The Pornographers

  But anyway, dear,

  See my hairy chest.

  In my new pot

  Bean curd sizzles.

  On the table,

  The clams lie ready.

  This hungry fellow bites

  Down to the very bone.

  Nor does he care how

  Oddly his legs sprawl.

  Much lush scenery

  Along Eros’s way,

  But how I love to pluck

  The crevice’s tiny bloom.

  We can’t be living forever,

  Says the old woman sneezing

  Into rice paper and with

  Cold hand crumpling it.

  Squatting over the toilet,

  No company but the moon,

  Each man’s taut pride

  Brought low at last.

  I was there at home when the police called and said that the boss had been hit by a car. The boss was somebody who most of the time didn’t even cross the street after the light turned green until he looked both ways, and so right away I thought to myself that it must have been because of that party. Ever since that party, he was going around like in a daze, it seemed like it took so much out of him. Like when Mr. Banteki came running in the other day all excited to tell us that Mr. Paul had gotten all beat up by somebody, probably from one of those Kobé gangs, and all he did was say: “Is that right?” Here Mr. Paul was half dead, and everything was all messed up, and the boss didn’t seem bothered at all.

  But anyway, I thought I’d better get down there right away, and so I went to Tenma Police Headquarters, and there the officer in charge got mad and said: “What the hell would he be doing here? Go to the hospital.” But then as I was going out, what did I happen to see but this young lady who looked just like the pictures of Miss Keiko that the boss had showed me, and, sure enough, it was her. The only thing is, she wasn’t at the station on account of her father’s accident. What actually happened, I’m afraid, is that she had been brought in because the police sort of thought that she was a prostitute or something. Anyway she was really surprised to hear what I had to say, and we left together, with a policeman going along with us.

  We didn’t know what to do once we got to the hospital, but we asked around, and somebody told us that he would probably be in the emergency ward in the basement. And so there we found him finally, in a dirty bed and all bandaged up. In fact there was almost nothing else on him but the bandages. You could see right away that this was it, and I felt awful. And then I thought of poor Miss Keiko. Here she was going to be an orphan. Her father was on his way out, and the deep bond, you know, between father and daughter was going to be broken. In the other bed in the room, this man was lying with blood bubbling around his mouth. Gee, I thought to myself, how awful to die in a place like this! But then just as we stepped into the room, Miss Keiko suddenly burst out laughing like something suddenly struck her real funny. I knew that the whole thing must have been a big shock to her; that was what probably caused her to act so strange. But still! My goodness, I thought, I wish I could get out of here! Because it wasn’t so nice, you can imagine, to think about having to be shut up in this dark little room with two gentlemen dying and Miss Keiko carrying on like that.

  Anyway I heard somebody’s voice, and there was this young doctor. He picked up the boss’s wrist.

  “No, no good. He’s gone already. Sorry, miss. His back was really smashed. And then I’d say that his cranium was crushed, too,” he said, as though he was kind of pleased with himself.

  Miss Keiko kept quiet, of course, as long as the doctor was there, but as soon as he went out, she burst out laughing even harder than before. Then she took a handkerchief out of her purse and bent over the boss’s bed. Somebody told me afterward that when you get your back broken in a certain way, something like that could happen. But anyway, there was the boss’s dinger pushing right up out of his shorts. And even though he was laying there dead as could be, it was pointing right straight up at the ceiling. It reminded me of one of those rockets they’re sending to the moon. I just stood there, hardly believing my eyes. The boss was always saying that he’d be cured of his impotency if only Keiko came back. And sure enough, she was back and there it was stiff and straight. It must be the soul that’s doing it, I thought, and I felt these chills going down my spine. But Miss Keiko didn’t know anything about that, and I suppose she just thought that it looked pretty funny the way his dinger was. And so she dropped the handkerchief over the thing very neatly. And then she had another fit of laughing. It sounded terrible loud in that little room, but little by little, I started to giggle too. I really shouldn’t have done it since it wasn’t proper at all. But gee, it really was funny the way it stood up. The doctor had covered the boss’s face when he died, and now the only sign of life was his dinger there underneath the white handkerchief. It and the face both covered—you couldn’t tell which was which maybe, I thought all at once, and then I really burst out laughing. Jun, jun, jun!

  A Note About the Author

  Akiyuki Nozaka is a rising young Japanese novelist who, at the age of thirty-eight, has already won three literary prizes in Japan, including the Naoki Prize in 1967. He was born in Tokyo in 1930 and majored in French literature at Waseda University. He makes his home in Tokyo, with his wife and daughter.

  A Note About the Translator

  Michael Gallagher was graduated from John Carroll University in Cleveland in 1952 and received his M.A. in English from Loyola University in 1961. He began to teach himself to read and write Japanese in 1953 while serving in the United States Army in Japan. Seven years later he returned to Tokyo as a seminarian in the Jesuit Order and began intense study of the Japanese language. He has worked as a laborer in the Osaka district and as an instructor at Tokyo University, and, a layman once more, is at present an editor for the Jesuit Writers’ Service in New York City.