Nureki Chimuo Archive

While discussing the “Talking Theater” with R-san, this topic came up.

“You previously wrote about this Shirahige Theater era under the pen name Fujimi Iku. It’s published in SM Select. It’s a good novel.”

“Huh? I’d forgotten about that. Maybe I’ll give it a read.”

I promptly asked Director Nakahara of the Sex Industry Museum to look for that magazine.

Sure enough, the story was published in the April 1976 issue of “SM Selected,” published by Tokyo Sanseisha.

The title was “The Second Floor Where the Slut Dwells,” and the pen name was Fujimi Iku.

As always, I was amazed at Director Nakahara, who swiftly located that single issue from among the vast number of books and materials on the shelves inside the museum and placed it before me.

The phrase, “encyclopedic knowledge” surely refers to this person.

He knows my numerous pen names better than I do myself and is more knowledgeable about my writings than I am. I can only stand in awe.

Director Nakahara promptly photocopied the twenty-three page “The Second Floor Where the Slut Dwells” and handed it to me.

So, I read it.

The name “Shirahige Theater” appears exactly as it is.

The name of the writer “Nagata Mikihiko” also appears.

It must be a novel I wrote, but this was unexpected.

Since I wrote it thirty years ago, I’d forgotten the details, but I could see the traces of my effort to depict my own boyhood relatively seriously and faithfully.

It describes how actors, after finishing their performances, were allowed to bathe in the family bath of the udon shop owners that adjoined the back of the Shirahige Theater.

It says that late at night, after a dozen or so actors had used it, the bathwater became thick and murky with dissolved white powder and makeup oil, and it had a strong odor.

I fondly recalled the feel of that murky water and its smell.

Thirty years ago, when I wrote this novel, both the Shirahige Theater and the Tsurukame Theater were still relatively recent in my memory.

In other words, 1976, when this magazine was published, marked thirty years after the war’s end.

Another thirty-odd years have passed since then.

The war is now a full sixty-five years behind us.

I have forgotten the slimy feel and the smell of the bathwater, saturated with the white powder and makeup oil the actors shed.

Yet, within this “Second Floor Where the Slut Dwells,” it was vividly depicted, and it felt nostalgic.

However, the story about the daughter of the udon shop behind the house who lent us that bath is entirely made up.

The parts about the udon shop girl getting naked and joining me in the bath I was soaking in, or sneaking into the second floor of that house and indulging in erotic acts with her, all of that is pure fiction, created to suit the nature of the magazine it was published in.

So when you read it now, it seems too absurd and lacks realism.

Even though creating such stories is my job, I can’t help but think now how I could have diligently written down things that never even happened.

I feel like I’ve written down a series of wistful wishes, how wonderful it would be if such a “slut” actually existed.

From the 1970s through the 1980s and into the 1990s, I spent my days working as a bondage specialist on the photo shoots for the dozen or so SM magazines published at the time, spending my days and nights alongside naked female models.

Even facing young female bodies every day in these closed-off spaces, I never actually encountered a single woman who was such a convenient “slut” for a man.

The female models were naked because it was their job to be naked.

They weren’t naked because they were “sluts.”

They were naked because they got paid that day for being naked.

(Come to think of it, during that era, my pay for the shoots was also paid on the day. The editor-in-chief handed it to me the moment the shoot ended. I recall getting thirty thousand yen per day.)

I bound countless models, but I never encountered a single “slut” or “nymphomaniac.”

(Well, maybe it was just that I wasn’t popular with women.)

My own unfulfilled desires, stemming from my unpopularity, might have created the character in my novel who was wildly popular, “me,” like the one in “The Second Floor Where the Slut Dwells.”

And one more thing.

When you’re in daily contact with naked models, you start seeing them not as women, but merely as material.

Basically, they cease to be objects of eroticism.

The troubling thing is, after working with paid models several times, the SM-like eroticism of the female body starts to fade.

If bondage becomes merely a form without soul, simply a nude woman wrapped in rope, enthusiasts will turn away from it.

That’s why we, or rather I, write such stories to stir my own erotic desires.

The seventeen year old “I” who appears in “The Second Floor Where the Slut Dwells” is bright and glamorous, but my actual reality was dark, miserable, and a daily struggle against the bitter cold.

The cold hit hard partly because there was no food.

Unfortunately, there were no pleasurable realities like those in “The Second Floor where the Slut Dwells.”

It was, after all, nothing but a fantasy.

It wasn’t just me. I think all the common people back then were starving.

I’ll go ahead and write something embarrassing.

Walking through the narrow, dark alleys of Mukojima, charred by air raids, I found what looked like scraps of some kind of food lying near the back door of a house.

I picked it up and put it in my mouth. But I spat it out immediately. It was dog feces.

Yet, through that era of starvation, those actors lived, performing with all their might, wholeheartedly, without giving up. And so did I.

Touched by their passion for kabuki, sometimes shedding tears of emotion, I too lived through that cold, dark era.

The Bando Takejaku troupe moved from the Shirahige Theater in Mukojima to the Tsurukame Theater in Kameari.

1. The Black-Handed Group: The Round-Up From Nakano-cho to Retribution. Three Acts.

Hanakawado Sukeroku … Bando Takejaku Agemaki … Ichikawa Fukunosuke Shirotama … Onoe Otojo Cast remains the same as at the Shirahige Theater

2. The Love Suicide at Amijima. The Riverbank Scene (Kawasho)

Kamiji: Bando Takejaku, Koharu: Ichikawa Fukunosuke All other cast members are the same as at the Shirahige Theater.

3. Dance

This “dance” thing, I don’t understand it anymore.

Was it nagauta, seigen, or gidayu dance? I can’t tell.

Since there was no jikata, that is, musicians, it’s certain it wasn’t a full-fledged kabuki dance.

Or perhaps they danced to a record?

My diary only records “dance.”

I regret not jotting down more details, even just a line or two.

If I had written about the dance’s content, I feel I might have glimpsed a fragment of the chaotic times, what kind of show was being presented to audiences on the poor, backstreet stages of Tokyo immediately after the war. It’s a pity.

On the other hand, I also feel that even if someone like me were to know it now, what difference would it make? What value would it hold?

Whether it holds value or not, I think I should have written down everything. Perhaps that’s the nature of the writer’s craft, even for a hack like me.

Come to think of it, the names of Kawabe Saburo and his troupe, who had temporarily participated in the Takejaku troupe, have also vanished from my notes without noticing.

Perhaps standing on the same stage as a kabuki troupe felt incongruous to them. Or maybe the audience didn’t take to them, so the production company pulled them off. The reason they disappeared was likely a combination of both.

I find myself wanting to know the details now, but back then, as the lowest-ranking seventeen year old actor in the troupe, poor and hungry, I had neither the power nor the means to pry such information out and record it.