Nureki Chimuo Archive

Now, looking back on those days with a clear head, though whether one can truly be clear-headed about events from over sixty years ago is another matter, one simply cannot still hold onto the passion of that time. It seems to me that it was, after all, a mischievous act, almost a prank, intended to stave off boredom, especially on the part of the second daughter, Tamayo, among the three sisters.

But… but… for a mere distraction from boredom, I feel like there was something in that bewitching gaze directed at me. A fleeting glimmer of something else.

If that hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t have been so utterly captivated by her.

To this day, I still don’t know what that light truly was.

Calling it love or infatuation would be simple and easy to understand, but it feels slightly different from those kinds of feelings.

I don’t know.

Maybe it’s okay not to know.

I don’t understand my own feelings either. Why I was drawn so strongly to a woman five years older, of a different status?

That’s right, at that time I was still a virgin.

Was it the reckless, single-minded love of a naive boy or simply an infatuation with the opposite sex?

No, rather than love or affection, it was ultimately the actions of a teenage boy driven by sexual desire for the opposite sex.

Back then, I thought I knew quite a bit about the world.

Even if someone were to say that such knowledge is merely the abstract understanding of a minor, I had repeated immersed myself in the works of Jun’ichiro Tanazaki, read almost the entire collection of Meiji and Taisho literature, from Homei Iwano to Shuko Chikamatsu, from Katai Tayama to Shusei Tokuda, and even Kafu Nagai.

Call it conceptual if you will, but I truly believed I understood both the romantic entanglements between men and women and the common sense of the world.

I stayed over at the sisters’ room several times after that, but I was careful enough in my own way about coming and going.

When you opened the glass door at the front entrance of the Tsurukame Apartments, there was a large communal shoe rack for footwear on the right, and the stairs leading up to the second floor started right in front of it.

The Nishiki sisters’ room was on the left side at the top of those stairs.

If I moved quickly, I could slip into the sisters’ room without encountering anyone from the Tsurukame Theater dressing rooms or the second-floor residents.

On the second floor, there were five rooms to the left and four to the right.

All were small rooms, either six tatami mats or just one room of four and a half mats. The rooms on the left side got better sunlight.

There was no toilet, no kitchen, and of course no bath. Only a small closet was attached next to the entrance door.

Even so, for people who had lost their homes in the war, it was a welcome place to live.

At the end of the hallway were the shared toilet and kitchen with running water. The residents took turns using these facilities in their daily lives.

The sisters’ parents lived in a six-mat room on the same left side, separated by two other rooms.

To be precise, it was their parents and their grandchild, the baby Hideyo had given birth to, who lived there.

The parents rarely showed their faces in their daughters’ room. It was the daughters who frequently went in and out of their parents’ room.

eat.

Their mother cooked all three meals, and the daughters went to their parents’ room to

They would leave some of that food behind, and Tamayo would secretly hide it and bring it to me. The three sisters were a tightly knit group of accomplices.

It was a time of food shortages, so we often ate brown cornmeal cakes or steamed bread.

It was the kind of food that would give you a stomachache if you didn’t chew it well, but when it came from Tamayo’s hands, it made me feel rich.

Still, what were those sisters thinking? Why did all three of them, in unison, hide me and let me stay like that?

For a game of adventure, it was far too dangerous under those circumstances.

What fun could they possibly have gotten out of keeping a young, half-baked guy like me, who wasn’t even a proper actor, locked up in their room?

Since their family consisted of only women besides their father, maybe a man was a novelty. Maybe they wanted to keep a weak man like me, who would do anything they said, close by and play a little harmless prank on him.

It might be hard to believe, but there was absolutely no sexual contact between the sisters and me.

If someone were to say that sleeping with futons spread across the entire six-mat room, all four of us piled on top of each other, was itself sexual contact, I could only answer yes. But there was nothing like the blatant, lewd acts the adults of the world might imagine.

Twenty one year old Tamayo faced me with her usual bewitching smile, but she never, for instance, took my hand, embraced my body, or pressed her lips to mine.

Had she pressed herself against me like that, I wouldn’t have run away or refused. I would surely have quietly submitted to whatever she did.

Nor did I ever initaite any such overt sexual acts toward Tamayo. Perhaps it would be fair to say I lacked the courage.

To be honest, I never once became aroused by Tamayo.

I never felt the urge to spread her legs and insert myself into her.

Was it because I was still sixteen and a virgin?

When I was far from Tamayo, I never fantasized about her breasts, her butt, or that bewitching face to stir my desire. Consequently, I never felt like masturbating. Even those thighs in the moonlight never became an object of self-pleasure.

I’ll confess one more important thing.

I never conjured up images of “ropes” when it came to Tamayo.

I never felt the desire to tie her up, to bind her.

At that time, even though I was a virgin, I already possessed a clear, intense image of “rope” and “bondage.”

Despite that, Tamayo and rope were worlds apart.

It’s only natural that I felt no desire for masturbation when it came to Tamayo, who evoked no image of rope.

Why were Tamayo and rope so utterly disconnected within my sexual desire?

Even now, thinking about it, it remains a mystery.

I don’t know the reason.

Truthfully, I intended to write while pondering this very point, hoping that as I wrote I might find a satisfying answer. But I still don’t know.

From around fifteen or sixteen to the early twenties, even during the food shortages immediately after the war, this is the peak age for masturbation and sexual fantasies. It’s a time of heightened arousal when even the knots in a wooden fence or the cracks in a wooden fish drum make you want to insert something.

So why, then, was Tamayo the only one who didn’t become an object of that kind of image?

For example, something like this might be possible.

The beautiful three sisters of the Nishiki family are, in truth, no longer living human beings.

When the Meguro mansion was bombed by the American air force, every member of the Nishiki family was already dead.

Yet, by some twist of fate, they appeared as ghosts in this land of Katsushika and possessed Ichikawa Fukujiro.

No matter how beautiful or charming a woman may be, being a ghost, she has no substance.

And since they had no substance, they could not even become objects of the boy’s masturbation fantasy…

Turning this into a ghost story would provide a conclusion, but that seems far too frivolous.

We mustn’t be frivolous like this here.

Tamayo turned to me, her usual bewitching smile playing on her lips and said, “Please call me ‘big sister.’ Because I think of you as my little brother.”

all.

Even as a boy, I knew such lines were part of the art of seduction. I was an actor, after

The word “courtship” is practically obsolete now, so let’s open a Japanese dictionary and confirm its meaning.

Kuzetsu (口説)... Words. Talk. Verbal sparring. A quarrel, especially a lovers’ quarrel.

I see. Especially lovers’ quarrels, huh.

While I’m at it, I’ll look up 痴話 (sweet nothings) too.

“Chiwa (痴話)” Playful talk between sweethearts. Sweet nothings. By extension, an affair.

“Sweethearts” is a nice word, huh. So the relationship between Tamayo and Ichikawa Fukujiro is “sweetheart?” That makes sense.

I was intoxicated by those sweet, cloying words of courtship coming from the mouth of that coquettish beauty.

I thought of Tamayo with maddening intensity. When we couldn’t meet, I writhed in anguish and agony. But thinking back now, I have no memory of touching her body. I never even held her hand.

Oh, Rakka-san. If I write such things, you will surely laugh at me. Or perhaps sneer.

“That can’t be true,” you’ll say.

Right now, the moment I see you, I just want to touch your body.

Aware of others watching, you run away. I will chase.

Even just the tips of my fingers, I want to touch you.

Bare my desire, wanting to touch you.

But… but, sixty years ago, I couldn’t touch you.

Was it because I was just a boy back then?

Or was it because I was timid?

No, I don’t think that’s it.

To say I couldn’t bring myself to touch you because I was young, that would be too easy an answer. Far too easy.

There’s no need to agonize over it like this.

I feel like the inexplicable nature of sex lies in that very place.

Once again I’m lost, and foolishly I start going around in circles.