I am the fourth generation Korean-Japanese and I’m grateful to what I am. I was born rich and I can be what I want to be without much difficulty, to a certain extent, because my father is a man of great connections not only in the music and the show business but also the publication world, the IT business, and the Japanese Animation circles.
According to him, the shipping trade and the rental business have been under the control of descendants of Korean-Japanese. And, just like the stereotype of Korean-Japanese entrepreneurs which the general public holds, my father does own Karaoke bars and Pachinko parlors.
He often says: ‘New business and new money? They’re both ours. We created them. That’s why various awards and loans go to exclusively Korean-Japanese artists and entrepreneurs. We’re the winners and the rest of Japanese are losers. You should be proud of being a Korean-Japanese.’
He definitely has a great business sense and I hate him. I hate his authoritative attitude toward my mother, my big brother, and me. I hate his anachronistic patriarchal attitude. I hate his preaching about filial piety. I hate his Mercedes and the collection of expensive imported wristwatches. I hate his being a womanizer and the scent of his eau de Cologne. Most of all I hate dinnertime at every Saturdays because my father is home and usually starts preaching about what means to be a man at the table. He wishes me to be tough and reliable and unsentimental.
Is it someone that I want myself to be? Give me a break. I know I can never be what he expects me to be. I’m sick and tired of being his super boy. But, don’t get a false idea of this.
All those feelings have nothing to do with the reason why I’m a gay.
I remember that my grandfather used to hold a grudge against his neighbors all the time. He said that they had been discriminating against him since he was little. But my father had no problem. He had been well protected by relatives and other Korean-Japanese and, more than anything, grandfather’s money.
My grandfather always told me this: If you were shut out from the main gate to an amusement park, all you could do is to execute these three things. One, you simply could blast the gate with dynamite and step in. Two, you could steal into the park through the back door or over the fence. Three, you could construct new amusement park of your own. If you are shut out from old business, you will have to create the new one. Don’t ever try to get in. All your efforts and struggles would be wasted in the end.
I liked my grandfather who gave me some pocket money and despised him when he started grumbling about his unhappy boyhood. I detested him throwing such big words as discrimination or prejudice to get my attention. I hate anyone or any word that makes me feel inferior to other people, you know. I always want to keep myself integrated. And, in order to attain that objective, I have to keep myself from worries as possible as I can and I’ve been trying to do so as much as possible. Nonetheless, I still find myself being the source of troubles.
Life is funny, isn’t it?
Did you see the news of the Mad Surgeon last weekend? I read an article about its detail in a weekly magazine yesterday. That rich cosmetic surgeon tortured and mutilated and killed runaway children, more than thirty of them. According to the article, he then reconstructed several bizarre human bodies or, I should say, objects by sewing heads and torsos and limbs of his victims together, like Dr. Frankenstein. He even hung one of his grotesque objects on a chain from the ceiling and called it a Flesh Mobile. The doctor claimed that he was an artist, not an Oni, just as our ethics teacher Mr. Buddha stated, in an interrogation room, that he was not a pervert but a new kind of an artist, you know.
I also learned from the magazine that the Mad Surgeon took runaway boys and girls out of streets and parks and railroad stations into his house, which is a solid five-story building with a dungeon-like wine cellar underneath. Before he induced a child to get into his inconspicuous Mazda sedan, not his usual cherished Porsche, he allegedly gave the child a drugged whisky bonbon. It is, by the way, one of my favorite sweets.
Now, the most interesting part of this incident is the fact that the Mad Surgeon is not alone. It has become known that he has been actually showing his ‘art’ to his fellow ‘dilettanti,’ his acquaintances, that are composed of a dentist, an obstetrician, and another cosmetic surgeon. To my surprise, those rich doctors in private practice are all neighbors living within two blocks from the so-called ‘art studio’ of the Mad Surgeon.
And, surprisingly each doctor has his own family. A wife and sons and daughters, you know. And their wives are all saying that they were not interested in what their husbands were doing in private as long as they were doing their business well.
I really wanted to know the reason why the Mad Surgeon committed such atrocities against those runaway children. The answer was simple. And, to borrow his own words, that he and his fellow dilettanti had been simply carried away by a powerful craving for the birth of new aesthetic. He also said that he was totally absorbed in creating his new art form. And an experimental dissection on a living human was the means to achieve his ends.
Whatever the Mad Surgeon claims, there is no doubt that this is nothing but a grisly murder case. Those runaway children were being sacrificed to give the surgeon a peculiar pleasure, days of sake and murder debauchery. He said that they were not guinea pigs but rather considered raw materials for his new art.
Once in a while I feel as if I were one of children who has been abducted and held in the wine cellar. The difference is that I’m still alive and that my alter ego has enjoyed being the guinea pig. You know, I’m talking about my first sexual experience.
I was introduced to a woman of twenty-three who had been kept in my uncle’s luxurious apartment in Roppongi. I was fourteen and I was voraciously curious. It was a hot and humid Friday night in summer and she smelled good especially in the air-conditioned apartment. Her eyes gleamed like black onyx and her lips glistened like cherry in syrup and her hair shimmered like moonlight on a dark ocean.
By the way, those are my uncle’s descriptions of her, not mine.
Ayumi was her name. I cannot recall her last name. I think she never gave it to me. I don’t even know whether Ayumi was her real name or not, but I was glad to be told that she was a third generation Korean-Japanese.
As you might have seen, my uncle is a man who loves fun people and a fun time, anything fun, although in a little perverted manner. I think he was born to be a man of pleasure principle.
That night, he teasingly ordered me to stay his apartment over the weekend. ‘You’re old enough to learn new things, some exciting things,’ he said with a knowing smile. After my uncle went out leaving us alone, Ayumi asked me point-blank if I was a virgin. I answered yes, pretending not to be nervous.
‘Stop doing that,’ said Ayumi. ‘You don’t have to act like a grown-up.’
She took me to a spacious bathroom to take a shower together. There was this fake marble bathtub, which was as dark as soy sauce so that her body stood out against its blackness. She was incredible. Her fingers came to take good control of my whole body. To my surprise, it felt good to fall under the control of the other. There was this strange sense of liberation from the image of the man I should be.
I was drowned in her skills of seduction. She didn’t sleep and I couldn’t either. We spent the night by few winks. The next day she began giving me a strange new sensation. She let me lie on my stomach and started caressing a particular spot which I had never touched even by myself so intimately. But I could do nothing about it because I was only fourteen and she was twenty-three. To be honest, it felt unbearably good and so embarrassing at the same time I literally wriggled like a glove puppet.
She was wicked. She explored me as if I were her guinea pig. On the bed she transformed herself into a man and I turned into a girl. It was just unimaginable that I would lose my virginity in such manner. My belief such as the one that had been constantly telling me what meant to be a man collapsed on the spot. I became unashamedly receptive to whatever she told me
to do, but it wasn’t meant to be passive at all. It required certain courage for me in order to open myself up to her peculiar demand.
Later my uncle told me that Ayumi used to be a high-priced Dominatrix in a sadomasochistic club in Roppongi, which had been known only by a handful of hard-core S&M fans.
It’s true that everything appears magical until the secret comes out, isn’t it? The same is true of myself. If my classmates happen to find out I’m a gay, I will be finished. If my father has found out this secret, he would cut me off without a doubt. I’m sure he would never speak to me again. He won’t even waved me a sayonara at the last parting because of my having disgraced the family name. As a consequence, the Kendo master’s life would be also shattered completely.
I’m afraid he would never be able to teach again.
Anyway, I paid frequent visits to Ayumi, almost every weekend, while my uncle was out. The visit lasted for about three months until she disappeared. Yes, she had vanished like a pint of vanilla ice cream left on a blacktop under a scorching sun. My uncle said she had made away with his money. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said with a chuckle, ‘I’m sure Ayumi is having fun with somebody somewhere this moment.’ His dark smile sent shivers down my spine.
What she had taught me stayed long afterward not only in my memory but in my body as well. I couldn’t shake off the aftertaste of that particular pleasure. So I continued to explore my body, searching for the sweet spot that would trigger some deeper and stronger sensation. Then I met him, my Kendo master, when I was still in junior high school. Until then I had never regarded myself a gay. I was thinking that I was only fascinated with that particular sensation and not by someone of the same sex. I couldn’t even imagine kissing other man on the mouth.
As a matter of fact, I don’t like the Kendo master much.
Especially his uncanny obsession with me. It has grown to be nothing but a nuisance now. I’ve noticed that some members of the Kendo club become aware of it these days.
I don’t know how to deal with that older guy. For him, ours is like the relationship between a samurai lord and his page. He thinks himself a sword and me a chrysanthemum, so everything seems natural to him. To Kendo master this affair seems like a manifestation of an ancient fellow feeling between warriors. Maybe he watched too much samurai movies, I guess.
As I’ve said before, if my relations with the Kendo master were brought to light, my father would become insanely furious. He’d be unable to face what his son is truly like. In truth, my father is faint-hearted. He is a man of no backbone. That’s what he is and that’s the truth. That’s why, I think, he is stubborn and conventional and intolerant. My father is clinging hard to a single unchangeable worldview which he alone can be comfortable with. There is nothing to be done to change his mind as long as he regards me a disgrace.
I’ve become a fallen angel now.
Like Ayumi, the Kendo master is also a third generation Korean-Japanese. He is one of us, but I pretend not to be aware of it, and I believe that it has nothing to do with a strange warm feeling. There is always this strange warm feeling surging up within me when I’m having sex with him even though I don’t have a much taste for him. I don’t deny it, only I’m being bewildered and bewitched by that feeling.
When he holds me tightly in his arms from behind, I feel as if I were in homeland where I can be as free as a cloud floating in the bottomless blue sky.
*
In the men’s shower room, Takeshi admitted that he regretted having confessed his secret to Yukio. He said he wished Yukio to be gone somewhere far away with Cahier de Secret, while he insisted that he had never even thought of actually killing his classmate.
‘And, now, you’ve known my secret as well.’
‘Do you want me to be gone and silent for ever like a heroine in some Hollywood movie?’
‘No, I don’t. I don’t need to.’
‘It’s very cool of you.’
‘Because I’m now pretty sure that you’re not interested in revealing my secret to others. You’re not that kind of girl.’
‘You should have known me better.’
I asked Takeshi if it was true that there was someone else standing between Yukio and him in the waiting line that cold morning.
Oh, Come on. Do you really think I can recall who was standing where? It was so crowded as always and, if you witnessed such an awful accident at such close range, it would definitely become hard for you to recall what was actually happening around you at that exact moment.
Everybody was in a sheer panic, you know, including me.
Motsuyaki
Night has fallen already. In downtown Tokyo every single night is a Christmas Eve.
As I step out onto the Shinjuku station plaza from the subterranean shopping complex, I spot a middle-aged man with no necktie waving to me to come. He is in a crowd of mostly young people who seem to be waiting for a Jazz concert to start on an open-air stage that is set up in the middle of the square. He is Maya’s uncle, Mr. Hirose, who invited me to eat out this evening. I have my mother’s permission to come but am a little nervous because this middle-aged man would have the key to access the true meaning of Maya’s confession.
What makes me feel nervous even more is that Maya’s uncle is accompanied by a tall Caucasian woman with a red-haired ponytail. I am surprised and, at the same time, worry if I can make myself understood with my high-school English. But it seems to be unnecessary because, as I walk up to them, I can hear her having a chat with Mr. Hirose in startlingly fluent Japanese.
“Here you are. I would like you to meet my young friend Ms. Nancy Heller.”
We exchanges a how-do-you-do with a casual bow at an angle of five degrees. Her smile looks friendly and her eyes intelligent and curious.
According to Mr. Hirose, she is a doctorate student in the graduate school of a four-year university in Kyoto, which is one of top three national universities in Japan. She was born and raised in Massachusetts and, after having had graduated from one of Ivy League located in New York City, she transferred to a prestigious graduate school in California and came to be interested in studying outcaste and untouchable in Japan as a student of cultural anthropology.
“It’s interesting to know that, in Japanese phonogram such as katakana, for example, both the elite and the untouchable sounds the same. They’re both pronounced sen-min. Although they’re represented differently in Japanese ideogram kanji, there seems to be quite an ironical coincidence. That’s what I call fascinating.”
“Excuse me, Heller-san, but how long did you say you had been studying Japanese?”
“Three and half years.”
Mr. Hirose says that she is also able to speak Korean, Chinese, and Spanish.
“Though I find it still difficult to write a research paper in Hangul.”
“I have a Korean-Japanese friend. But he can neither read nor write Hangul.”
“Is your friend the third generation of Korean-Japanese?”
“He is perhaps the fourth generation. I’m not sure of that.”
“I see. Oh, by the way, I’d like you to call me by the first name,” she adds, this time, in Kansai dialect in which intonation is almost the reverse of Tokyo dialect.
“I wish I were able to speak Japanese like you, Nancy-san,” I say.
It was a heartfelt compliment, no, I was merely trying not to show my jealousy on my face.
We cross the boulevard, being carried away by the flood of a crowd.
Under the night sky, there seems to be no single sober person walking in Shinjuku. I spot some half dried-up vomits, which look like leftover pizzas, probably dropped from persons intoxicated by sake. Japanese males are, according to my mother, mostly alcoholics. ‘Most men are unable to do without drinking after five six days a week,’ she said with a contemptuous look and added, ‘even though they have no breakdown enzyme for alcohol.’
Mr. Hirose seems to be invigorated by the noises and smells of the city. He talks rapidly while
walking hastily: “I must say I love this city. This megalopolis is truly insomniac. Everyday is a carnival here. Look around, enjoy the illuminations, and feel this energy. All these high-rise buildings are beanstalks and I am Jack. All I have to do is to climb up. Life is that simple here.”
As Mr. Hirose raises his hand, his large titanium-cased wristwatch that is decorated with gold and diamonds glitters like a miniaturized royal crown.
I chuckle to myself over the fact that Maya herself doesn’t know I am now walking with her uncle.
Sometimes it is possible for a secret to give birth to freedom instead of a burden, I guess.
*
There are rows of restaurants, shops, clubs, and massage parlors on every street that is flooded with neon lights. We are already in the labyrinthine back streets of red-light district of Shinjuku.
“That’s it.”
Mr. Hirose guides us toward a stall-like restaurant with three red paper lanterns hanging under the eaves. It has an open kitchen next to the entrance, which reminds me of a Turkish shish kebab restaurant. Soon we are enveloped in an oily smoke blown out from the grimy ventilating fan of the restaurant. Mr. Hirose opens its sliding door, saying hello to the close-cropped owner who is attentively cooking skewered meats on a narrow grill. You can see a horseshoe-shaped service counter to which there are ten to twelve people sitting on wooden stools along, laughing, chatting, sipping, smoking, and munching.
Mr. Hirose explains that this is an eating house, which specializes in serving grilled entrails and giblets called motsuyaki. Nancy adds that motsu is a slang word that refers to the internal organs from chickens, oxen, or pigs such as the tongue, heart, stomach, liver, intestines, womb, testicles, and penis.
A Japanese Schoolgirl Page 18