The Part of Me That Isn't Broken Inside

by Kazufumi Shiraishi

  14

  After parting from the missus, walking down the hill toward Akasaka, I remembered her shameful conduct the previous night.

  With her hands and legs tightly tied up as usual, she was down on her hands and knees on the bed with a big vibrator shoved into her vagina, allowing her large ass to be mercilessly violated by me. Her anus, holding fast my condom-covered penis, exhibited a powerful outside-in suction every time I thrust it in and out. When I pulled out my dick, a cavity opened up, and the flesh in its periphery underwent massive spasms while shrinking. When I thrust into her again just after this cavity closed, the folds of her intestinal wall climbed all over my penis to put it through its paces. Overcome with a pleasant sensation—like an electric current shooting up to the crown of my head—I thrust my pelvis tirelessly.

  The missus implored, screamed, foamed at the mouth, thrashed about her restrained hands and feet, pressed her blindfolded and gagged face against the bed—as if to crush her nose—and wailed. In the end my condom split apart, and the massive volume of semen released poured straight into her anus.

  After pulling out my soiled dick, I carefully washed it in the bathroom before returning to the bedside. But the missus, whom I’d just left lying there, was letting the white liquid drip down from her pushed-out buttocks, while continuing to come, the vibrator still entrenched in her vagina, endlessly stimulating her.

  I mounted the bed, wedged the drooping vibrator into her butt crack, and, using the base of the vibrator as a fulcrum, lifted her ass. The semen inside was already sticky, but thanks to this swift motion, a residual quantity spilled out of her anus to the bed sheet, creating a puddle.

  Mindful of this puddle, I scooped up her legs with my left arm, and, holding her by the waist, flipped her over and made her face me.

  Ahhhn, the missus moaned. Grasping her long hair tied into a knot at the back with a rubber band—supporting her small head in the process—I stretched out my right hand and firmly inserted the protruding vibrator into her vagina again. I then removed her blindfold and gag, and lifted her chin. With her makeup ruined by sweat, tears, and saliva, she looked back at me with vacant eyes. I half rose and held my freshly washed dick over her half opened lips. Reflexively springing at it, she began to let out a moan again.

  Taste good? I asked.

  She nodded her head subtly.

  Answer me properly!

  It tastes good, sir, she said in a muffled voice.

  After making her suck for nearly five minutes, I pulled out my dick and used it to smear the bubbly saliva around her mouth all over her face.

  Well then, let’s have you lick something more delicious now.

  Seizing her hair, I pushed her head down and drew it close to the carefully preserved puddle of semen near my knees.

  Go ahead, lick it, and don’t you dare leave a single drop, you got that?

  The missus was just gazing for a while at what was there before her eyes, but when I pressed her for an answer, she said, Thank you, sir and stretched out her tongue and began to lap up the fluid.

  Is it yummy?

  It’s delicious, sir.

  Wrong answer!

  It’s delicious. Thank you, sir.

  I untied the missus while she kept her face pressed to the bedsheet, and after moving behind her and making her assume a proper crawling stance, I slowly worked the vibrator in and out of her vagina. The missus, while awkwardly licking up the semen, writhed violently, and continued to come, over and over again.

  While making use of the vibrator in such an interminable fashion, I was, as usual, thinking about something else entirely.

  Of course, I don’t recall everything, but I believe I’d remembered a certain assistant professor from my college days, who used to be fond of me for some reason.

  Although I was a law student, he was teaching German when I was taking general education courses, and we

  became close after I submitted a dissertation in German. We began to meet outside the campus to have drinks together, talking about novels often, since he was an aspiring novelist. I wonder how much whiskey he treated me to back in the day, when I was spending all my hours moonlighting to come up with the money for covering my school and living expenses. He was really talkative, shooting the breeze about various dull things, which I hardly remember anymore. But while playing with that vibrator yesterday, I suddenly remembered something he used to often say.

  A woman’s body is a treasure. Everything else about a woman is unpleasant. So going out with a woman is all about how much you can tolerate those unpleasant things, for the sake of the treasure. With sex, the more you see your partner as an object, the more you’ll get better at it, and the more she’ll cling to you.

  One day, just prior to graduation, he invited me to an old-fashioned bar in Kanda, where he repeatedly said, You think you’re smarter than me, don’t you? Well, perhaps you’re right.

  But then he added with conviction, You’ll likely self-destruct, though, if you’re actually much smarter than me. I’ve known two guys like that before now. You’re the third.

  If I recall correctly, I think he went on to say that one of them had committed suicide or something, but I’m not sure. That year, he’d at long last won a certain well-known literary prize.

  I headed toward my office, walking down a lonely back street devoid of traffic even though it was nearly lunchtime.

  The reason why my mind drifted to the past last night wasn’t because I was seized by some silly nostalgia for my college days. Not to put a damper on Teruko Onishi’s enthusiasm for having a child, but it was because I couldn’t help thinking that childbirth, in the end, results from the sort of contemptible acts she and I had engaged in.

  At the risk of sounding like Honoka, I feel that, where sexual intercourse is concerned, men and women are driven merely by their libido, which is fundamentally different from love. Nonetheless, both men and women avert their eyes from this basic physiological mechanism, forcing themselves into a romantic union, rationalizing their denial.

  But here’s what I think. You can never get at the truth unless you look like crazy, unless you look hard, unless you fix your gaze on the naked truth. Eriko said that she was someone who had to make sure of things with her own eyes, that she had to see things for herself, or else she was never satisfied. But when it comes to her relationship with me, she says she finds comfort and solace in turning her eyes away. Now, have you ever heard anything more selfish and contradictory than such an attitude?

  When I told her—some time ago—that everyone reluctantly goes on living, she rejected this notion at once. When I asked her to elaborate, she said something silly like, There may be people who live reluctantly, but there certainly are others who live vibrantly. Even then, my heart—fluttering in my chest—burned with a small rage. When I say that everyone goes on living reluctantly, I naturally and absolutely mean that there exists not a single person in this world who does not live reluctantly. I didn’t articulate those words so casually that Eriko could negate and dismiss them in a few words. I pride myself on always being accountable for the words I speak. But in the case of Eriko’s words, I found this all-important sense of responsibility—this gravitas—utterly lacking. Which is why she’s always quick to laugh and make light of a situation, making groundless arguments with a smug look on her face. Frankly, I can’t stand this attitude of hers.

  Eriko says she gets listless after having long, drawn out sex, that she feels inertia. It’s the same with me. Which gets me wondering about exactly what lies beyond this shameless act, in which a person isn’t treated like a person. I can’t help wondering about what the hell it is. But then Eriko says I shouldn’t look at this listlessness, this inertia, in a negative light, and that if one gets obsessed over it, harboring dark and backward doubts about it, one will lose the will to live. I certainly agree with her. But another question immediately occurs to me: so what if you lose your will to live? What’s the big deal? What’s going to happe
n as a result?

  What I want to know has nothing to do with sensory constructs like volition, or freedom of action, or peace of mind. Whenever I meet Eriko, whenever I sleep with her, I’m always asking her questions, deep inside my heart: what will become of me, always being together with you? By staying together, how close will you and I ever get to the ultimate meaning of life itself, transcending concerns like the will to live, freedom of action, peace of mind and comfort? To what extent can you reassure me?

  Where on earth will we be heading, having a family and living together all the time? Can you even vaguely see the destination? If you can, please tell me, please stop hesitating and just tell me! Honestly, I can’t see the destination very well at all. So I’m uneasy, terribly uneasy. This boat we climbed aboard is really small, floating in the middle of the great big ocean. Sure, just as you say, there’s a warm wind blowing, and if we look up, we can see that we’re enveloped in the azure light of the sky. Still, I’m unable to shake from my mind how tiny the boat is, and how ominous is the sea, where anything can happen. What’s more, I’m unable to banish the thought that one day one of us will abandon ship, ahead of the other. This isn’t an issue of making choices, as you suggest. It’s a more important, more fundamental matter—one that precedes the choosing. It’s a terribly dispassionate and heartless matter that transcends time, and there’s no room in it for human emotions like love and compassion and sympathy.

  Still, there’s not a scrap of an answer to be found in Eriko’s loquacious talk. She doesn’t offer answers. She doesn’t even share her views about what I’m saying. And yet she concludes that what I’m seeking can’t be found with the kind of simple method I apply. Does she then have knowledge of some complex method that can help me in my quest?

  But I understand.

  Put simply, she doesn’t want to know anything; she just wants to feel, just like Tomomi, just like that Park, just like Mrs. Onishi—just like everyone.

  15

  HONOKA, WHOM I HADN’T seen in a while, was hardly recognizable.

  Her body, which used to be skinny, had become remarkably more fleshy around her shoulders and chest, while her legs, clad in jeans, retained their slender charm as before, making her physique appear all the more feminine. Even her looks, which used to be memorable for the prominence of her large eyes on an angular, lackluster face, had become really lovely, her now plump cheeks and lips hiding the former sharpness of her features. Even if Eriko were to stand next to her, you’d be hard-pressed to notice any striking differences between the two, as there had been before. Even her tone of voice, eye color, and facial expressions exuded a cheerfulness that made it hard to believe she was the same Honoka I used to know. Although I’d heard rumors, seeing her in person like this only filled me with admiration for Eriko’s astuteness.

  Raita also, compared to the time I drank with him in Nakano, was looking fine. Working part-time to pay off his debts while simultaneously managing a change of residence, he couldn’t hide his fatigue, but he still seemed ready and eager to face the day when he’d finally leave Torimasa to embrace his new future.

  These past several days, it seems Honoka had worked hard, having undertaken full responsibility for packing his luggage and handling particular arrangements at the new address.

  According to Eriko, the relationship between Raita and Honoka had rapidly progressed since the year began.

  So you think they’ve bedded each other already? I asked every time the two came up in our conversations. Eriko would always laugh and say, That’s all you think about, isn’t it? Apparently they’re putting off things like that until later.

  She also emphasized that it was Raita, and not Honoka herself, who deserved the credit for her dramatic change.

  A woman changes, after all, when she applies herself to her main profession, Eriko said with feeling once, so I asked her, What do you mean by main profession?

  You fool, she yelled. I mean men, of course.

  The apartment Raita rented was in a place that was about fifteen minutes away by foot from Seibu Shinjuku Line’s Numabukuro Station, in the direction of Ekoda. From Torimasa it would take less than twenty minutes to reach, moving directly north along the Loop Seven Kanana road. Raita’s baggage wasn’t that considerable, and so it was decided that the four of us would help him move on May 3, when my holiday coincided with Eriko’s.

  We promised to assemble at Torimasa at nine. Although I drove away from my apartment before eight and picked up Eriko at Ningyocho before heading for Nakano, the roads in Tokyo were almost completely empty that day—since it was the middle of the holiday-studded week—so we ended up arriving in less than forty minutes. I went around to the back of the shuttered shop, pulled open the old, unlocked wooden door there, and climbed up a steep and narrow staircase, ahead of Eriko. It was silent inside the house. I’d heard that the boss and his wife had already retreated to Kagoshima before the consecutive holidays began. At the top of the stairs, to the right, was a space for drying clothes, and there was a refreshing breeze blowing through an opened window. On the left-hand side of this space was the couple’s suite, apparently, and with its sliding fusuma doors already removed, a vacant two-room interior was visible. Raita’s room was on the right. When I knocked on its fusuma door I heard Honoka’s voice calling out, Coming, so I slid the door open and saw the two of them peacefully eating their lunches in a room littered with huge piles of cardboard boxes. Lined up on the tatami mat were two cans of oolong tea, and when I inquired, it seemed that Honoka had prepared the box lunches, waking up early in the morning.

  Eriko and I also sat down on the tatami mat and waited for them to finish eating.

  Honoka was attending to Raita in various ways. Whenever his paper tray was empty, she’d serve a side dish from a large lunch box and swiftly hold out an onigiri when he was done with one. At times, appearing cheerful and happy, she’d also stop to gaze at Raita’s neat face. To be sure, Raita’s good looks—now accentuated by his sunken cheeks—had acquired such a formidable, bad-boy charm that you couldn’t help but admire them, even if you weren’t his girlfriend.

  A little after half past nine, Raita pulled up a pickup truck in front of Torimasa, which he’d borrowed the day before from the boss of a wrecking yard, who had been a regular at Torimasa. It had been decided that Raita would start working, for the time being, at this wrecking yard after the consecutive holidays. It was this boss who had

  found the next apartment for him, on account of the fact that his company was located in Ekoda. On the door of the pickup was, indeed, the name of the company: Nakagaki Industries.

  After loading all the baggage in about an hour, Raita and Honoka set out in the pickup ahead of us. We were to stay behind and finish up cleaning before following them in our car.

  But we didn’t need to be all that meticulous, since the building was slated to be demolished as soon as it was handed over. The window frames were sash, but the rest of the place was made of wooden mortar from around thirty years ago, and parts of the tatami mats, where Raita’s bed and bookshelves used to stand, were discolored by sunlight. We vacuumed the place briefly, wiped the floor and windows, removed the nails and hooks stuck in walls and decorative nageshi beams, and then called it a day.

  Sitting down on the vacant space of the six tatami mats, I smoked a cigarette, using an empty can of oolong tea as an ashtray. From a window flung open, two light gauge steel apartment buildings—also old-fashioned—were visible across a parking lot, a clear blue sky spreading out above their rooftops.

  Extinguishing the cigarette, I lay down on the tatami mat. Eriko, who had been standing by the window and also taking in the view from there, came back and sat next to me. Without saying a word, I moved my hips, placed my head on her lap, closed my eyes and distinctly felt the sunlight pouring in on my face and palms.

  When I’m in this kind of a room, I feel at peace.

  Is that so? Eriko said with a hint of wonder in her voice, smoothing back my hai
r.

  Until high school, I lived in such a room with my mother and younger sister, just the three of us.

  Is that so? she said, this time in a tone that was gently stimulating.

  "I suppose the name Tobata doesn’t ring a bell for you. It’s a town in Kitakyushu City—next to Yawata—where you find steel foundries. In this town there’s a small bay called Doukai Wan with a large bridge there, and nearby there are a lot of these small factory towns subcontracting work from Nippon Steel, and the apartment I was living in was in a corner of a district with clusters of these factories. It was the size of six tatami mats with one restroom for all, and no bath. I was raised there until I graduated junior high. Mother would hardly come back home, on account of work or men, leaving me to take care of my younger sister from grade school onward.

  But what was really sad was that I couldn’t serve her a proper dinner. Although I’ve forgotten the details, the memory of that sadness I felt in my juvenile mind, that indescribable vexation and hurt, remains unforgettable to this day. My mother was one miserly woman; she’d give plenty of money to her boyfriends, but when it came to me and my little sister, her own children, she was such an awful penny-pincher: she’d never let us have any money. I bet you haven’t eaten canned food all that much. You usually have food like that when you’re climbing mountains or camping. But my sister and me, we were different. I’d buy canned foods from the supermarket with whatever pittance Mother handed over, and eat them with my sister as side dishes. Day after day, it was just canned food and white rice, so you can imagine how fed up we were, right? But our mother, whenever she could be bothered to return to the apartment, would pick up an empty can of boiled mackerel from a pile of other cans in the kitchen, and say something like, ‘You know what, kids? All canned foods are delicious because they’re made seasonally, when the ingredients are harvested in large quantities.’ Only at the time of a school field trip did our mother allow us to buy pork. We’d be overjoyed then, getting up early in the morning, roasting the pork—which we’d leave pickled overnight in plenty of ginger soy sauce—and then putting it on top of the rice in our lunch boxes before heading out for the excursion. This was, to us, the best treat we could ever have. Nonetheless, even back in those days, I thought that it was rare to see anyone leading such a pathetic life, a life of such poverty …