Mania Correspondence

Translation

MANIA CORRESPONDENCE
A Confidential Salon for Readers
Kōgo Hitoshi

1. A Middle-Aged Man Obsessed with Young Girls

I am a thirty-two-year-old company employee. I am married and have a five-year-old son. For about two years I have been afflicted by a troublesome condition, and because of it my married life has not been going well.

The condition is that unless the object is a young girl, I feel neither romantic emotion nor sexual desire. When I think about what may have caused it, I trace it back to the spring when I was thirty. My salary was small and life was difficult, so I took a part-time job as a private tutor.

The first student I was asked to teach was a fourteen-year-old junior-high-school girl in the neighborhood. Her father was some kind of company executive and lived in a large residence. The girl’s room was in a corner of the second floor, separated from her parents’ rooms. As I sat there alone with her teaching English and mathematics, I began to feel, toward her unspoiled and innocent face and manner, a powerful attraction that I could not experience toward adult women.

I cannot say how many times I thought of reaching out to her. If I had wanted to, she was right there within reach. But I forcibly restrained myself.

That was the beginning of my obsessive attraction to girls. When I am walking along the street, or riding on a train, if I see a pretty, beautiful girl of fourteen or fifteen, I can no longer contain myself and end up following her or moving close beside her.

If this tendency keeps growing stronger, I may someday commit a crime like Oda Yoshio or the so-called Uguisu Man. That possibility terrifies me.

(Hokkaidō, Ikeno Chōichi)

Answer:

A preference for young girls comes from male sadism. Seen from an adult’s perspective, a girl possesses weakness and a touching vulnerability. That weakness and pathos stimulate the sadistic desires of an adult man.

The fascination you felt for the purity of the girl you tutored likewise came from your sadistic disposition. It was a desire for conquest and aggression directed toward a purity that cannot be obtained from an adult woman.

When a man reaches about thirty-four, the psychology of sexual love becomes markedly more sadistic. To satisfy such sadistic erotic desire, the young girl becomes the most suitable object.

At one girls’ school, an investigation was made into cases in which students had been subjected to sexual advances. It found that the men who fondled schoolgirls’ buttocks on trains, took hold of their hands, or committed sexual pranks were overwhelmingly men between thirty and forty, and often men of respectable appearance. This, too, supposedly shows that men attracted to girls are especially common among the middle-aged.

When such attraction becomes obsessive, the answer says, it can turn into pathological erotic fixation and lead to sexual crimes against girls.

From your letter, however, it appears that you have never actually committed such an offense, so you may be regarded as a person with strong self-control.

I know a man with this attraction who always has his wife arrange her hair and clothing in a girlish style, and by doing so has fortunately kept his tendency from going off the rails. Rather than relying on such a makeshift measure, however, I recommend that you consult a psychiatrist.

2. A Young Man Intoxicated by Women’s Bad Odors

I am a twenty-five-year-old man who feels an extraordinary obsession with the smell of women’s bodies. I am unmarried and have a relatively well-paid occupation, so from time to time I entertain myself with geisha, and I also go to cabarets and special drinking and pleasure districts. Yet on such occasions, simply smelling the woman’s bodily odor is enough to satisfy me.

Of the odors peculiar to the female body, rather than the so-called pleasant fragrances mixed with hair oil and face powder, I am more often driven to sexual desire by strong smells such as underarm odor.

In that sense, my favorite female odors are:
1. The odor of a woman with strong underarm smell.
2. The odor of a menstruating woman.
3. The distinctive odor of a woman who has never known a man sexually.
4. The odor of a woman with a sexual disease.
5. The odor of every kind of female secretion, although I do not mean excrement.

From long experience, when I meet a woman I can supposedly tell merely by her odor that she is menstruating, that she has some gynecological illness, or that she has never known a man.

Thus, even when I go out with women, I have sexual relations only with women possessing one of the odors mentioned above. With other women I restrict myself literally to ordinary amusement.

Are there other men like me?

(Tokyo, Okamatsu Shirō)

Answer:

Bodily odor and sexuality are closely related. Musk, which is prized as perfume, is produced by animals such as musk cats and musk deer in connection with attracting the opposite sex during the mating season. A more familiar example is the way dogs and cats in heat go about smelling the hindquarters of animals of the opposite sex. The answer claims that the same connection exists in human beings.

There are many cases in which the smell of the opposite sex arouses sexual desire. You are certainly not alone. The article claims that this is less common among Japanese, whose bodily odor is comparatively faint, and more common among Westerners, whose bodily odor is stronger. It likewise claims that among Asians it is more common among Indians and Chinese, citing an alleged Indian custom in which lovers exchange sweat-dampened arm bands.

Underarm odor, too, is considered a bad smell by ordinary people, yet some people become strongly excited by it.

One woman is said to have confessed that she is ordinarily not aroused by the bodily odor of the opposite sex, but that smelling her lover’s underarm odor immediately brings her to orgasm.

There are even scholars, the answer claims, who say that a person’s odor can reveal whether a woman is a virgin, ill, or menstruating.

The sense of smell, however, differs enormously from person to person, and one’s own perception is difficult to communicate to others. One person may describe a smell as resembling rancid butter while another compares it with cheese. The character of a smell is therefore subjective.

In your case, the answer concludes, you may fairly be called an extreme devotee of bodily odors.

3. A Woman Obsessed with Idols

I am a twenty-three-year-old unmarried woman. I work as a middle-school teacher.

I will never forget it. I was seventeen, in my fourth year of girls’ school, during the autumn. We came to Tokyo on a school excursion and visited an art exhibition at the Ueno museum. In the sculpture room I saw a nude male statue, and at that moment I felt toward it a romantic emotion, and, to be frank, even sexual excitement, unlike anything I had ever felt toward a living man.

It was a life-sized bronze sculpture. The whole body was powerfully built, its muscles swelling prominently, and its face was imposing, almost formidable. Although it was only a statue, its entire surface gleamed darkly, and it seemed to possess the strength to spring into motion and attack at any moment.

I actually had the illusion that the statue had taken me into its arms, and I shuddered involuntarily. It was a pleasant shudder that seemed to numb my entire body. I fell completely in love with the statue.

Before we departed, when we were allowed some free time, I lied to our supervising teacher and said that I was going to visit relatives. Instead, I went alone to the Ueno museum simply to see the statue once more.

Even after returning home from the trip, I could not forget the nude statue for a long time. Sometimes I would summon its image and enjoy myself alone, and it even appeared in my dreams.

From then on I gradually came to love sculptures and Buddhist images resembling that nude figure more than living men.

After leaving school and finding employment, merely going around to look at them was no longer enough. I saved money from my small salary and commissioned a sculptor. I explained my own ideas and had him make a sculpture closely resembling the nude statue I had seen at Ueno. I keep it in my room and caress it morning and evening as though it were my lover, or rather, in my own imagination, I feel that the statue is caressing me. It is my greatest pleasure.

As long as I have this statue, I do not feel the slightest desire for a living man.

(Kyoto, Noriko)

Answer:

Some degree of attachment to idols or images exists among ordinary people, but your case can be described as complete Pygmalionism, or erotic love of an image. You are an obsessive Pygmalionist.

According to the old Greek legend, the sculptor Pygmalion became enamored of a statue of Galatea that he himself had created. The image was eventually given life and became his wife. The term originates in this legend. Generally speaking, the answer says, this form of image-love is more common among men than women.

The old Benzaiten image at Enoshima was ordinarily kept from public view and was said to be completely nude. There are also so-called bedchamber dolls used by sailors during long voyages to relieve loneliness. These may serve as substitutes for the opposite sex, but they can also be regarded as manifestations of image-love.

My own view, the respondent writes, is that in your case a certain fear of men may have caused you to avoid real members of the opposite sex and become attached instead to an image. If a living man were to appear before you who possessed the same imposing appearance and magnificent musculature as the statue you saw at the Ueno museum, your obsessive love of statues might perhaps disappear.

4. A Man Obsessed with Women’s Legs

I am a man possessed by an intense erotic love of women’s legs.

Whenever I look at a woman, my eyes are drawn first not to her face or figure but to her legs. I stare at them in fascination.

That does not mean I like badly shaped legs of the sort sometimes called daikon legs. They must have beautiful lines. If the legs are beautiful, I do not care whether they are bare or covered by nylon stockings. Whenever I see such legs, I am seized by an irresistible urge to touch them.

Even when I go to strip shows, unlike the other male spectators I pay no attention to breasts or buttocks. I watch legs, legs, legs. Strippers sometimes come down among the audience to satisfy the spectators’ desire to touch them, allowing men to hold their hands or touch their breasts. At such moments I have repeatedly found myself touching the dancer’s leg instead, sometimes provoking laughter.

Readers who are leg maniacs like me, please write.

(Saitama, Iwamoto Ken)

Answer:

Everyone knows the story of Kume the Immortal, who saw the white calves of a woman washing clothes, lost his supernatural powers, and fell from the heavens. Few people, however, know that there is truth behind this story. Most assume it is simply an imaginary tale. Such skepticism, the answer says, is one of the bad habits of modern people.

The story of Kume is said here to be based on a real tradition, although of course it was not literally about an immortal living in heaven but about a religious practitioner cultivating the arts of the immortals. From a high place he saw a woman’s white legs and, overcome by desire, lost his composure and fell down before her.

Kume is later said to have taken the woman as his wife. If even a practitioner such as Kume could be overcome in this way, how much more easily can those of us ruled by worldly passions be captivated by women’s legs. Leg fetishism is said to be one of the most common forms of fetishism.

Try watching men on a train, or those ascending and descending the stairs of a railway platform. You will realize that the eyes of a great many men are fixed not on women’s buttocks but on their legs.

There is nothing particularly troubling about merely enjoying the sight. But once it becomes obsessive, the man may masturbate while imagining women’s legs, develop a compulsion to touch them, or even desire to be kicked or stepped on by women’s feet.

Leg fetishism, the answer concludes, is therefore very common among men. Women would do well to pay attention to the beauty of their legs.

5. An Elderly Woman with Senile Hypersexuality

I have a female relative who is seventy-six years old. At this age she has begun craving men indiscriminately, constantly bringing men into the little retirement house where she lives alone and becoming the subject of gossip throughout the village.

Most of the men are in their forties or fifties, although apparently there has even been a young man of twenty-three. As one of her relatives I find the situation deeply embarrassing. Why should such desires arise at such an age? And can an elderly woman like this really still engage in sexual relations?

Answer:

The old woman is described here as suffering from what the article calls senile hypersexuality, a condition in which sexual desire becomes unusually strong in old age. Sexual desire naturally differs greatly from person to person, and there are people who continue sexual activity beyond eighty, so old-age sexuality by itself is not an illness. But there are degrees, and when someone demands partners night after night, the behavior can be regarded as pathological.

Women of this type are said to have often matured sexually early in childhood and to have begun menstruation earlier than average. Many people suppose that early menstruation means an early menopause, but the article asserts the opposite, claiming that menopause is often delayed until roughly fifty-five or sixty.

Female sexual desire, it continues, is not directly determined by menopause, and may remain strong for about ten years afterward. It is therefore said to be surprisingly common for women of sixty-seven or sixty-eight to complain that they are lonely without a man.

That is the article’s answer to the first question, why an elderly woman might continue to desire men’s bodies.

As for whether such a woman can still have sexual relations, the response claims that although genital secretions generally decrease with age, women with this supposed condition may retain considerable lubrication and muscular tension.

An example is then given of an eighty-two-year-old woman. She had remarried five times after the death of her first husband. Her menstruation ceased at sixty-one, but her sexual appetite allegedly increased afterward. After her fifth husband died, she decided that remaining single gave her greater freedom in choosing sexual partners and therefore lived alone.

At the age of eighty-two she supposedly picked up several delinquent-looking young men in town. She offered them money, and the men, partly as a joke, agreed to become her partners. When the young men eventually noticed what had happened, the woman had already become cold. They panicked, summoned a doctor, and the police arrived, causing a great commotion.

The article then gives an even more extreme example, a woman said to have lived beyond one hundred while constantly desiring male partners.

She had allegedly been notorious in her village for sexual promiscuity since the age of thirteen or fourteen. Because she was an only daughter, adopted husbands were brought into the family, but none remained for long. Some died, others fled, and altogether twenty-seven or twenty-eight adopted husbands supposedly came and went.

Her sexual desire allegedly became even stronger with age, and she took young men from neighboring villages as partners. She called the arrangement “lesson fees.”

In other words, she supposedly taught unmarried young men sexual behavior through practical experience. Because she welcomed virtually any unmarried young man, the article claims that over the course of many years the number of those she instructed may have reached several thousand.

Between the many adopted husbands and the money she paid as these so-called lesson fees, she was said to have dissipated much of a family fortune accumulated over generations. Even after reaching more than one hundred years of age, when she spent nearly all day in bed and sometimes suffered urinary incontinence, she allegedly still put face powder over her wrinkles and murmured almost deliriously about wanting a man’s body, retaining enough spirit to seek out young men.

Editor’s Note:

As the examples above indicate, we welcome correspondence concerning every variety of mania. Please describe your own habit or fixation as precisely as possible. It would also be helpful to include your age and occupation. Send correspondence to the Mania Correspondence section, care of Shunkōsha, addressed to Kōgo Hitoshi.