even though you've been so afraid of me that you've been running away all over the place, you've finally come to me, haven't you?" And he laughed.

  He broke into a broad grin. His was a strange face, both clownish and dignified. It didn't seem the face of a bad guy.

  "Can't be helped since I've been assigned here." My reply was certainly blunt.

  "I guess you feel I'm the same type Henmi is, don't you? I'm not."

  Without replying, I began to put my section of the room in order. Ever since my childhood, I had had a great aversion to having any of my things scattered about. From the moment I had entered this school, I had precisely and systematically classified my school notebooks and my other concerns. By that time in this period of my life, I already had a great many notebooks, exactly twice the number other students had. The reason I had so many was that I used two notebooks for each subject. Furthermore, I always carried these sets of notebooks to class, and while listen
ing, I would sort out the important facts and the points for future reference and write these down in ink in whichever notebook was appropriate, the opened notebooks piled one over the other. There was no need to make a clean copy of my notes the way the other students did after returning to the dorm. In my room I had only to look up some scientific terms used during the lecture and some Greek and Latin etymologies and annotate these in red ink along the margins of my notebook. That was just about the extent of the work I did outside the classroom.Whenever I heard anyone saying it was difficult and troublesome to memorize these technical terms, I couldn't help feeling amused. I almost felt like asking them why they tried to memorize these words mechanically without looking up their etymologies.

  I always arranged my notebooks and reference books in the same order on the shelf. As a precaution against overturning my bottles of red and black ink, I lined these up with my pens in an empty cake box I set on the far corner of my desk. On the front of my desk I spread a huge sheet of blotting paper. To the left I piled two notebooks with thick bindings. One was my diary in which before going to bed I kept a precise record of each day's events. The other notebook was for memos that had nothing to do with school subjects. For its title I had pretentiously written in pen as seal letters the two scholarly and academic Chinese characters kan and juy which can supposedly awaken memory. Under my desk I concealed about ten volumes of Teijozakki with their essays on the samurai. In those days the most elegant and refined miscellaneous essays available in the circulating libraries were in books of this sort, and when one had completed, as I had, all the novels of Bakin and Kyoden, the only thing to do was turn to such essays. Whenever I happened to find anything worthwhile in them, I would make a note of it in my kanju notebook.