Mistress koharu, p.1
Mistress Koharu, page 1
Mistress Koharu
NOBORU TSUJIHARA
Translated by Kalau Almony
Contents
Title Page
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Translator’s Note
Copyright
Part One
1.
Upon returning home a little after 10 p.m., Yano Akira opened his bedroom door and, without turning on the lights, whispered, “I’m home” to Koharu, who was sitting up, leaning against the headboard. Koharu squirmed ever so slightly, glanced at Akira, and gave him a small nod. Akira shut the door with bated breath and walked to the living-dining-kitchen at the end of the hall.
Akira lived in an apartment in a five-story building. He did not own but rather rented it from a real estate corporation, which had acquired the apartment as an investment. It was, in Japanese real-estate parlance, a 1LDK—a single bedroom and a combined living-dining-kitchen space—and was far from large, just forty-five square meters, but for a single man like Akira, the layout was perfectly livable. On the left of the hallway leading from the entryway was his bedroom and a small spare room he used for various chores; on the right were the bathroom and shower, divided into separate rooms. At the end of the hallway was the combination living-dining room and kitchen about ten tatami mats in size, and in this living-dining-kitchen was a large closet.
Before turning on the room lights, Akira approached the aquarium on the left of the closet and asked, “How are you doing?”
The tank was lit by a small clip-on light. The two red and white sarasa comet goldfish waved their long, flowing tails and raced to the surface of the water, opening and shutting their mouths in anticipation of food. In response to Akira’s call, the pure red ranchu emerged from his usual position in the crevice between the base of the heating cord and the corner of the tank, moving in a gentle, clockwise spiral. It was three years ago that he had brought these fishes home from the large plastic viewing tanks of Kingyozaka, a goldfish specialty shop in Hongo.
After Akira fed the fish, he watched the three of them swim back to their usual positions, and once they had returned, he shut off their light and covered the tank with a blackout sheet before switching on the lights of the living-dining-kitchen.
Akira approached the window and opened one of the sliding glass doors that led to the balcony, letting in the night air. The apartment had been shut up all day, and he wanted to air it out. He had left the front door half open for that purpose as well.
Below the balcony was a municipal park for young children. If one were to draw an oval within its rectangular grounds, it would probably produce a track of about 150 meters. Across the now barren and blackened park, the playground equipment and low trees cast tentative shadows. In the middle of the park was a pond with a fountain, but Akira had not once seen the fountain spitting water.
About forty meters away, on the opposite side of the park, stood a ten-story Leopalace apartment building. At this hour, Akira thought he could connect the dots of the few room lights still aglow and wind up with a constellation he knew. The wind blew through his apartment, and once Akira felt the air had freshened up, he closed the glass door and then closed and locked the front door as well.
Akira had moved into this apartment in Nishi-Kanda five years ago, when he was thirty-four. Prior to coming here, he had spent twelve years in the company dorm for single men in Mejirodai, near his workplace. The super there called him “boss.” Next year he would be turning forty, but he was still completely unattached. No one around him had brought up talk of marriage recently, and he had no intention of looking for someone to marry either, so it was probable that his life as a single man would continue. His father had lived for a long time as a widower in Minoh, one of Osaka’s satellite cities, and would be turning seventy this year.
Akira took a can of Guinness from the refrigerator opposite the kitchen sink, checked his mail, and read the evening paper. After finishing the beer, he made himself a Tachibana Genshu on the rocks, a sweet potato shochu he had ordered from Kuroki Honten distillery in Miyazaki.
Sitting on the couch, Akira turned on the TV. The NHK-BS1 news broadcast had just started; they were announcing today’s opening of a new extension to the Hokuriku Shinkansen bullet train line, which would connect Tokyo and Kanazawa. The trip would take only two hours and twenty-eight minutes! The newscaster added that the line was expected to be extended to Tsuruga in Fukui by 2022.
Akira remembered traveling around the Noto Peninsula one winter in his mid-twenties. Back then, he had taken the Joetsu Shinkansen to Echigo-Yuzawa Station and changed trains for the Hakutaka Express to get to Kanazawa. It had taken over four hours. He was shocked by how much faster the trains had gotten.
As the clock struck twelve, he turned off the TV, showered, changed into his pajamas, brushed his teeth, and headed to the bedroom.
Akira turned on the floor lamp to the right of his bed, removed Koharu’s dress, helping her strip down to just her lingerie, and positioned her face up on the mattress.
He climbed over her, and from her left side, leaned on top of her, his right hand massaging her thigh and buttocks as he rubbed his face in her breast.
Koharu was a life-sized love doll Akira had had delivered from a gallery in Koganecho in Yokohama’s Naka Ward. Such dolls used for sex were once called “Dutch wives,” but the term “love doll” had come into general usage to denote a Dutch wife made with realistic detail.
Akira graduated as a literature major from the humanities department of his university, with his undergraduate thesis on Chikamatsu Monzaemon, the playwright of bunraku puppet theater and kabuki plays. Even before this doll arrived, he had decided that he would call her Koharu—the name of the heroine of Chikamatsu’s The Love Suicides at Amijima.
After he began living with Koharu, Akira made a discovery. Something unrelated to the workings of sex, something to do with sleep.
The expression “Dutch wife,” the predecessor of the term “love doll,” came from Dutch-occupied Indonesia, where Dutchmen sought to improve their troubled sleep in the hot tropical nights by sleeping with body pillows made of bamboo. These “bamboo wives” inspired the name of the dolls later made for sex. And what Akira discovered was that, when he slept spooning with Koharu, she served to drastically improve his sleep.
He found that when he went to bed with any part of his body touching Koharu, he would fall into a deep sleep such as he had never before experienced. Moreover, he had completely stopped dreaming.
Akira’s bedtime ritual began with petting then advanced to him telling stories. Problems at work, memories from his childhood, gossip about friends; the talk would continue endlessly, and Koharu, an excellent listener, would nod her head, give simple responses, and touch his body at just the right moments. Akira would grow relaxed, overcome by a warm and gentle feeling.
Akira worked in the editorial department at a large publishing house of both books and magazines, and tonight he couldn’t help but let the complaints spill from his mouth.
“Printing ran late again today. The editor should have marked the author’s corrections on the galleys and handed those over to the printers, but she just gave them the galleys with the author’s notes attached. The operators had to do twice as much work, and the way they mark corrections isn’t even the same.”
“Is it that woman editor again?”
“Yeah, did I tell you about her? The new girl who started last year. I don’t know who trained her, but they don’t seem to have taught her anything …”
Koharu pushed her right breast against his left arm, and Akira tried to continue his story with his eyes closed, but there was nothing he could do to fend off the sleep that suddenly overcame him. After dropping off for just a moment, he woke again, and though he felt aroused at Koharu gently stroking his penis through his pants, sleep came and dragged him back into its depths.
2.
When he was a student, Akira encountered the work of manga artist Tsuge Yoshiharu. As with many Tsuge fans, he first read Screw Style and then began collecting all his major works. After landing his current job, Akira learned that Tsuge had once serialized his diary in a literary magazine, and so, for a hefty price, Akira purchased on Amazon a used copy of the hardcover edition of The Diary of Tsuge Yoshiharu.
The Diary covers five years, beginning in 1975 and ending in 1980, though there are at times significant gaps between entries, and the work is filled with the details of the manga artist’s daily life. It begins with the birth of his son and goes on to capture on page his wife’s battle with cervical cancer, the couple’s disagreements, the deaths of friends, memories of a discontented and oppressive childhood, and complaints about his incapacity to create new work.
Tsuge was haunted by an incomprehensible anxiety, and beginning in the second half of The Diary, mentions of that anxiety grow frequent.
“It’s not that I grow anxious about some imagined problem; rather I’m in a state where I’m anxious about anxiety itself. Sometimes I feel as though the only escape from this anxiety will be death.”
One day, on a walk with his four-year-old son, Tsuge suffered a sudden episode of some sort and collapsed in the park grass. There, lying on his side, he followed his son’s movements with his eyes, his own body stiff and trembling.
The Diary ends on sports day of his son’s preschool.
Akira read the book in one sitting. In the afterword, Tsuge wrote that he was encouraged by his editor’s flattering claim that his
diary “is actually an I-novel,” but Akira felt that the work possessed a charm different in nature from the so-called I-novel of Japan. He remembered the feeling he had after reading the book: it was as if in one corner of a dark and gloomy sky there had opened a gaping mouth of blue.
When Akira discovered that the author Tomioka Taeko had written about this diary, he searched the office library for her essay.
The piece was titled “Personal Life and the I-Novel,” and was in Tomioka’s essay collection The Scene of Expression. In the opening she touched on how Tsuge mentioned his editor complimented him by saying that his diary was like an I-novel, and then she drew attention to Tsuge’s understanding of his own work as an I-novel. She argued that unlike the I-novels that came before it, Tsuge’s was not premised on the intention to express the self through fabrication, and she went on to claim that the unostentatious style of the work was the result of Tsuge’s optimistic belief that one could both maintain the purity of their “personal life” while also making themself into the subject of an I-novel.
Additionally, she wrote, “Whenever I think about the ‘novel,’ I imagine a scale with ‘I-novels’ in the Tsuge style on one side and ‘allegory’ on the other. These two are polar opposites, and the ‘novel’ must not go to either extreme; it must fluctuate between the two sides. Maybe it is because his illustrations are a form of allegorical expression that his written work tends towards the opposite extreme.”
As Akira looked over the other essays contained within The Scene of Expression, he noticed a piece titled “Curses and Reproductions.”
Tomioka Taeko begins “Curses and Reproductions” by citing an interview with a “Dr. S” published in the May 1984 issue of Photographic Era. After witnessing the suicide of a mother of a disabled child and seeing families collapse under the pressure of raising disabled children, Dr. S, a neurosurgeon, decided to create a Dutch wife for mothers and children. Dr. S proposed this unexpected solution after coming face to face with situations where the male child’s sexual desire was directed at the mother.
After many prototypes and failures, Dr. S managed to produce one thousand dolls which he believed would be effective as partners for disabled people. Dr. S called those dolls his “daughters,” and he is quoted as saying that “those who have requested one of my daughters must choose auspicious days for the occasion of receiving her” and that he truly felt as though he were sending daughters off to get married.
This was when Akira first developed a strong interest in the Japanese-made Dutch wives, called “sex dolls” in English, twenty-two years after Tomioka Taeko wrote this essay.
Tomioka noted the measurements of Dr. S’s “daughters.” According to the essay, they were 158 centimeters tall, with busts of 88 centimeters, waists of 60 centimeters, hips of 89 centimeters, and weighed 7 kilograms. Their skin was made from 100% latex, and the subcutaneous fat of rubber. When he looked this up online, Akira found that these types of dolls were now primarily made of silicone.
In terms of its texture, elasticity, and translucency, silicone was the material that most closely resembled human skin, and it could be used to reproduce even the most delicate features of the human body.
Further, contemporary dolls had frames made of stainless steel, industrial plastic, brass, and aluminum, and as their joints were made of fiber-reinforced plastic, their shoulders, groin, hips, and knees could all be moved freely.
Akira had imagined a love doll shrugging and smiling, and he thought to himself that at least once he’d like to see a real one.
While online, Akira had stumbled upon Orient Industry. Of the handful of love doll makers within Japan, Orient Industry was the oldest and largest, the premier brand. Because, at the time, Akira lived in a dormitory for single men, he wouldn’t have been able to bring home a love doll. However, Orient Industry had a showroom and took reservations for tours. Out of curiosity, Akira had headed to their showroom in Okachimachi.
Over fifty dolls had been on display, dressed in a variety of fashions and striking a range of poses, and while Akira did find some charm in their deportment and construction, he did not find a doll whose face he liked. The heads were connected by joints and interchangeable, but they all looked like characters from comics or anime and were made up like popular idols; they had felt quite distant from his own preferences.
At the recommendation of an editor who joined the publishing company at the same time as him, Akira had watched the film Cape Fear, directed by J. Lee Thompson, starring Gregory Peck and featuring Robert Mitchum in the role of the unforgettable villain. Akira fostered a secret adoration of the actress Lori Martin, the only daughter of the lawyer played by Peck—and he had hoped for a doll with a similar, daintily featured face.
After the tour of the showroom, Akira continued to browse the webpages of love doll makers and maniac fans, and among them he regularly visited a certain connoisseur’s webpage called Taa-bo’s Dress Up Reference Room. And though his interest in love dolls never waned, he never encountered a doll that made him take the leap and make an actual purchase.
Then a few years after leaving the dormitory, in the fall of 2014, he had happened upon a youth magazine’s special issue on love dolls. One of the articles in the issue said that Gallery Hitogata in Yokohama’s Naka Ward held a biannual exhibition and sale of love dolls assembled from around the world. The owner of the gallery was the manager of a major restaurant in Chinatown, and he collected love dolls for his personal amusement.
So twelve months ago, mid-December 2014, Akira exited the gates of Keikyu Hinodecho Station and headed for Gallery Hitogata. As he had previously researched, the gallery was located below the Keikyu Main Line that ran alongside the Ooka River, halfway between Hinodecho Station and Koganecho Station. This area used to be a red-light district, overrun with prostitution and drug trafficking. However, the commencement of a construction project to repair and reinforce the elevated Keikyu Main Line in case of earthquakes triggered evictions of the shops and residences under the rail line, as well as the establishment of the Koganecho Area Management Center, a non-profit organization with the goal of beautifying the area.
As part of their activities, in 2011, the organization established a new facility called Konagecho New Studio Beneath the Rails in the one-hundred-meter space below the train tracks between Kogane Bridge and Suekichi Bridge. The facility combined gallery spaces, shops, studios, and meeting rooms.
Gallery Hitogata was housed within that complex. Akira walked along the footpath between the tracks and the river, searching for the gallery.
Konagecho New Studio Beneath the Rails was a long, two-story, rectangular glass box stuffed beneath the train tracks, and Gallery Hitogata was on the second floor. On the first floor was a used bookstore, Artbook Bazaar, which specialized in art books.
Akira climbed the wooden stairs, then, walking along the glass wall, made one pass of the hallway before opening the door of the gallery. There were no other visitors. A small, fat man built like a penguin who, like Jean-Paul Sartre, had a lazy right eye approached him. He said something to Akira, but as a train passed overhead just as he began to speak, Akira couldn’t catch what he was saying.
The man introduced himself as the gallery manager and politely led Akira to the display space. The floor was covered in the same wood as the hallway, and aside from the entrance, all the walls were glass, with off-white lacquered boards positioned to block the sun—and people’s glances—from the outside. Soft downlighting illuminated the small space, where fifteen or so dolls striking various poses lay in wait.
“Our specialty is foreign-made dolls,” the man said in a whisper. “These are mostly from America, from Abyss Creations in San Marcos in Southern California. This company doesn’t call their products love dolls, but ‘RealDolls.’”
Akira looked at the dolls one by one. Both the build and makeup of these dolls, which were clearly made for American tastes, made Akira deeply uncomfortable. Their breasts and butts were emphasized to the extreme, and all together they felt forbidding to him, the thickness of their eyebrows and plumpness of their lips simply abnormal. Were they supposed to look like some Hollywood actresses?
