Vita Sexualis (12 page)

In the final analysis I ended up not knowing whether this change in Ocho's mind or nervous system had been brought about by love or sexual desire or even by the mere working of my own imagination.

*
*
*

In July, I graduated from the university. On noticing my officially announced age of twenty, someone said it was rare for a person that young to be a university graduate. Actually I wasn't even twenty yet. I graduated from the university without finally having had an experience with a woman. That of course was certainly due to Koga and Kojima's influence. As for Kojima, though he was older than I was, he apparently hadn't had a woman yet either.

For some time we had an excessive number of graduation parties. The Matsugen, a restaurant in Ueno, was popular among the students in those days. On one occasion all of us graduates invited our professors there for a party.

We called in many geisha and apprenticed geisha from Sukiyamachi and Dobocho. That was the first time I had ever seen geisha at a party.

Even now students who are about to graduate have parties in honor of their professors. But thinking back to the event of that time, I believe the behavior of both guests and geisha was different from what it is nowadays.

When one becomes a university graduate today, he is shown neither any special favor nor any severe rudeness. In those days, though, I found that some geisha didn't even regard us graduates as human beings.

I still have a clear recollection of the party that evening at the Matsugen. Each graduate, one by one, went over to exchange cups of sake with his professors, who sat in a row in front of the alcove. Some of the professors made it a point to come over to their students and, sitting down with their legs crossed, talk with them. The room came to take on the appearance of something wild and jumbled. As I was sitting in blank amazement, someone to my left offered a cup of sake under my very nose.

"My dear ..."

It was the voice of a geisha.

"Well thanks."

I was about to take the cup from her. All of a sudden the hand of the geisha holding that cup drew back.

"It's not for you!"

Her slight glance at me was like a reprimand as she offered the cup to the person across from me to my right. It hadn't been done as a joke. It didn't have even the slightest outward semblance of a joke. The person sitting across from me to the right was a professor. With almost his entire back turned toward the geisha, he had been talking to the person to his right. The crest on the professor's
haori
of silk gauze was quite visible to me. Finally noticing the geisha's offer, the professor accepted the cup. No matter how absentminded or stupified I might have been, I could never have grabbed a cup of sake which had been offered to somebody else. Never in my wildest dreams had I felt anyone would offer a cup of sake to the crest of a
haori!

From that very moment I felt as if I were completely awake. I felt, for example, as if I were looking at violent waves after I had been flung on the seashore from inside a swirling maelstrom. All the members of the party were mirrored in my eyes with perfect objectivity.

One professor who in the classroom always had a serious expression on his face was grinning like a Cheshire cat. A geisha who was trying to captivate the graduate sitting beside me was saying, "I say, my name's Boru. I'll be angry if you forget me!" I thought her name was Otama, which means "ball" in Japanese. All the younger apprenticed geisha at the party had stopped serving sake and were happily dancing. No one was watching them. Someone was catching a sake-cup after getting another person to throw it to him. Someone dashed up and thrust himself into the group of apprentice geisha and was dancing with them. One geisha, seeing that her samisen was about to be trampled on, was putting it away in haste and confusion. The geisha who had rebuffed me a short while ago seemed to be the senior geisha, frequently raising her loud voice, bustling about, poking her nose into everyone's business.

Sitting two or three persons away to the left of me was Kojima. He seemed absentminded. He didn't look much different from the state I had been in before my awakening. A geisha was sitting in front of him. The balance of her well-knit body was perfectly ordered, and her face was equally beautiful. If she had made the borders of her eyes more conspicuous, she would have appeared more like the

Vesta seen in Western painting. From the moment she had come in to distribute our small dining trays, she had attracted my attention. My ears were so poised I even heard her fellow-geisha call her Koiku. She was making several attempts to engage Kojima in conversation. As for Kojima, he was replying quite reluctantly. Even without trying to listen, I could hear their exchange:

"What is it, my dear, you like best?"

"Mashed sweet potatoes with sweetened chestnuts tastes delicious to me."

His was a serious response. Wasn't that an odd reply from a handsome, rather imposing twenty-three-year-old youth? Certainly among the graduating students at the thank-you party that evening, not one could rival him. Having become this strangely cool-headed, I felt awkward and ridiculous.

"Oh you do?"

Koiku's gentle voice trailed behind her as she got up from where she had been kneeling. I was watching the development of this affair with a certain amount of interest. After a while she brought in a fairly large porcelain bowl and put it in front of Kojima. It contained mashed sweet potatoes with sweetened chestnuts.

Kojima kept eating these until the end of the party. Sitting directly in front of him, Koiku watched each single piece disappear behind Kojima's beautiful lips.

I left the party early without telling Kojima, hoping, for Koiku's sake, he would eat as much of that mixture as possible and as slowly as possible.

From what I heard later, Koiku was the most beautiful geisha in Shitaya. And yet all Kojima did was eat the
kinton
which this beautiful geisha had carried in for him. Now Koiku is the wife of a famous politician belonging to a certain political party.

*
*
*

In due time my fellow graduates went hunting for jobs, many of them off for the country districts to become teachers. Since my class standing when I graduated was good, it was rumored I might be permitted to study abroad at government expense. However, since it was far from being settled, my father was worried. I wasn't, so lying on my bed in my four-and-a-half mat room in our official residence at Kosuge, I read my books.

Almost no one dropped in to visit me. Koga became a counselor in some government agency, got married, and lived in his wife's family home from which he went to his office. Even before Koga had found a regular job, Kojima was working in the office of a company in Osaka and so he had left Tokyo. When I went to the train station at Shinbashi to see Kojima off, Koga, who was still a bachelor at the time, whispered to me, "Someone wants to be my wife. Strange, isn't it?" Koga wasn't being modest. Even though he knew a good deal about the ways of the world when compared to Kojima, he still formed a corner of our triple alliance and so he was, as might be expected, quite innocent and naive. I didn't feel Koga's remark the least bit strange.

I too had an offer of marriage. It was my mother's idea that even if I were permitted to go abroad to study, it would be better for me to marry first. My father had no definite opinion. And so my mother was the one who prevailed on me to marry, but I kept giving her evasive answers. She didn't understand what I had in mind. Though I had an opinion of my own, I didn't want to reveal it to her. Even if I had decided to explain, I felt it would have been extremely difficult to. My mother persisted in asking me to. One day, after finally being driven into a corner, I said something like the following:

I would, in any event, be married at some time or other. When I did, I would really be troubled if I married someone I didn't like. It would be easy to decide if I liked her or not. However, it would even be hard for the woman to marry a man she didn't like. Perhaps it sounded disrespectful for a son to be saying this to his parent, but I couldn't the least imagine any female liking me once she had seen my face. Of course it wouldn't be impossible for a plain woman who was wise enough to know her plainness to be able to endure me even after she had seen my face. Still, it wasn't necessary to endure me. In such a situation I myself would be glad to do the declining! Then what about marriage in terms of my soul? I didn't think I happened to possess a very palatable soul either, but from my contacts with a great many people up to then, I didn't believe I had to feel that much ashamed of it to have to keep it concealed. If I had to take an examination on my soul, I didn't think I was bound to fail. When I took into account the current customs involved in marriage, though, I realized there was a marriage interview between the parties in terms of looks, but not in terms of souls. In fact, even this interview for examining looks wasn't necessary once the go-between told the other party the information beforehand. The woman herself did not say whether she liked the candidate or not. Only the male had to indicate his likes or dislikes. It was as if the parents of the daughter were selling her while the groom was doing the buying. The daughter was treated as if she were a commodity. If she were set down in Roman law, the word
res
would be used, the same as our word for slave. I had no interest in going out to buy a beautiful toy.

This was a rough approximation of what I explained to my mother in order to help her understand my feelings. It was a great disappointment to her that even though I wouldn't fail an exam on my soul, I was likely to fail one on my looks. "I've no recollection," she said as if unable to endure her indignation, "of having brought you into the world a cripple!" I couldn't help feeling embarrassed. Furthermore, my mother would not accept my view of the marriage interview that if it was fair for the man to choose the woman, it was equally fair for the woman to choose the man. According to my mother, that sort of view, in all probability, came from the same source as those advocating equality between the sexes. From early times the daughters of tradesmen had occasionally refused the prospective groom at the marriage interview. But the daughters of samurai married samurai because they were fully confident of the manly and spiritual aspects of these men so that to raise objections about a man's features was hardly to be expected. Even if this custom existed only in Japan, my mother felt that if it resulted in good, it had sufficient justification. But she had once heard an account from my father that even in Europe the king sends his retainers to neighboring countries to have them look for a bride for him. If so, she might as well assume that even in Europe the way a king selected a wife was the same as the method used in Japan. I was somewhat confused by my mother's dragging in an example from Europe and going on and on about it, especially since I was trying as much as possible not to mention European customs.

I had many more things I wanted to say in defense of my own position, but feeling it improper to contradict my mother, I said nothing further.

Shortly after this discussion an acquaintance of my father, a Doctor Annaka, came for a visit and recommended a match with a young lady in a titled family whose antecedents went back to a feudal lord. The girl was living in Bancho in the home of an artist named Ichijo. It would be all right for me to see her at any time. As usual, my mother urged me to go.

Suddenly I had a whim to see her. It was quite incongruous of me to. It wasn't that I really wanted to observe what the young lady looked like—it was that I merely wanted to attempt the experience of going through a marriage interview. It was somewhat irresponsible of me to do this, but it didn't mean I had already made up my mind not to marry any woman. Should I feel inclined to marry this one, I thought, I could easily do it.

It was about March, the weather still cold. Led by Doctor Annaka, I went to Ichijo's house in Bancho. It was a gloomy dwelling with a black-roofed gate. We were shown into an eight-mat room which seemed to be the artist's den. As I was sitting with Annaka around the brazier chatting with him, the artist came in. About fifty years of age, he seemed unaffected and candid. He talked about painting. After a while his wife appeared with the young girl.

The husband and wife kept the party lively by bringing up various subjects. They told me to talk as long as I liked, and if I wanted some sake, they would bring some in. I told them I didn't drink. The husband said, "In that case, what can we treat you to for dinner?" and he cocked his head to one side in thought. Because at the time I had been plagued with a tooth which was decaying, I had been living on buckwheat mash. And so I suggested, "If there's a noodle shop in the neighborhood, I'd be glad to have some buckwheat mash." Laughing, the host said, "That's an interesting request." The artist's wife called their maid and gave her the order.

Sitting quietly to the right of the wife all this time was the young girl, her hands on her knees. She had a full round face, the corners of her eyes somewhat slanted. Looking straight ahead, never looking down, she did not appear to be the least bit timid. There was no definite expression on her face. Yet when she heard me ask for buckwheat mash, she couldn't help breaking into a smile.

After requesting the dish, I had to admit it was as inferior as Kojima's request for mashed sweet potatoes with sweetened chestnuts, and I laughed inwardly at myself. For a while the conversation flourished on the topic of buckwheat mash. The artist had also eaten it at one time. Once when he was ill, he had consumed it an entire month because he couldn't eat anything heavy. "At that time," the artist's wife said, "I was really disgusted with him," but suddenly realizing her slip of the tongue, she apologized to me.