Vita Sexualis

by Ogai Mori

  Koga, a broad grin on his face, was watching what I was doing, but when he saw me trying to conceal the Teijozakki volumes under my desk, he said, "What sort of books are those?"

  "Teijozakki"

  "What's in them?"

  "On these pages in this volume they're writing about ceremonial costumes."

  "What's your purpose in reading that kind of stuff?"

  "It's not for any particular purpose."

  "Then it's all useless, isn't it?"

  "If that's the case, then my, or anyone's, entering this school and pursuing an education is useless, don't you think? You probably didn't enter only to become a government official or a teacher, did you?"

  "You mean that when you graduate, you don't want to become a government official or teacher?"

  "Well, I may. But I'm not studying just to become one.

  "You mean, then, you're studying in order to learn, that is, you're studying for the sake of study?"

  "Well. Yes, I guess that's right."

  "Well, you're an interesting kid."

  Suddenly I felt angry. To talk to someone for the first time and to conclude by saying I was an interesting "kid" was too insulting. I glared at him with those same reversed triangular eyes of mine. Koga was still calmly grinning at me. I felt somewhat disarmed, so I couldn't really hate this innocent strapping fellow.

  Toward evening that same day Koga suggested we go for a walk. Even though Waniguchi had shared the same room with me for a long time, he had never said to me, "Let's go for a stroll." At any rate, since I felt I might as well try going out with Koga, I agreed.

  It was a pleasant evening of early summer. We walked along the streets of Kanda. When we came to a secondhand bookstore, I stopped to look in. Koga browsed with me. In those days five sen was enough to buy a one-volume collection of any Japanese poet. On first entering Yanagiwara there was a public square. A large umbrella stood open, and under it a pretty girl about twelve or thirteen had been ordered to do a Japanese street dance, the kappore. Later in my life when I was reading Victor Hugo's Notre Dame and saw something written about a little girl with a name similar to that of a precious stone, perhaps Emeraude, I was reminded of this little girl, feeling Emeraude was like the girl I saw dancing the kappore under that umbrella.

  "I don't know what kind of child she is," Koga said, "but she's been treated badly, hasn't she?"

  "Probably Chinese children are treated more harshly. I once heard that a Chinese baby was placed in a square box, forced to grow square, and then put on display. The Chinese may be capable of that kind of thing."

  "How did you come to hear that story?"

  "It's in the Gushoshinshi, a Chinese book on biography and anecdotes."

  "You certainly read strange things. You're an interesting kid."

  That was how Koga, in rapid succession, had repeated, "You're an interesting kid." While we were walking through Yanagiwara toward Ryogoku, he stopped in front of a shop whose paper-covered lantern had on it the characters for eels broiled in soy sauce.

  "Do you eat eels?"

  "I eat them."

  Koga entered the shop. He ordered large ones. When the sake was brought in, he seemed to enjoy drinking it by himself. Before long some phlegm caught in his throat. Suddenly clearing his throat with a loud noise, he sent that phlegm flying into an alley over the bamboo fence surrounding the small garden just off the veranda. I watched with a stupid look of amazement on my face. The eels were brought in. Only once had my father taken me to an eel restaurant, and only once had I eaten eels. I was first surprised that Koga had ordered as many as the amount of money he had taken out could buy, and I was again surprised to see how he ate them. He would draw the skewer from the eel. Then folding a big thick piece double with his chopsticks, he would cram the whole thing into his mouth. I didn't say anything, merely watching him as I thought to myself, "He's the interesting kid!"

  That evening Koga returned to the dorm as meek as a lamb. Just before going to bed, he asked me to wake him the next morning, and then he fell into a sound sleep.

  It became light out around four in the morning. I would get up at six. After washing, I'd look over some books. At seven they would beat the wooden clappers that breakfast was ready. I woke Koga. The eyes he opened were heavy with sleep.

  "What time is it?"

  "Seven."

  "It's still early."

  He turned over in bed and again fell into a sound sleep. I went to eat breakfast. It was seven-thirty. At eight classes would begin. I woke him.

  "What's the time?"

  "Seven-thirty."

  "It's still early."

  It was a quarter to eight. About to set out with my notebooks I had prepared the previous night for my daily schedule, I again woke him.

  "What time is it?"

  "Quarter to eight."

  Without uttering a sound, he sprang out of bed. Carrying some toilet paper and a towel, he rushed from the room. He went to the lavatory, washed, ate breakfast, and hurried over to his classroom.

  This was the usual daily routine Koga followed. Occasionally his friend Jujiro Kojima came over to visit him. He looked like the famous hero Genji in the colored prints we saw hanging in the print shops in those days. The skin all over his body was a kind of bluish white. He was nicknamed "Blue Striped Snake," though he always became angry whenever anyone called him that. It was quite reasonable for him to get angry because I heard the nickname was fastened on to him after a certain part of his anatomy was seen in the bath. Kojima was not a drinking man. His words and actions seemed like those of a young aristocrat. He was the younger brother of a well-known scholar on Occidental learning, a professor given his rank directly by imperial decree. Due to his being the twelfth child in his family, I heard he had been given the name meaning just that, Jujiro.

  I first had my doubts as to why Koga and Kojima were on friendly terms with one another. But after observing them, I gradually discovered something they shared in common.

  Koga was quite devoted to his father. It seemed, nevertheless, that his parent treated him as an unworthy child because of his own grief over the premature death of Koga's younger brother, who was something of a child prodigy. The more his father treated him as unworthy, the more Koga felt he had to relieve his father's anxiety by making up for the deficiency over the loss of this child. Kojima's father had died, but his mother was still living. She had given birth to more than ten children. Her thirteenth, a boy named Jusaburo, was quite talented, and apparently she was very much attached to him. In spite of the fact that Jusaburo was quite talented, he was something of a libertine. He stirred up quite a row after a girl employed in the reading room of a certain newspaper fell in love with him, the incident appearing more than once in the papers. The woman was employed by a man who ran the reading room, and after being coerced by him, a man more than thirty years her senior, she had given herself to him and had become his mistress. He was jealous because she adored Jusaburo, so he continually abused her. The woman begged Jusaburo for help. Because he was the young aristocratic son of a professor by imperial decree, he became quite a fashionable topic for the papers. On account of the scandal, Jusaburo, who had been adopted into a fine aristocratic family without sons, had to sever his connections with that family. His mother was very much worried about him. It was Jujiro who was doing his best to console her.

  Perhaps you may feel my loose, slipshod, leisurely way of writing about these events has no connection to my sexual life, but actually it has. It has a very important connection.

  Gradually I got to be on friendly terms with Koga. And through Koga I became friends with Kojima. So a triple alliance came into existence.

  Kojima was a most innocent child. His sexual life was a complete zero.

  As for Koga, after he drank some sake, he would usually fall into a sound sleep. But about once a month there would be a turbulent day. On those days before stomping out into the corridor he'd say to me, "Tonight I'm going to kick up a stor
m, so you'd better go quietly to bed." Once, calling up from outside the dorm to someone's room after finding himself locked out and everyone asleep, he broke open the door with his fists. On such nights he would go into Adachi's room, the handsome boy who was in a lower class at the school. There were even occasions on those stormy days when Koga slept away from the dorm. After returning sad and dejected the following day, he would say repentantly, "Last night I acted like a beast!"

  Kojima's beast of sexual desire lay slumbering. Koga's sexual beast was chained, but occasionally it was turned loose and ran amuck. Yet in the same way that some present-day gentlemen eagerly try to preserve the tidiness of at least their own homes, he never desecrated his own room. I was lucky to share this sacred room with him.

  The three of us, Koga, Kojima, and I, coldly frowned upon the entire dormitory. Whenever we had any free time, the three of us would get together. Those students who reared the beast of sexual desire and usually unleashed it were mercilessly censured before our triumviri. And among these, those who went out in white socks late Saturday afternoon were spoken about by us as if they were no longer human. The postponement of my sexual life was due completely to this triple alliance of ours. Now, long afterward, when I think about our group, it seems to me that if Koga had not been a member of our alliance, it would probably have been a dismal anemic one. Fortunately, Koga, despite his occasional stormy days, threw in his lot with us, so even when we included one another in our critical judgments, it was impossible to deprive us of our energetic spirits.

  I remember one Saturday in particular. The three of us decided to have a look around Yoshiwara, the red-light district. Koga took charge. We went out in those duck-cloth skirts and dark blue socks, our tall Bohemian clogs clattering along the way. After going over the hills of Ueno, we passed through Negishi and then turned right along Torishinmachi, heading along the ditch toward the entrance to the gay quarters. We swaggered along the width and breadth of Yoshiwara. Calamity befell any of the mashers we happened to meet. Together the three of us burst into laughter on gazing after those white socks as they furtively turned down a sidestreet. After leaving my friends, I took the ferryboat at Imado and proceeded to Mukojima.

  ***

  During summer vacation that year, as I had done the previous year, I lived with my parents at Mukojima. In those days the custom of a student's going to a spa or the seashore at the height of the summer had not yet been established. The best a student could do was go back home to his parents. As the son of a government official, I could imagine no greater pleasure than returning home to my parents and enjoying myself there.

  As usual I played with Eiichi. No longer was his mother around. Rumors circulated about Hanno and Eiichi's mother, and he was dismissed from his position and went back to his hometown. Eiichi's mother was sent back to her home province.

  I competed with Eiichi in our exercises of composing essays in the Chinese manner. When we became more interested in it, we wanted to study Chinese composition with a good teacher.

  In those days a teacher named Bunen lived at Mukojima. He had built his home where he could command a view of the banks of the Sumida River across a rice field about five acres wide. To the main wing of his two-storied house was an annex whose study looked out on a pond in the garden. The storehouse was loaded with books imported from China, a student supported by the teacher continually going in and out carrying volumes by the armload. I guess the teacher was about forty-two or forty-three. His wife was around thirty, their two or three daughters quite pretty. All of the women lived in the main wing. The teacher lived in his study, which was connected to the main wing by a covered passageway. He was an official editor of government publications, his monthly salary one hundred yen. He had his own private jinrikisha to take him to his office. My father envied him, telling me, "That man is happiness itself!" In those days a monthly salary of one hundred yen brought one happiness.

  After asking my father about our plan and receiving his permission, I was able to go to Bunen Sensei's house to have my Chinese compositions corrected. The student-dependent led me into the teacher's study. No matter how long the composition I brought, my teacher took it, saying only, "Let's have a look." He corrected it with a brush dipped in red Chinese ink. He punctuated it one line after another. And while punctuating it, he revised it. The reading and revising were done simultaneously. Whenever he found a key word, though, he always put a good mark by it, and seldom did he break up any harmonious phrases in the composition.

  After several visits I happened to meet a girl about sixteen or seventeen serving my teacher dinner, her hair worn in the shimada style. After returning home, I said to my mother, "Today I saw my teacher's eldest daughter," but my mother said, "She's the maid." Later I found out the word maid had a special meaning.

  One day I happened to find a Chinese book tucked away under my teacher's desk. It was Kinpeibai, which describes the corruption and debauchery of the Ming dynasty. Though I had read only Bakin's adaptation of this work, I had known the Chinese original was quite different, much more erotic and obscene. It was then that I realized how cunning my supposedly austere and dignified teacher was.

  Fall of the same year . . .

  Koga was in one of his ugly moods. I assumed he was ill, but that wasn't it. One day we went out for a walk, and as we were strolling along the edge of a pond, he said, "I'm going to have a look around Nezu today. How about coming with me?"

  "If we go back together, it's fine with me."

  "Of course we will."

  While walking along, Koga told me the object of his exploration of the area. Adachi had become intimate with a popular prostitute working in a house called the Yawataro in Nezu. Since the woman was passionately in love with him and continually summoning him, he had just about abandoned all his classes. Adachi's nightgown and everything else were provided in her room. All the woman's possessions were marked with the combined crests of her family and Adachi's. If she didn't see Adachi for a few days, she became hysterical. No matter how much Koga tried to detain Adachi, the woman's magnetism was so powerful that he was drawn to the Yawataro almost unconsciously. Koga had sent a letter to his friend's parents, who lived in Asakusa, cautioning them about Adachi's misconduct. Koga waited for Adachi's return to the dorm and then asked him, "How did it go?" A look of confusion on his face, Adachi said, "It was terrible today seeing my mother cry. It was pathetic to hear my mother crying, saying she wanted to die. But I've also heard my sweetheart in tears, telling me she wanted to die, and so nothing can be done about anything."

  Quite angry while telling me about this situation, Koga had tears in his own eyes. While walking along after listening to him, I said, "It certainly is hard and unjust." Yet even while coming out with these words, I couldn't feel the least bit outraged. Ever present but dormant in my consciousness was that beautiful dream of love. Just after I had read Ume-goyomi for the first time, having borrowed it from someone who had borrowed it from the lending library, I became friends with a student majoring in Chinese literature, and he advised me to read Sentoyowa. I read Enzangaishi. I read Joshi. I was envious, burning with jealousy over the naive love affairs between young men and women described in these Chinese books. And because I had not been born handsome, I felt as if those beautiful experiences were ideals beyond my grasp. I experienced constant dissatisfaction, a continual pain in the innermost depths of my mind. And so naturally I couldn't prevent myself from thinking that Adachi was certainly happy, that even though he was undergoing pain, it was probably a sweet pain, not that bitter pain I felt lying dormant in me.

  At the same time I also came up with the following thought: Koga's exceedingly simple and pure character was in itself lovable. Still, when I reflected on the underlying basis for his own anguish about Adachi, it didn't seem deserving of the slightest sympathy. Rather, Adachi had extricated himself from an unnatural embrace and had rushed toward the bosom of a natural one. If Koga had told Kojima about this situation, Kojima hims
elf might have shed tears along with him. Of course I felt no greater joy existed than obedience to one's parents. And for the sake of this obedience it was a fine thing to restrain one's sexual desires as much as possible. It was not strange, however, to find that some human beings were unable to. Kojima treated his carnal desires as so much excrement drawn into the bottomless pit. Koga regarded these desires as an outhouse receptacle which occasionally had to be cleaned out. Was it really to my credit that in becoming part of this alliance with these two I had not sought to gratify my sexual desires either? That was quite doubtful. If I had been born handsome like Kojima, I would probably not have been a Kojima. Before the altar of our sacred alliance, I indulged myself in this kind of heretical reflection.

  For the first time in my life I crossed the Aizome Bridge as I followed Koga. He entered a small house on the west side and began talking to one of the employees. I stood on the threshold. The house was a restaurant in the licensed quarter. Koga was checking on exactly which days Adachi came to the restaurant. The man was reluctant to answer. After a while Koga came out sad and dejected. We started back without saying anything.

  It wasn't long before Adachi was expelled from school. About a year later I heard a rumor that a handsome policeman in a section of Asakusa was quite the gay blade among many nurses and widows, Several years later Koga was at Okuyama in Asakusa and happened to meet a man dressed in a wadded garment made of taffeta, his face sinister, his cheeks hollow. They said that was the miserable end of Adachi, who was being kept by a female acrobat performing in a cheap Okuyama tent show.

  ***

  When I was sixteen . . .