HIGAN SENSEI (1992)

Translated by Kenneth L. Richard (1994)

CHAPTER TITLES & PAGE NUMBERS

01-30 CHAPTER ONE - MASTER AND DISCIPLE

31-71 CHAPTER TWO - COMPANIONS OF THE NIGHT

72-109 CHAPTER THREE - CITY OF WOMEN

110-131 CHAPTER FOUR - SENSEI, MYSELF, AND MY PARENTS

132-198 CHAPTER FIVE - THE DIARY

199-215 CHAPTER SIX - SENSEI’S PRIVATE DOCUMENTS

216-229 CHAPTER SEVEN - THE ANTI-FAMILY

230-265 CHAPTER EIGHT - A THOUSAND AND ONE TEMPESTUOUS NIGHTS

266-299 CHAPTER NINE – AFTERWARD

CHAPTER ONE - MASTER AND DISCIPLE

1

"Humans were gone. Only their shadows remained. Reality too had vanished, leaving only fiction in its place. You and I are merely characters made to dance on the slightest wisp blown from a fiction which is always in progress, yet in which everything is already concluded," Sensei had remarked to me on one of my regular meetings with him. He wore a hand-knit sweater over his pajamas.

Was his work not going so well? His face seemed full of unfinished business. Or could he have spent the night with a lover and had just arrived home for a bit of sleep? I don't know. I was to see him in this state a number of times. He looked satiated, as though he had had enough of women. Usually, he looked, strangely enough, as though nothing could stand in his way.

I am a fan of Sensei’s looks, but I must also say that I am a devotee of his particularly bizarre hidden confidence. He writes the truth in his books. Sensei has a grasp of almost anything. He has a knack. One can count on him for answers. And basically that is why I had sought him out as my mentor; his body played a major part in that choice. A mentor must exude confidence. He was to be the object of my belief, the target of my assault. I had yearned since childhood for a disciple-master relationship.

But I was still a boy then, just nineteen, and I stupidly misunderstood what Sensei had been saying. I was prepared to accept the spell he cast over me --"from now on, you will live in the world of my writings." He had been permitted me access to the place where his books were written and conceived which meant to me that, in the near future, I was to appear as a character. It gave me pleasure to think about when that would be. Only later did I come to realize other meanings hidden in his words.

Sensei had not finished his pronouncement: "You're handsome. A man's beauty is in his face. We don't give birth to children, so the most we can do is to cultivate our beauty. All men are capable of is an erection; they're incapable of creative work. Did you know that the god who created Heaven and Earth was female? "

One could do no better as a character than to be handsome. I believe I was taken on as his disciple because of my good looks and my ability to keep quiet.

"Being with a handsome youth does have rewards for his benefactor, don't you see?"

If Sensei intended to go girl-hunting, I would be content to be the bullet in his rifle, the hunting dog at his feet. I have confidence in my reflexes and in my physical strength. I will do whatever is in my power to be of help to this man. Does my thinking or my great admiration for his works mean that I am specially predisposed to serve him? Sensei embodies something, something I can’t explain, never having known anyone else who had it in equal measure. Can I call it moral fiber? My admiration, however, was mixed equally with cynicism. What the hell, I thought, a character's a character, so why not be a beautiful young boy by whom the author would be captivated? Some of the athletic louts who turned up in his stories, stupid as well as unattractive, so thick-skinned they had cast iron stomachs, no class, and no pride, might find fault with the likes of me, but at least I knew I would, in this company, not end up being a mere extra.

I tried neither to exaggerate nor shrink my role. At worst, I could play a bad game of apparent cleverness, or through impudence bring Sensei to openly ridicule me with those piercing bright eyes of his. I liked what he once wrote somewhere --nothing is as guileless as the wisdom of an adolescent boy.

Sensei was the first writer I had met; his slightest move became part of my own grand bildungsroman.

“Don’t novelists all tell the same story? Do you know what you’re doing, putting yourself in his hands?”

I never allowed anything that was worrying Satoko to get in my hair. Novelists are not the only ones to have a few eccentricities. Even Satoko often remarked how jealous she was of gay culture, or how she too wanted to ‘vogue.’ ‘Well, isn’t it a little odd to want to learn about living and dressing gay?’ I reminded her that a novelist was a pro when it came to doing strange things, thinking anything. Therefore, I reminded her, that genus known as ‘novelist’ had to be infinitely more ordinary than most of us plebes who find it impossible to think of much of anything, let alone something unheard of. If Satoko and I were ninety percent ordinary, a novelist would have to be five-hundred percent to be in his right mind, I added.

“What kind of stories does he write?”

“Twisted romances, you know the stuff.”

“Are they any good?”

“How should I know? A little porno, a little Sci Fi, a little politics, with a little mystery thrown in for good measure.”

“Are there gay characters, any fashion queens?”

“ There’re plenty of weirdoes.”

For the most part, I had no way to explain what was going on in Sensei’s novels. All I knew was I could lose myself in that world.

Satoko was concerned more about Sensei’s looks than what was in the novels. She despised ugly middle-aged men more than snakes. She’d be likely to pronounce the death sentence on men who groped people on the trains, meaning middle-aged ones. Luckily (and this had nothing to do with Satoko), Sensei had never quite become middle-aged, preferring instead to lead the rest of his life with the aura of spent youth.

To jump ahead, I found myself frequenting Sensei’s home. When he asked me whether I was thinking of becoming his disciple, I said yes. He agreed. “It might prove interesting,” he added.

“You mean you want to be a novelist?” Satoko asked.

“Absolutely not.”

I meant it. I figured it might be one thing to think I might want to write, but another thing entirely to want to be a novelist. I had absolutely no intention of learning how to write novels from Sensei. I needed to be with him from time to time. That was it; nothing more, nothing less. I became his disciple because this way I wouldn’t have to make excuses for being there.

2

Sensei was Sensei, but my sister taught him. She had studied voice in the Graduate Faculty of Music and took on the task, part-time, of instructing Sensei in operatic technique. Sensei’s fixation on Italian opera drove him to learn how to sing; unfortunately his voice couldn’t produce the higher registers. So my sister, who lived nearby, took on the task of improving his voice.

“The voice isn’t so bad, it’s breath control that gives out too quickly. He runs all out for the first three kilometers of the marathon, and then poops out around the tenth. It’s only a problem of air. He loves the music, though. All he wants to sing are difficult tenor arias. It’ll take him another ten years before he can hit high C. I tell you, he sings the F sharp an octave lower.”

My sister’s comments led me to imagine Sensei as middle-aged, red-faced with his efforts to produce the merest falsetto. I hurried to buy Sensei’s books, but always put them down because of the author’s perversity. This would prove to be rougher going than explicit schoolgirl comics. I found character types I had never encountered who spoke, made love, fought. The Tokyo settings were familiar, yet the language and the reality of the encounters seemed to belong to some other world. I was not to find my role in this play. How could I become a character when nasty authorial lobotomies seemed imminent? Nevertheless, I read the works over and over, persevered until, as I began to glimpse Sensei’s own inner life, I felt the fictional world coming ever closer to fitting my own physical contours. Training was requisite to reading such books.

Sensei’s voice lessons terminated in about three months. My sister was enrolling in a Music School in Vienna. In just this short time, she had become a devoted fan. Thanks to Sensei, her tastes in men changed. Now knowledgeable, she had read somewhere in his works that men who were slightly faded were more attractive, and that a man’s backside was more interesting than his face. Sensei’s warped sense of morality had quietly crept into my sister’s senses.

Sensei’s home was about twenty minutes away by bicycle. He lived with his wife on the sixth floor of a nine-story condo called ‘Riverside Village.’ I lived with my sister on the top floor of a multi-use building containing a 7-Eleven and a video rental shop. Since the buildings were on either side of the Tama River, I took singular pleasure in being able to bicycle on a clear day across the bridge to visit Sensei.

Sensei had two names by which society knew him; his real name and his nom de plume, but I needed only the one I already used. I kept another, just in case, strictly for my personal use. When I referred to Sensei by this name, it would be reserved for him not just as anybody’s mentor, but as mine alone. I thought of it one day as I was walking on the riverbank. Sensei lived on the opposite side of the river. So he became my mentor of the ‘other side.’

I met Sensei three times during the period my sister made once weekly visits. The first was when she had forgotten the scores she needed for the lesson, and I brought them over on my bicycle.

A woman appeared at the entrance and ushered me inside. Later I learned that this woman was his wife; I had no idea the woman and Sensei were a pair. I had mistaken her for one of my sister’s friends, or perhaps someone else; my first impression led me to unilaterally decide that he was single.

Having a sister on the scene helped me get through my fear. In such situations, I normally played dumb and held my tongue. This time, I was the one who made Sensei uneasy. Who wouldn’t be embarrassed at having to continue his voice lessons in front of a sudden intruder?

“This is my brother Kikuhito.”

I returned her introduction with an inept something about now nice it was of him to put up with such noise pollution. If she were rehearsing at home, customers would check the window above the rental video shop and the 7-Eleven before entering. I said the same thing to Sensei I said to customers. Without acknowledging me, Sensei said,“how nice of you to come.”

With that, the day’s lesson finished and we had a cup of tea. I had intended to leave without interrupting the lesson, but my timing had been off. My sister kept the conversation going.

“Which food is best for the voice?”

Beef was my sister’s immediate reply.

“I don’t know why, but beef with red wine seems best. Melon, on the other hand, is not good. But, you know Sensei, it’s all a matter of taste.”

This was the first time I had heard my sister call him Sensei. Following her lead, I began to do the same. I knew if this were a mistake, they would let it pass; after all, his wife referred unnecessarily to him as Sensei. I remember vividly how his wife responded.

“The one of whom you speak never talks to anyone at home; he is sullen by nature. It’s no wonder his voice is so rough. I believe that is why he has taken up singing; to be able to speak more happily. Isn’t that so, Sensei?”

Sensei remained silent for the rest of the meeting. Gloom set in. Nodding or punctuating with an occasional ‘Oh,’ the conversation continued between the wife and my sister. I noticed that Sensei’s attention had continued its flight to an unknown source. I knew from the complete ennui that engulfed his expression and from the way in which he hid this in a faint smile that this man was complex.

Husbands and wives often resemble one another, but Sensei’s case was the exception to the rule. I felt sure that Sensei’s wife regarded him more as a perverse outsider than as her husband.

My sister and the wife were getting on so well I imagined they must be nearly the same age. My sister looks older than her age, and the wife, much younger, so my visual mistake wasn’t at all inappropriate. My sister was twenty-three; the wife was twenty-nine. That day, their conversation left Sensei behind as it turned to the vulgar subjects of foreign travel, the theater, and cosmetics. I was preparing to make my escape, looking for a lull in the conversation when suddenly my eyes met Sensei’s. He telegraphed his entrapment.

As I left, Sensei whispered, not directing it to me.

“I wonder what goes on every day in the mind of a nineteen year old boy?”

My sister answered for me.

“Girls.”

“I see. The same as me then. I have an emotional age of about nineteen.”

For the first time, I heard Sensei laugh. Unfortunately, his joke was lost on the two women.

On the way home, I asked my sister.

“Is that woman Sensei’s mistress?”

“Don’t be silly. Couldn’t you see she’s his wife? She is pretty, isn't she.”

“Yes, but she doesn’t seem like his wife. Doesn’t even act like it.”

“We caused it. I’m sure they’re a couple when they’re alone.”

“I like Sensei’s taste in clothes.”

“Do you? Are you sure it’s not just to make himself appear younger? A middle-aged man still has just one thing on his mind; his next conquest.”

“Isn’t that what women do too; sit around all day thinking about men?”

Laughing it off, my sister rapped me on the head. Who, I wondered, was on Sensei’s mind? His wife? His lover? My sister maybe?

Sensei was about to have his thirty-seventh birthday next month.

3

I don’t remember when Sensei, my alternate man from across the river, came walking in the vicinity of my house. He couldn’t have had any reason to cross to this side, but there he was, muttering something to himself, and heading in the direction of the station. I had just come home from the university, so it must have been about five thirty in the afternoon. The minute I saw him from the balcony, I set off after him like a blundering idiot. I had a special sideline now. Town crier. ‘There goes an author’ was my refrain.

Sensei was not just strolling through the shopping arcade; he walked slowly, glancing around like a lost child.

Dressed in a turtleneck shirt and black corduroy pants, Sensei paused in front of a fish shop to ogle at a flayed sea bream on ice.

“Sensei, nice to meet you the other day.”

Sensei started, then stared squarely at me.

“Oh yes, you’re her brother.” Sensei was struggling to remember my name.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m staring at a fish.”

“Something for dinner?”

“No. I feel sorry for a flayed bream on ice.”

“I hope your wife’s well.”

“She is. Working now. You live near here?”

“Yes. I’d invite you in if my sister were here, but she’ll be late tonight.”

“ I see your sister every week. Anyplace around here to get a good cup of coffee?”

I took Sensei to a place that specialized in classical music about ten minutes away. The owner, a passionate fan of Richard Strauss, called the place ‘Der Rosenkavalier.’ I usually had coffee there in the evening with Satoko. If I asked, the owner lent me his rare collectors-item recordings. When the store closed at midnight, he offered me beer. I brought him, in return, gifts from my travels. I wasn’t sure how to introduce my friend the owner to Sensei. What if he didn’t want his identity as a novelist known? I hardly knew him. I ended up avoiding the counter in favor of a table from where I made only eye contact with the owner.

Sensei sipped a cup of black Mandheling, preferring to puff on a cigarette rather than exchange words.

“Do you write all the time when you’re home?”

I had no confidence in being able to have a conversation, so I pursued the ordinary idea of how he lived his life.

“Writing isn’t all there is to the job. Killing time like this is also extremely important.”

“Is singing part of your work too?”

“Sure. So is slurping my noodles, making telephone calls, and walking in the shopping district.”

“What do you do for amusement?”

“That’s the most important aspect of my work. I’m always on the lookout. Keeping yourself constantly amused is a very tiring you know. Truth is I’m the sort of person who hates to have a good time. Yet I can’t stop.”

What a strange thing to say, I thought. Just idle talk, but he had been too emphatic. There would be time after I had become his disciple to ponder the meaning of these words.

“You mean, Sensei, that amusement is not fun for you?”

“The more I amuse myself, the more vulnerable, the less lovable, the less able to bear it I become.”

“I’ve never had that pleasure. It would be nice, having so much fun I ended up hating it.”

“You’d have no problem with it physically, but what’s at stake is prayer. Debauchery requires a vow.”

“A vow? Vow what before you go wild?”

“Oh, this and that.”

Sensei wouldn’t speak in specifics. His word ‘vow’ was weird. Lighting a new cigarette, he changed the topic.

“Your sister says you’re studying Russian at the university. Is that true?”

“Right. The daily drills are horrendous.”

“Russian grammar must be difficult. You know, though, I think everyone ought to study a foreign language. So you can let loose anywhere in the world. Japanese restricts you to having a good time only in Japan.“

I laughed and agreed. My sister told me that Sensei was fluent in English and Spanish. It seemed he could also get by in Italian when his travels called for it. From the moment I took the entrance exams to the foreign languages department, I held fast to one single maxim: a minimum of three languages would be required to get on with women. Sensei seemed about to confirm my golden rule.

Sensei waited for the entire performance of Berlioz’s ‘Harold in Italy’ to end before getting up from the table. He thanked me for introducing him to the shop, and paid the bill.

Walking back to the station, Sensei suddenly stopped in the middle of the street as though he had recalled something. He blurted “I smell teriyaki chicken. Let’s have some.”

His invitation seemed so natural I forgot my reticence and let my appetite be swayed by the smells enticing us both.

“Have as much as you want,” Sensei said, filling his own glass with beer. I followed suit. After a moment, Sensei, asked, somewhat hesitantly: “Do you have a lover?”

“There’s a girl at the university.”

“Do you think one’s enough?”

I smiled, thinking it was a joke, and said I wouldn’t mind having more. Sensei continued in earnest.

“Do you really like this girl?”

I also thought this question was meant to be funny. Obviously so, if she was my lover, I thought. I grinned.

“She’s the only one.”

“I’m jealous. What’s her name?”

“Satoko. Studies Italian.”

“I see. I once wrote a novel about naive love among students. That’s nice. You’re living out the novel of your youth.”

“No. I’m just seeing a girl, that’s all.”

“Yes? I was once like that. I’m jealous.”

What, I wondered, did Sensei have to be so jealous about? Youth? Purity?

“What about your beautiful wife?”

“Ah, yes. You must think me insatiable,” Sensei replied, biting into his teriyaki as though trying to conceal his interest.

I wondered if, in fifteen years, I wouldn’t feel the same way as Sensei. My curiosity was piqued. I wanted to delve further into Sensei’s inner consciousness.

Sensei went out to make a phone call after our second round of beer. He announced, on returning, that he had to leave. He said in parting: “How about inviting your sister next time?”

“Why don’t you ask her yourself?”

Sensei laughed approvingly. The alcohol had taken effect and made me somewhat curt. I continued with a more polite wish to go out with him again, and he responded in kind that I should telephone him.

4

After coffee at ‘Der Rosenkavalier,' I saw Satoko as far as the station on the other side of the river on her way for tutoring. I had been called Sensei until quite recently by a ninth grade schoolgirl. A more skillful tutor had been found and so I was let go. My pupil Yumi had this to say on our last day, “I like you, but Papa’s warning me.”

Me leading Yumi on? Ridiculous. If that’s the way her worrying father sees me, I’ll quit. What if I had gone ahead and given Yumi that single little kiss?

That day, my sister came home by taxi after midnight. Quite drunk, she bumped into things getting to the kitchen where she drank two glasses of water in an attempt to sober up. It had been her lesson day, and I knew she had gone that evening to Sensei’s.

“What did you and Sensei have for dinner?”

“Italian.”

“Nice. All I got was teriyaki.”

“Well you’re not in the same category. I am, after all, an opera singer. Get it?”

So, Sensei was also good at flattery. Sister was in an unusually bouyant mood. I wanted to know what his wife was doing while Sensei and my sister were out having that dinner. I wondered whether Sensei had asked his wife if he could take his singing teacher out.

For about a month after, I was busy preparing for exams and writing papers. My simple life consisted of a solitary bead drawn directly between the university and home. Any date with Satoko was made in the library. We sat across the table for about an hour, me pouring over Russian documents, she doing the same with Italian, until we reached a convenient break point in the study to signal to each other that it was time to go back down to the stacks where old magazines and valuable rare volumes lie moldering eternally on the darkened shelves. We had been told that there were books dating to pre-Revolutionary time, lost in Russia that would fetch no less than 5,000,000 yen , yet nobody ever looked at them.

We spoke in whispers under the window admitting light to the deserted stacks. The light struck her face, outlining it so that she seemed like a talking sculpture. I could see deeply into the pale brown pupils of her eyes, hot stuff when it came to appreciating a lover. All that was necessary now was for her to have skin like marble. Cheeks brightened by the light, Satoko glowed faintly as though emitting a pale glow of fireflies.

“Let’s go somewhere when we finish our exams,” I said.

“I need to cut loose too. How about going skiing?”

“Too strenuous for me. Cold too.”

“What are you talking about? You want to be Russian, don’t you? You may find your future working in Siberia.”

“I work better in a warm place, let loose easier. Let’s go to a hot spring.”

“How about a combination ski resort and hot spring?”

Satoko always made the decision, and I always followed. She always went the short way, and I always took the long way around. I got better at reading my own character going out with her.

People often ask me why I decided to study Russian. I was used to giving a variety of answers: I wanted to read Dostoevskii in the original (despite the utter difficulty of even reading him in Japanese translation?!), or something romantic as if I wanted to set foot in that cinematic world Tarkovsky had created, or that I just liked a country that had been left behind by capitalism. Things like that. It turned out that when I began to study Russian and delve into the forest of materials on Russian literature and history, I realized just how close I actually was to having a Russian disposition. I felt empathy with the poor oaf Oblomov. How moved I was by the stalwart actors in Dostoevskii’s novels and in Tarkovsky’s films. More than a few of my classmates had plans to be hired by the Russian department of the university in four years, or were aiming to be experts in international politics, but none of this seemed worthy of debate to me.

While arguments over the pros and cons of scholarly analyses versus television and print media event coverage flew left and right in the graduate student offices, I offered nothing by way of opinion or addition; I muttered to myself something about what to do with people like the Doukhobors who lived a life in Siberia free of Western rationalist ideas? What was happening was I was choosing a world that already conformed to my character. This would be the most honest answer I could give to the question of why I studied Russian.

Tarkovsky made a film called ‘Nostalgia.’ I knew the characters were a Russian man with an Italian woman. I took Satoko to see it. She looked puzzled when she found me shedding tears. In Italy, the main character has a glimpse of his soul through the window of his inner recesses, not through his intellect. For some reason the story pointed at my own sense of guilt and complicity. What guilt, you ask? Something like guilt by association. It made me unbearably sad to think that I would not share his will to commune heart to heart with such religious zealots. I knew what he was capable of was forbidden to me: hearts in communion, peering into the recesses of the inner consciousness, praying for something, thinking of death. I felt in my own way dysfunctional.

Satoko brought it up later.

“You know, sometimes you just bury yourself in your own little world. But you come right back to this side again.”

“Is that weird?”

“Weird, but fascinating.”

I knew she must have been accusing me.

Why had Satoko taken up Italian? The reason was clear; she had lived as a child in Rome.

In the stacks, we talked about clairvoyance: how everyone has it, how the way you make love would change if you had telepathy, how interesting it would be to be able to play an instrument without using your hands or mouth. It took thirty-five minutes that day before I first kissed her. I couldn’t seem to get the timing right. In thirty-five minutes, any real Russian or Italian would have done it close to a hundred times. What were we to do? We were impostors.

Deciding to make one last ditch effort at study, we went toward the stairs and up to the desk.

“Let’s talk more about extra-sensory powers.”

I laughed and obliged her. Sensei crossed my mind.

“One of my sister’s friends asked me recently whether I had a lover, and I said yes.”

“Really? Who?”

Thinking for a second about what I would do if she didn’t take it as a joke, I looked Satoko right in the face.

“As if you didn’t know.”

Our relationship had stalled at a kiss.

5

It was cherry blossom season and my sister’s life seemed to be pulling apart at the seams. All the time she should have been hard at work on her German in preparation for school in Vienna in June, she complained about having no time. She was living it up. How many times had I seen my sister not come home until morning, suffering from a hangover, sighing all the time? When the fatigue of her debauchery was over, she was off again on a three-day, two-night trip to a hot spring, then off again in a car with her friends, almost as though in a month’s time she would be confined to hard labor.

“How do you think you’re going to get on in Vienna with this habit for carousing you’ve picked up?"

Whenever I teased her like this, my sister complained as though she had been through the depths of despair.

“I don’t have enough time. Too many things to do in Tokyo I can’t do anywhere else.”

“If you’re going to go whole hog, might as well do it a little more cheerfully.”

Her regretful abandon forced me to say this. Was it because she was sad at having to leave someone? Was it her way of trying to forget her anxiety over the thought of living abroad for the first time?

What I witnessed that day from the bridge would explain everything. I saw my sister sitting absent-mindedly on a bench in the park along the riverbed. I thought I would surprise her and leave my bike to go down to see her when I saw a man standing just behind her about to put his hand on her shoulder. It was the Sensei of the alternative side. I got off my bike and observed the situation. The sun in the West framed them as if in a spotlight. Sensei sat down immediately next to her, his arm around her shoulder. My sister whispered something to him, her head buried in his chest.

Now I knew. They were a pair. I had the good sense to leave well enough alone. I stomped on the pedals of my bike to send it racing toward the other side. When I looked back, I saw their faces pressed together.

Who had started it? Was it my sister who fell in love with Sensei? Had Sensei been the one who had initiated? Soon she would be in Vienna. Their affair seemed designed with a parting in mind. Sensei had a wife. My sister would be no more than a stray cat to Sensei’s wife. Why had she deliberately become an interloper? What was my sister to Sensei? A lover on a three-month contract? What had she been thinking? Was this just a game? One of her operatic roles? The singing teacher had obviously been telling her pupil to fall in love. The only conclusion I was able to come to after putting the whole thing in perspective was that they were accomplices in the construction of a fleeting romance. The romance, I had no choice but to conclude, was to be a disaster.

She was late getting home that day too. Where had she gone after the park? Certainly, Sensei was her partner in her nights of revelry. I whiled away the time waiting for her by watching a movie from the video rental store. By the end of the movie, she still wasn’t back.

I had a Russian class the next day, but I didn’t go. On two days of every week at least, I simply don’t want to do anything, think about anything, or see anybody. I spent the whole day in my pajamas sprawled on the floor in the living room reading schoolgirl comics. I waited for one thing , a call from Satoko. Without a lover friend, I would easily fall victim to the worst depravity. There would be only me and my alter-self on the other shore and we would never return. I knew what fortune it had been to meet Satoko. She would see me through the university, and she would see that I didn’t need to spend all day in my pajamas. She would pull me, compel me to go outside.

I read the comics three times before I became hungry. I changed from pajamas into jeans and a jacket and went downstairs to the convenience store to get something to eat, maybe rent a couple more videos. This building was designed to cater to a lazy lifestyle. If one so wished, one would never have to set foot out of the building. Perfection would be the bride brought in to join me.

“Go and get me a can of Pocari Sweat, please!”

It was a soprano’s voice. A woman on the verge of a decline into sloth was still in bed. Sister had been escaping from reality by playing a quick and dangerous game of love. People in love get thirsty; clearing her throat like beating on a huge drum, sister replenished her bodily fluids with a large can of Pocari Sweat I had purchased.

“I saw you yesterday. After three o’clock, in the riverbed park, doing it.”

“What do you mean ‘doing it’?”

Sister made no attempt to get up.

“Does anybody else know about you and Sensei?”

“So you saw us, did you? Leave it to you to notice a speck on the ceiling.”

Munching on the rice balls I had bought, my sister laughed in my face.

“Aren’t you seeing him tonight?”

“Something’s come up. With Sensei, I mean.”

“What do you intend to do? Wipe the slate clean before you go to Vienna?”

“Well, we’ll see what happens.”

“You’re in love with him.”

Instead of answering me, she pointed to a video and asked what I had borrowed. I meant to spend the remainder of the evening watching ‘Ben Hur’ and ‘Dark Eyes.’ I had seen ‘Ben Hur’ ten times. I had once had a dream of Charlton Heston rafting on the Tama River.

“Let’s see this one first.” Sister slid the cassette of ‘Dark Eyes’ into the video deck.

Why, I thought, should she want to get involved in a film like this? She only make some new emotional mess of it. I had intended to see this one with Satoko.

“How is Sensei?”

“Fine, thanks to me.”

“Isn’t this just a fling for him?”

“Same goes for me.”

Somehow I didn’t think so. Surely she had realized the value of not getting in too deep at one point, but now that she had, she was trying to get out of it by saying she was just in it for the fun.

Sister had already polished off three of the five rice balls I had bought, and was fishing in the bag for potato chips. Occasionally she twined some of her hair around a salt-free finger, bringing it to her nose for a sniffing. A sigh ensued.

“Must be hard for you to break it off.”

Silently she nodded again and again as if convincing herself . Momentarily the crunching stopped, but resumed almost immediately. Hers was the edible sort of anguish.

6

When Satoko called, I was as nervous as if I had been speaking Russian. I made an attempt to explain what I had been doing the last couple of days, but my tongue was tied. I knew I had to try to come back over to this side, but my body wouldn’t make the effort.

“Come on. Snap out of that private world of yours. I’ll be at ‘Der Rosenkavalier.’ Okay?”

“I’ll be right over.”

I threw the pajamas I had been wearing for three days into the washer, and took a shower. I marked the for-the-meantime parting of ways from my three day bingy lazy side, with a ceremonial shave. I’m always doing something else when I have my shower: shave, brush the teeth, pick the nose, drink beer, masturbate like hell. The only thing I don’t do is smoke. When I do smoke, I chew gum.

For the first time in three days, dressed in a favorite pastel shirt and black pants, I went out. At this rate, I’d be able to go back to the university tomorrow, I thought. Might be good to sweat a bit. Haven’t done that for a while.

Satoko’s complexion shone with an uncharacteristically ruddy pink.

“I’m going to Italy this summer.”

“To study Italian?”

“Half for study and half for pleasure.”

“My sister’s going to Vienna. I think I’ll go to St. Petersburg.”

June brings the ‘white nights’ to Petersburg. Still, I had always associated St. Petersburg with dark nights: the brightness of the sun is eternally set while the nocturnal Russians, beneath the orange streetlights, wander about wrapped in their furs of nocturnal muskrat, rabbit, fox, and lamb. At the same time, they spend their days in melancholic contemplation and great forbearance, pausing on occasion to clear their minds with a bout of wild abandon. Their movements lethargic, always in silent reception of their fate, rooted in sloth.

“What will you have to drink?”

“I think I’ll have a glass of red wine.”

“I’ll go along with that. And what do you plan to do with your day?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t we just let things happen?”

While we were waiting, I thought of how I could make a toast. The Russian way would be to propose a tantalizing little story, then drink the whole thing in one gulp.

“How about to my ‘Roman Holiday’?” Satoko said as she raised her glass.

“To the ‘white nights’ of Peterburg, “I offered in response.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if there were white nights in Tokyo,” she remarked.

“I’d prefer not to have the day. I hate people who are awake.”

“You don’t have many friends, I guess.”

“I have two. We spend the nights at each other’s houses. I have a rule that to be a friend you have to sleep together.”

Satoko laughed from the corner of her mouth as she brought the wine to her lips.

“Do you still have these friends?”

“What do you think?”

We looked at each other and laughed, looking for clues to our real intentions.

“I don’t mind sharing the same dream.”

“You mean with extra-sensory powers?”

“Sort of.”

I had no objection to sleeping with Satoko. I certainly don’t worship the idea of virginity, and never have I wondered, when I saw a girl, whether she had been violated as a part of being born or whether she was intact. I am not impotent, nor do I stake my life on masturbation. I had a store of pent-up desire in my groin all right, but it was not the sort of itch that could be cured by having sex and sweating.

Never mind that I have no idea of what I seek; I am deeply fearful of having that pointed out to me by someone else. I exhaust my friends.---Come on! All you really want is a woman. We know.---No, that’s not the way it is at all. While they’re busy putting women into categories, I’m like a twig circling around on the surface of the whirlpool. I whisper softly this caveat: “I don’t want to be untrue to myself, so I don’t have sex.”

My friends give me a wide berth. Telling me I’m sure to find a stunning woman, they heave me up on the shelf of indifference.

I am my own puppet, running on my own set of emotional priorities. The shitty serious I, that me of the alternative side, makes a Pierrot of the me who continually consorts with an indecisive woman.

Satoko’s defenses are perfection. She doesn’t turn a hair when I slip back into my own world. I would not be likely to catch her off guard. Satoko sets her sights on me, talking in terms meant to tease, but real enough. Though essentially arrogance on her part, it has the reverse effect of gentleness on me.

That day we jokingly took up the idea of how impoverished we were when it came to common ground. The best relationship is when one of the partners is magnetic North, the other a South pole. We agreed that like minds who fought each other had nothing do to with us at all, then adjourned to the subway and went for French food.

I never knew with what men Satoko had had relationships before we met. She too kept her distance about my past, and my first love. I once became aroused by imagining how she would look in the arms of a strange man. I planned to just take her body, maintaining a distance: in other words, no sucky kindness, no adoration, none of that pure love crap. I would order two mean, ugly wrestlers to rape Satoko, and while one was doing it, I would borrow the other’s hand to masturbate myself. My imagination told me it would have to be at night when the fetishistic shackles were attached to my feet.

I finished eating my steak, and ordered a cognac. Racking my brain for a way to get out of the turmoil I was in, I put on the sweetest expression I could muster, and looked directly into Satoko’s eyes.

I had a sudden unwelcome thought. The park in the riverbed. Three o’clock in the afternoon. Sensei kissing my sister. What if the couple had been Satoko and Sensei?

“Give me a kiss.”

In truth, the full rich feeling of release from the effect of the cognac hadn’t quite arrived, yet consumed with a reluctance to slip down into my nocturnal fetishisms again, I did a bit of feckless acting on this set sumptuously laid with food. To my good fortune, she bought it.

Satoko’s lips were fiery. Those lips belonged to me. She was my lover. Silently, I kept screaming this to myself.

“I’m afraid I’ve got to go now,” Satoko said abruptly.

“Go ahead, leave me in the lurch”

“That’s not what I mean. I’ve really got to go.”

“I want to sleep with you.”

“Next time maybe.”

That one line shut me down completely. I felt like a jerk with his schoolgirl crush, ‘You mustn’t stay out in the moonlight, darlings. It’s bad for you. Go home now. Go home to bed.’

Satoko was not about to become my nocturnal accomplice.

7

My parents were almost never at home. My father was always abroad on business, three months here, six months there. Mother went along as a tourist to cater to his needs (he never knew where his white shirts were), but also as an excuse to police his attempts at philandering. It was as if my father always had a nursemaid in tow.

Next month, my sister would be gone. In July, Satoko would leave for Italy. Summer, and I’d be beset with bad dreams. If I didn’t plan to go somewhere, by summer I’d be dead and gone, a ghost.

One Sunday it was raining. I opened the window, sprawled on the sofa, and looked outside. Diagonal lines slashed the normal rooftops and street signs, until things became invisible, like interference on a television screen.

I was reading Dostoevskii’s story ‘The Avenging Ghost.’ I had started reading it numerous times, but always gotten bogged down in the middle, always in a different section. I read fifty pages and got sleepy; Stavrogin quaffs ten bottles of champagne, appears at the ball on crutches, and brings on the acrobats.

I discovered that all books have two sides, a front and a back: Flaubert’s Le Education Sentimentale, Clausewitz’s The Art of War, the Bible, the Koran, the Lotus Sutra, all of them. I’m not talking here about the covers. Most people just read what’s on the page. That’s the book’s surface. However, when you read in suspension, words, images, and sounds pop out from between the lines. This is the book’s inner side. A book with an inner side can be conflated with a dream, and so it is audiovisual. An author rewrites the surface level of his work in the dreams of his readers. Once the reading of the inner side begins, all is forgotten about what is transpiring on the surface. I was aware I might have been blessed with the ability to communicate with a dead author through his books. Like a shamaness or something.

I fell asleep. In my dream, a man with long slender eyes was looking down on me, pelted by rain, blue veins visible on his temples. I took him for Stavrogin. He spoke.

“All of you are prisoners awaiting execution. No one knows on which day he shall make his final farewell.”

I became aware there was someone else in the room. I bolted upright.

It was my sister. She looked awful. Her mascara had run in the rain, and traces of black tears were etched beneath her eyes.

“Where’s Sensei?”

I thought she had brought him home. At the border between reality and the dream, Stavrogin and Sensei had overlapped.

“It’s over.”

“You don’t seem very upset. Aren’t you going to see him again?”

“I don’t know.”

“Hungry? Shall I make something?”

“I’m tired. I’m going to bed.”

“I see. Better wash your face first, though.”

8

Sister left for Vienna. She didn’t seem to be scarred deeply from her affair with Sensei. Quite the contrary. She left me with a bizarre job to do.

“Watch over Sensei so he doesn’t commit suicide. Our relationship is over, but I have no desire to see him dead. Oh, and another thing. You’re going to be living on your own for awhile, so I want you to be good to Satoko too. It doesn’t have to be all the time, but once in awhile, go see Sensei, have dinner with him. He says he’d welcome that.”

Did her asking me to watch over him mean that Sensei was constantly being taunted by the idea of suicide? She asked me to phone him, but I hadn’t heard the story of the final breakup.

On the fourth day into my new era of solitary living, I conveyed my sister’s wishes to Sensei.

Sensei’s voice on the phone was cracked and raspy.

“How have you been. This is Kikuhito. My sister sends her regards.”

“So she’s in Vienna. How is she?”