But the unexpected turn of history whereby Japan achieved the goals of the war by losing the war, was not without its victims. Somewhere in the hectic confusion of democratic expansion the traditional Japanese brothel disappeared, taking with it the Orient’s artistic contribution to originality and one of man’s rarest creations, the Japanese whore.
No longer was anyone willing to pay money for a woman’s educated body, a woman’s aristocratic smile, a woman’s subtle remarks and incomparable cleverness at match-stick games. The businessmen in the new Japan were preoccupied with their wares and the wares that were soon to be theirs, so when the hour came for relaxation they preferred lying on their backs in a massage parlor staring through the steam at the ceiling, calculating profits, considering new markets, dreaming alone and grandly as a firm, anonymous hand reached out from the mists to masturbate them with swift efficiency.
Or they preferred a pornographic film parlor, where such individual democratic acts could be recalled and anticipated.
As was necessary, Mama adapted to the times. She remembered the films shown in Shanghai before the war by a naked clown and built The Living Room with those films in mind. And the combat veterans she had entertained after the war, before they had learned the ways of the new democracy and become successful, certainly didn’t forget the little woman who had provided for them when they were penniless.
They remembered and they returned, gratefully spending large sums of money at Mama’s nightclub, the most famous place of entertainment in Asia, a club that was almost as much of a legend as its mysterious owner, a tiny old woman whose compassion and mercy were so great that many wondered if she might not be a reincarnation of the Kannon Buddha.
War, disaster, turmoil. Despite it all Mama had followed the Tao.
And now more recently in her old age she had acquired the kind of retreat she had always wanted, a quiet shrine where she could contemplate the sunrise high above the Imperial moat and the Imperial palace. From there she descended to the world below only in passing to accrue some minor transitory wealth, some award or honor, before returning to her real home far above the city, a spiritual temple carried on the back of the mythical dragon that had guided her through the years of loss and love.
Kikuchi-Lotmann
Now we see him stepping into the ring, the master of ceremonies dressed in boots and frock coat, carrying whip and megaphone, a shaman and arbiter of marvels.
Quin came and went. Big Gobi left the apartment with him once, for the first visit to Father Lamereaux, but he was so confused by the meeting Quin left him behind after that. Quin said something about the names Father Lamereaux had given him. Big Gobi nodded and kept his eyes on the television screen.
Names are fine, he muttered as Quin closed the door.
The Living Room was an underground bar many levels below the street. Quin knew the Japanese custom of referring to all female proprietors of bars as Mama.-san, so as soon as he came upon a waiter, after having walked down several hundred steps, he asked for Mama-san saying they had a mutual friend, Father Lamereaux.
The suspicious waiter directed him to a corner where there stood a man of some four hundred pounds, a former sumo wrestler with a huge mallet resting on his shoulder. The former sumo wrestler held the mallet over Quin’s head until the waiter returned.
The waiter bowed. He apologized for his family and education, his meanness of spirit, his boorish and crass behavior, his whining voice, his unsavory appearance and total incompetence. Mama would see him presently.
In the meantime Quin was invited to be her guest in the Round Room, reserved for the most honored guests. They left the wrestler in the shadows and started down an interminable spiral staircase. Occasionally the waiter stopped to ask Quin if he liked Japan, and when Quin reassured him that he did the man sucked air noisily through his teeth out of wonder or gratitude, or simply because nothing else seemed appropriate.
After descending another three or four hundred feet they entered a circular room where a dozen men or more sat at a counter facing the wall, or rather small windows recessed in the wall. Their backs were to him and no one turned when he came in. The waiter directed him to an empty stool, sucked air, and disappeared.
A face peered up at him from the bartenders’ runway, which was sunken so the heads of the bartenders would not protrude above the counter. Quin ordered a drink and saw a hand come up over the edge with a glass.
On the counter in front of him there was a console of buttons. Family portrait, said one. Small projection lamp, said another. Tattoos. Kobe cameras. Quin arbitrarily pressed the button for Nose.
The screen that Quin had mistaken for a mirror flickered. The screens were built in such a way that only the man directly in front of one could see which private movie he had selected. To everyone else the screens remained mirrors reflecting a distorted view of the small round room.
The first nose was flat and spreading. It grew in size until the screen could no longer contain it. The pores, rich dark holes, were soon big enough to put a fist in, as big as craters in a desert. The rims of the craters were cracked, deep down inside lay heaps of fertile material. The picture continued to expand until there was only one enormous pore on the screen, a volcanic crater not unlike the one to be found on top of Mt. Fuji, the sides of the pore cut by ancient landslides, the center black with dormant bacterial lava.
The frame faded and another nose appeared, life-size, narrower than the first, quivering, and undeniably sensitive. A chrysanthemum or a cherry blossom presented itself to the nose. The nose hesitated and then inhaled deeply, bringing on a multitude of tender sensations.
The third nose moved rapidly. The hairs in the nostrils flapped as a bowl of custard slipped into view. The nose slammed itself into the custard, emerged, rammed itself into the waxy cartilage of an ear.
The same nose moved down a neck, across an armpit, through the crevice made by two pendulant breasts. It nudged a woman’s erect nipples, poked the ridges of her rib cage, shook itself vigorously in her navel, pecked at the mound of her smooth belly. It caressed the thighs and burrowed between the toes, sampling, working swiftly.
Quin’s head jerked back. For an instant a totally different image had appeared on the screen, or so it seemed. A scene from what looked like a barnyard, healthy animals being cared for by healthy, smiling peasants wearing starched muslin and embroidered blouses, East Europeans of some kind, Slavs perhaps, cheerfully tending their animals under the benign guidance, the approving fatherly gaze of a dashing man with a moustache and a worker’s cap, dressed in a loosely fitted black suit and a high celluloid collar.
Lenin?
The image was gone at once and not so much seen as imagined, an effect that made the tale of the nose curiously disturbing. Somehow the suggestion of an actual historical event added authenticity to a film that might otherwise have been merely obsessive and unreal.
The nose lay on its back as a woman’s legs opened at the top of the screen. The legs descended, spread wide, bringing down a curtain of wiry hair that ended the film.