Vita Sexualis

by Ogai Mori

  The widow snatched the book from the girl, opened it, and holding it out in front of me pointed to something in the picture.

  "Shizu, what do you think this is?" she said.

  The girl's laugh was even louder this time. I glanced at the page, but the position of the persons in the picture was so complicated I couldn't make it out.

  "This is a leg, isn't it?" said the widow.

  Both the widow and the girl laughed together out loud. I realized it couldn't possibly have been a leg. I had the feeling they were treating me with contempt.

  "See you again, Madam!"

  Without even listening for the widow to tell me to wait, I ran out the door.

  I had no way of knowing how to judge what the picture was the two women were looking at. But I felt their words and actions were quite strange, quite disagreeable. I didn't know why, but I was afraid to tell my mother anything about this event.

  ***

  When I was seven . . .

  My father came home from Tokyo. I began attending a school built on the site of the former school that had been set up under the clan government.

  In going to class from our house, I had to pass through a wicket at the western end of the moat in front of our gate. A guardhouse at the wicket was still standing, an old man about fifty years old living there. He had a wife and a son. The boy was about my age. He was always dressed in tattered clothes, two lines of mucus always dribbling from his nose. Each time he walked by me, he would stick his finger in his mouth and stare at me. I would pass him with a feeling of disgust and even of awe more or less.

  One day as I was going through the wicket, I didn't see the boy standing outside as I usually did. Wondering if anything had happened to him, I was about to go by. Just at that moment I heard the old man's voice inside the guardhouse.

  "Hey! Told ya you couldn't play with that, didn't I?"

  Stopping dead in my tracks, I looked toward the direction of that voice. The old man, sitting cross-legged, was making straw sandals. The scolding just then was due to the fact that his son was about to carry off the mallet used for beating straw. Putting the mallet aside, the boy looked in my direction. So did the old man. His face, swarming with dark brownish wrinkles, had a large twisted nose and hollow cheeks. He was goggle-eyed, and some parts of the whites of his eyeballs were red, some yellow.

  "Little master," the old man said to me, "d'ya know what your father and mother do at night? I don't think so' cause you're such a sleepyhead!" And he laughed.

  The old man's laughing face was really quite grim. The boy joined in too, his face all wrinkled up from laughing.

  Without replying, I walked past as if running away. I could still hear traces of the laughter of that old man and his son.

  While walking along, I thought about the old man's remark. I had known that when a man and woman married, they could then have children. But I didn't know how they actually could have them. The old man's words seemed to have something to do with that. I thought some secret lay concealed there.

  Even though I wanted to know what the secret was, I didn't feel like lying awake in the dark as the old man had said, lying awake and watching my mother and father. Even to a mere child like me, the old man's words were a profanation. I felt as if they were blasphemous. It was the same as if I had been ordered to wear my wooden clogs past the bamboo blinds of the temple. I really hated that old man for his words.

  These thoughts occurred to me whenever I passed through the wicket. But a boy is always so consciously receptive to new facts and situations I couldn't go on thinking about the subject for very long. Usually by the time I reached home, I had forgotten it.

  When I was ten . . .

  My father began teaching me English a little at a time.

  Occasionally there was talk we might have to move to Tokyo. At such moments when I was all ears, my mother would tell me not to mention this to anyone. If and when we did decide to go, we could not take any unnecessary things with us, so we had to pick and choose carefully, and that was why my father was often doing something in the storehouse. Rice was stored downstairs, oblong chests and other items placed upstairs. When any guests called on my father, he immediately stopped whatever work he was doing there.

  Wondering why it was wrong to tell anyone about our moving to Tokyo, I asked my mother about it. She told me everybody wanted to leave for Tokyo, so it wasn't good to mention it to others.

  One day when my father wasn't at home, I went into the upstairs section of the storehouse to look around. I found an oblong chest with its cover open. Various items were scattered about. An armor case which had always been put on display in the alcove when I was much smaller had, for some reason or other, been dragged out to the middle of the room. The armor had lost its value when the Choshu clan had been conquered by the Tokugawa shogunate about five years ago. It seemed to me my father had dragged the case out and had put it there with the intention of selling it to some junk dealer.

  Quite innocently I opened the cover to the armor case. I found a book had been placed on the armor. When I opened that book, I discovered it had pictures printed in beautiful colors. A man and woman in those pictures were in strange positions. I realized it was the same kind of book I had seen in the Ohara house when I was much younger. But because my knowledge had increased considerably since I had first been shown that book, I could now understand much more than I had at that time. It has been said Michelangelo used bold perspective in drawing the characters in his murals, but since the persons in these Japanese drawings were quite different in that they had been made to assume very unusual poses, it was quite excusable for a boy to have difficulty in distinguishing an arm from a leg. This time, however, I could easily make out arms and legs. And I realized this was the secret I had previously tried to penetrate.

  Fascinated, I looked repeatedly at a number of these pictures. But I must say this: At the time I didn't realize in the least that this kind of human behavior had any connection to human desire. Schopenhauer says: No person with an awakened consciousness wants to have a child; no man wants to attempt to propagate his own species. And so nature made propagation go hand in hand with pleasure and incarnated it into desire. This pleasure, this desire, is the trick, the bait, nature has devised to force human beings to breed. Lower forms of life have been given no such bait, in fact, have no objections to multiplying. Nor, Schopenhauer has said, have they any wakened consciousness. I was totally ignorant that the behavior of the persons in this type of drawing was equal to this kind of bait. The reason I enjoyed looking at those drawings again and again came merely from the pleasure I had found in discovering something I had not known before. It was nothing but Neugierde. Nothing but Wissbegierde. I was looking at these pictures with eyes completely different from those of that girl in the youthful hairdo, the girl who had been shown these pictures by Mrs. Ohara.

  While I kept glancing at them over and over again, some doubts occurred. One part of the body was drawn with extreme exaggeration. When I was much younger, it had been quite natural for me to think that this part of the body was a leg when it actually wasn't. Drawings of this type can be discovered in any country, but only in Japan do we find them with such monstrous proportions for this part of the body. This was an invention of the ukiyoe artists of our country. The ancient Greek artists, in creating the figure of a god, enlarged the brow and made the lower portions of the face smaller. Because the brow was thought to be the dwelling place of the soul, they enlarged it in order to emphasize it. The lower parts of the face—the mouth and the teeth in the upper and lower jaws used for masticating—were made small because these portions were thought to be baser parts of the body. If Greek artists had shaped these parts of the face larger, the human face would gradually have come to resemble that of a monkey. Then anthropologist Peter Camper's description and analysis of facial angle (in which the wider the angle made by the line from one's brow to one's upper jaw and the line drawn from the base of the nose to the ear cavit
y, the greater the intelligence) would have indicated smaller and smaller capacity. Furthermore, the Greeks made the breast comparatively larger than the stomach. That the stomach bears the same relationship as the jaws and teeth need not be particularly explained. The function of breathing is superior to that of eating and drinking. Moreover, the ancients believed that the breast or, to put it more precisely, the heart, did not have the function of circulating the blood but of stimulating the spirit. For the same reason that the Greeks enlarged the brow and breast, the Japanese ukiyoe artists enlarged some parts of the body when they created drawings of this sort. That had been somewhat difficult for me to understand.

  The Flesh Mattress is an indecent, licentious book written by a Chinese. What is more, the author, as is customary with Chinese writers, has forced into the structure of his tale the ethical retributions of good and evil. Actually it's quite a silly book. A passage describes the hero Miosei going around spying on others when they are urinating because he believes one part of his body is smaller than that of other men. In those days I also took a look whenever I happened to see someone urinating along the road. Even in our castle towns at that time there were no public latrines, so everyone urinated along the roads. Because everyone's seemed to me to be small, I con eluded that the pictures in that book were false. I fancied myself as having made a joyous, miraculous discovery!

  This was one of the observations I made about the real world after seeing those strange drawings. Another discovery occurs to me now, one somewhat difficult to put down here, but for the sake of truth I have forced myself to write about it. I had never seen with my own eyes that part of a woman's body. In those days there were no public baths in castle towns. When I took a bath at home or even at the house of a relative with someone else helping me wash, I was the only one in the nude, the person assisting me always wearing her kimono. Women never urinated along the roads. So I was quite puzzled about them.

  At school the girls were taught in special classrooms, and we could not even play together. If a boy said anything to a girl, his friends immediately ridiculed him. And so we had no girl friends. Some of my relatives were small girls, but though they came on the annual festival days or to the Buddhist memorial services, all they did was appear in their best holiday kimonos with make-up on their faces, eat very gracefully, and then go back home. There was no girl with whom I could feel at ease. Behind our house, though, lived a family of very low rank at the time of the clan government. They had a daughter about my age. Her name was Katsu. Occasionally she came over to our house to visit, her hair done up in the butterfly coiffure of young girls. She had a white chubby face. She was a mild, gentle person. It was a pity I made her the object of my experiment.

  It happened after an early summer shower had just cleared up. As usual my mother was at her weaving. It was hot and muggy just after the noon hour, and the old woman who did needlework for us and who helped my mother around the kitchen was taking a nap. Only the batten for my mother's loom resounded through our quiet house.

  I had fastened a string to the tail of a dragonfly and was sending it flying in our backyard in front of our storehouse. A locust on a crape myrtle tree bursting with flowers began its shrill cry. I peered into the tree and found it, but at that high a spot I couldn't have caught it. Just then Katsu came by. Since the members of her family were also taking a nap, she felt lonely and had gone out.

  "Let's play!"

  That was how she greeted me. In no time at all I had worked out my plan.

  "All right. Let's have some fun by jumping off the veranda!"

  With these words I discarded my straw sandals and climbed onto the porch. Katsu followed, removing her leather-soled sandals with red straps and climbing up. First, I jumped down barefooted on the garden moss. So did Katsu. Again I climbed onto the veranda. I tucked up the skirt of my kimono from behind.

  "If I don't do it like this, my kimono gets in the way and I can't make a good jump."

  I made a vigorous leap down. Looking at Katsu, I saw she was hesitating.

  "Come on! You jump too!"

  For a while she made a face as if she were troubled, but because she was an innocent gentle girl, she finally tucked up her kimono skirt and jumped. Wide-eyed, I peered at her, but I could discover nothing except two white legs joined to a white abdomen. I was quite disappointed. My narrative, though, is very innocent when I think about those gentlemen at the ballet, their opera glasses used to catch a glimpse between the thighs of the dancing girls merely to find themselves disappointed in seeing only glittering gold threads woven through silk gauze.

  ***

  Autumn of that year . . .

  My province was one in which the Bon Festival dancing was quite popular. As the Feast of Lanterns drew near according to the lunar calendar, a rumor was circulating the dancing was to be prohibited that year. But the prefectural governor, who had been born in another district, thought it a bad policy to oppose our custom, so he looked the other way and let it pass.

  The center of our town was only two or three blocks from my house. A dancing platform had been erected there, and in the evening the music accompanying the dances could be heard all the way to our house.

  When I asked my mother if I might see the dancing, she said I could if I returned early. I hurried into my straw sandals and ran out.

  I had often been there before. When I was much smaller, my mother had taken me with her to let me see the dances. It was thought that only the tradespeople participated in public, but because each person danced with his face concealed by a kerchief, many of the sons of samurai went to dance. Among the dancers were men dressed as women. And there were also women dressed as men. Those who did not wear kerchiefs wore paper masks called hyaku-manako. In Europe carnivals are held in January, but even though the time of the festivals is different, human beings have quite naturally invented the same kinds of celebrations everywhere. In Europe too they have special dances at harvest time, but I guess masks are not worn.

  The crowds form into a circle and dance. Some who have come in their masks merely stand around watching. While they are observing, if they happen to see someone who is quite good in his movements, they are usually able to break into the ring to be next to that person.

  While I was watching the dance, I happened to overhear some masked dancers talking to one another. Apparently the two men knew each other.

  "Last night you went to Atagoyama, didn't you?"

  "What you making that up for?"

  "Oh no? Someone said you did."

  While they were arguing in this way, another man beside them cut in:

  "If you go up there early in the morning, you can find a lot of stuff left behind."

  A burst of laughter followed. Feeling as if I had touched something dirty, I stopped watching the dance and returned home.

  ***

  When I was eleven . . .

  My father took me with him to Tokyo. My mother remained behind. The old woman who always came to our house to help moved in, and they lived together. My mother would join us a little later. I assumed she had to remain until our house was sold.

  At Mukojima was an estate that belonged to our former feudal lord. My father and I lived there in a tenement building which had been left vacant. We employed an old lady to cook our meals.

  Every morning my father went out, and every evening he returned. He promised to find a school I could attend. Whenever my father left, a married woman about twenty years of age came to our kitchen door and returned with her apron bulging. Our old woman employee was stealing rice, giving it to her daughter to cart off for her. When my mother joined us later, she found out about it and turned the old woman out of the house. I guess I was a very stupid boy.

  I had no friends to play with. I knew someone two years younger, the son of a steward, but when he suggested the first day we met that we fish for carp in the artificial pond on the estate, I lost interest and decided to have nothing to do with him. The steward also had two or
three daughters, the eldest twelve or thirteen, but when the girls caught sight of me, they pointed at me from the distance, whispering, laughing about something. I found them equally disagreeable.

  Sometimes I went into an anteroom in the lord's mansion. Two or three stewards would be waiting there. Usually they were smoking, engaged in small talk. They didn't find me much of a nuisance. So I asked them about various things.

  Among the names of places they mentioned most frequently during their discussions were Yoshiwara and Okuyama, the red-light districts. Yoshiwara was the paradise they were always dreaming about. And the grandeur of that paradise was more or less kept sacred by the influence and power of the estate of their master. The stewards lent their master's money at high rates of interest to certain persons in Yoshiwara. It was in this connection apparently that whenever these stewards went there, they were warmly received. So one after another they rambled on about their experiences at Yoshiwara. Even though I listened carefully, I couldn't understand half of what they said. And the half I did understand wasn't the least bit interesting. Once one of these men said to me:

  "Next time, should I take you with me? A pretty strumpet will fondle you!"

  When he said that, everyone laughed.

  Okuyama never entered the conversation without their bringing in the name of a man called Hanno. Almost each one of these stewards had a pockmarked face, a pug nose, and buckteeth, their features leaving much to be desired! Quite unlike any of them, this Hanno was tall, his complexion white, his long pomaded hair parted down to his nape. I didn't know what kind of position he had, but I assumed he was superior in rank to our stewards, perhaps drafting letters or something of the sort. The stewards offered statements like the following: