We were just reaching our climax… and I went into a spasm. My body gripped his like a vise… he screamed with pain… I was in agony, too. Somehow, I managed to get hold of the phone, locked together as we were.
That boorish fathead of a doctor, looking at the nude yellow couple clasped in the first embrace shown in marital textbooks… just as if we were a pair of copulating monkeys or dogs. Because of the pain, we didn’t feel embarrassed. He injected a depressant, and eventually we were able to separate.
Well, when we got back to Chicago, Dr. John Wells diagnosed the reason for my convulsive spasm. It was, he said, a fear syndrome directed against pregnancy. He said the same thing would happen in the future if I made love to my husband, and that it would happen just as he was about to ejaculate. He said, “It’s like having a nervous pain in your muscle. You’ll get it even if you use contraceptives. You’ll get it with other men, too.” Unless I could overcome my fear of pregnancy. As it was all in English, it was less embarrassing to listen to.
Thus began the agony of the centaur. Does not the head wish to make love to a woman, whilst the lower parts can only cover a mare?
Or we were like the starving figure in Greek mythology, buried up to his neck with plates of delicious food just in front of his nose.
First we would look at each other’s bodies… exchange caresses… at last give up in desperation. Always so fruitlessly tired… always, the stain of our sweat on the sheets, full of the sorrowful smell that symbolized our barren love.
The doctor thought that my fear of childbirth was due to the failure of my first pregnancy—we had put it about that I had had a miscarriage in Mexico—and suggested that all would be well if we changed our environment. But my husband and I, knowing the real cause, knew better. Our future as man and wife had ended in a brick wall.
My husband found a post in Tokyo, and we came back to Japan. We lived apart, except for Saturday nights.
And so, once a week, we would sometimes search for each other’s body in the darkness, dreaming that a miracle might occur. However, after a while, we gave up. My husband told me that when he was with me, he was no longer a complete man.
With a weak smile like an old man’s, he would stroke the thick hair on his chest and say ruefully, “I am impotent. I have lost all interest in women. Sometimes I go to a strip show or look at nudes in magazines, though. That’s about it, I’m afraid.”
And like a fool, I pitied him, still young and handsome, and yet already impotent.
When we first met, he was a melancholic man, but in spite of that he was very quick-witted and seemed to be able easily to make others believe in love between men and women. I remember him well, standing in front of the redbrick university building in Chicago, wearing a red woolen shirt; he struck such a fine pose, his head slightly to one side, that he seemed to match the American scenery around him, and I immediately fell in love with him. I always loved him—the first man I ever knew.
So, one day, when our separation had gone on for six months (and it was my idea originally; I thought that if we were together every night, the torture would be too much), I was overcome by a sudden desire to see him. I got into my Mercedes and set off for Tokyo without ado. All those six hundred kilometers on the road I was in a dream.
It was almost dawn when I got to the Toyo Hotel, where he was staying. It was still winter, and outside it was cold and dark. I parked in front of the hotel and switched off the headlamps. I sat and finished my cigarette, looking at the hotel; later, when it was not too early, I would go in. And then suddenly I saw a familiar figure getting out of a taxi; surely it couldn’t be… but yes, it was my husband.
He paid his fare; his face was expressionless under the lamplight. And somehow, looking at him, I saw about him a dark shadow, suggestive of tiredness after secret lovemaking. Why didn’t I follow him immediately and accost him? I still don’t know.
If only he had come back ten minutes earlier! Or later, when I was more composed and could have approached him; we would have had our customarily meaningless chat; a cup of tea together, and I would have said goodbye.
After all, there’s no contending with fate, I know that. It was fate, wasn’t it, which brought me there at that precise time, to turn out the headlights and find myself in a position just overlooking the entrance to the hotel at the moment that he came back.
I stayed in the car, my coat collar turned up, rubbing my feet together to keep them warm. At that sort of hour, if one has something on one’s mind, you go into a sort of trance without sleeping. I wonder why.
The sun came up, and the first car in the lot had its engine started, clouds of white exhaust filling the icy air. Finally, I could bring myself to move, and I drove back to Osaka without taking any sleep on the way.
That weekend, my husband came back as usual. I greeted him as if nothing had happened, and we spent our usual weekend together. I made no attempt to cross-examine him or catch him out.
For the next two weeks, I resolutely closed my mind to what I had seen and immersed myself in my painting. Even if my husband did have a mistress, I thought, it was my duty to forgive him. But nonetheless I could not resist the temptation, and two weeks later I drove up to Tokyo again.
This time, I arrived in Yokohama about noon and parked my car at a hotel near the seafront, one which usually has a lot of foreign guests. Then I rented an inconspicuous car; I had decided, against the voice of reason, to spy on my husband.
Words are not enough for me to explain the bottomless sense of humiliation and despair that crept over me when I saw the Huntsman’s Log at my husband’s hideout at Yotsuya.
I wish I had never found the key to that apartment in his jacket pocket. I wish I had not had my maid get a spare key made. I wish I had not followed him there…
It would have been much better for me to have known nothing.
It wasn’t all his different women who made me feel that I could not forgive my husband. About those victims I did not particularly care. I could not forgive him because he had listed me as his first victim. And I could not forgive him because he was not afraid to make any of those other women pregnant.
This was how he described what to me was a most precious night, the first night we made love, in the summer holidays:
“It was cramped in the car, but I enjoyed the unnatural posture this forced upon our lovemaking. Her pants off, her skirt pulled up, one leg over the back of the front seat. It made her body tight to enter, which was extra pleasure. Good breasts; she pulled her sweater up, and I did not bother to remove her bra, but pulled it down (though later she took it off herself) and I could see them in the moonlight as I worked on her. Later, she turned over, and asked me to enter her from the back, which I did. Used her mouth on me, too.
“I had invested all my earnings from my part-time job in that old Chevrolet, and this experience made the investment fully worthwhile.
“Keen on foreplay, and definitely not a virgin.”
Was that how he saw our tender and romantic congress? And what did he mean by saying “not a virgin”? I had never known any man before.
A few months later, I read of the suicide of the key-punch operator who was one of the victims described in his diary.
I went to her sister, Tsuneko Obana, at her apartment in Omori. The reason was that I wanted to make sure that my suspicions about the cause of the suicide were correct.
I think it was seeing the mole on her nose that made me decide to plot against my husband. That kind of defect attracts one’s attention, even though one feels sorry for the person who has it. As she spoke, her anger was obvious; those eyes of hers glared through her double eyelids.