Daisuke was a gourmet when it came to both women and food, his tastes running towards expensive shellfish. Every night Daisuke took me to a different restaurant with a new speciality to try. During this time I developed a taste for hot sake, the culinary enabler. Mild drunkenness allowed me to bypass my gag reflex and enjoy the erotic intrigue of Japanese food. It all seemed vaguely perverse, yet prepared to obsessive standards of beauty and cleanliness. Certain foods reminded me distinctly of sex: a gummy fermented substance known as natto stunk like unclean genitals. Viscous tororo starch, served over noodles, was white and sticky like come. Powdery soft mochi cakes made from pounded rice had the silky weight of a testicle.
Eating these things made me feel as though I was a culinary whore, being mouth fucked by one strange flavour, odour, consistency after another.
Everything was eaten raw, served with horseradish, pickled ginger and strong liquor in order to combat the ill effects of any parasitic micro-organisms hiding in the muscular striations of fish meat. The danger of food poisoning or tapeworms loomed perilously near, yet never close enough to be perceived as a real threat. As long as Daisuke was picking up the bill, he ordered and I ate shamelessly.
At a family-owned izakaya in Asakusabashi, we ate slick pink pregnant female shrimp, belly bulging with shiny black caviar, spindly legs and antennae jutting out at random angles. I fought the urge to scrape off the gelatinous eggs and eat the otherwise innocuous shrimp on its own, but consumed the delicacy whole, enduring the chitinous crunch of the tail, savouring the creaminess of the flesh, the hundred tiny eggs that popped in my mouth and got caught between my teeth.
While we ate, Daisuke told me about the first woman he’d made love to, a naive peasant maid, “the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen.” They’d sneak off at night to fuck in barns and fields. When she’d discovered she was pregnant, she’d killed herself to protect the honour of her family. He’d fucked her one last time as her body convulsed from the poison she’d eaten, mixed into sweet bean cakes, her spasming body ripping the orgasm from Daisuke’s loins.
“I could have kissed her,” he said. “The poison from her mouth would have killed me, our sin would have been wiped clean. But I didn’t. Now you know why I am a criminal.”
Daisuke related the tale with fond nostalgia. I took another sip of bracing shochu, liquor made from the clean wheat in the peasant fields where Daisuke had lost whatever semblance of innocence he’d once had, and ate another.
A week later we had fresh spider crab, eaten cold with lemon at a fancy restaurant in Ebisu. Daisuke told me what he’d done that day – breaking all ten fingers of a man who’d defaulted on his loans – as we snapped the spindly crab legs one by one, teasing out the red and white flesh with picks and scissors. When we had picked the crustacean clean of meat, there was an elaborate ritual of sucking out the muddy brains, then sipping hot sake from the bare shell.
At a bar managed by an Australian surfer in Hibiya, we drank cold Sapporo beers and slurped fresh Uni, the slimy orange innards of the sea urchin divested of its spiky purple shell. Each glob was daintily served on an edible green leaf, to be grasped by chopsticks quickly before it dripped to the table like fluorescent snot. Daisuke told me about the special sushi restaurant he went to, to celebrate his release from prison five years previous. He called it “sushi in the raw”, sashimi served off the supine bodies of beautiful naked women. The women shave their entire bodies and bathe in ice water beforehand, in order to lower their blood temperature by a degree or two. Then the raw fish is arranged artistically on the chilled body of the human serving tray. He’d said he’d never been so aroused. His erection was so hard it pained him. And they’d eaten his favourite, an exquisite tuna with fresh roe.
I asked him if he’d fucked the girl afterwards. He seemed appalled. She wasn’t a whore, he said, just a serving tray. Her flesh was cold; it would have been like fucking a corpse. He preferred the warm-blooded women in Kabukicho, their wet mouths slicked the colour of fresh tuna sashimi. They call adult video stars maguro, he said, because of the way a lubricated vagina looks shiny red like slabs of raw tuna.
After our meals, we’d retire to the love hotels of Shibuya to indulge in the next round of carnal pleasures. We’d fucked on the whorehouse beds of a hundred different love hotels, heart-shaped beds, black leather beds, revolving beds, beds shaped like racecars. We’d fucked on shag carpeting, in bathtubs, in chairs, in every imaginable position until Daisuke would fall asleep, and I’d stay awake watching TV and smoking cigarettes, the terminal insomniac.
He made love as one would expect a criminal to, grasping my arms and legs with strong fingers, leaving bruises in the shape of fingerprints. Daisuke’s sexual appeal was his violence: the fact that he was a gangster made me desire him more. I loved the shameless way he ripped off my panties and pulled my hair while he thrust his cock into me from behind. He rode the fine line between lover and predator that is socially unacceptable in the States, but it made me come like a hair-trigger every time.
His entire being fascinated me; he was so much different than a Western man. His body was hairless and smooth, lacking the musky animal smell that some men have. He was very lean and strong, the lines of his muscles outlined in golden skin and indigo ink. His hair was heavy, straight, and black like the feathers of the ominous crows that haunt the streets of Tokyo, getting fat on garbage, rumoured to occasionally attack dogs and small children. Yakuza were like crows in that way, despised, yet an unwavering necessary evil.
The love hotel we went to the night we ate Uni had red satin sheets and a black carpet. He’d removed his tie and his jacket, hung them carefully in the closet. Daisuke had placed his hands on my shoulders and gently pushed me back onto the bed. He unplugged the phone from the wall and used the plastic cord to bind my ankles to my wrists, leaving me splayed and open, an elaborate display of shibari. I felt like the sea urchin whose shell had been cracked open, oozing and vulnerable. Fully clothed in this absurd position, he unbuttoned my dress down the front, pushed my breasts up over the tops of my bra, worked his fingers in under the elastic of my panties, then cutting them off entirely using his knife, taking care not to nick my delicate skin.
Once my vulva was fully visible, he pushed the labia back with his thumb and index finger and squeezed lube into the crevice running from my pussy to my ass. He angled me against the mirrored headboard to display the maguro-pink of my cunt and ass. He worked his fingers into both holes, and licked my clit until I came, gasping. He grasped my hips to lift my glistening pink sex onto his, and entered me. Daisukes cock was curved upward in long graceful lines. There were bumps along the underside – pearls, seven in all, one for each year he’d spent in prison. Each bump caught at the entrance before popping in, the smooth ridge working against my G-spot as he moved in me. He kept his fingers in my lubed ass and fucked me in both holes while telling me his fantasies – that he wanted to take me to the Yakuza headquarters for a gang bang, that he wanted to hire another gaijin girl and have us sixty-nine while he took turns fucking us from behind.