A personal matter pdfdrive com

particular, that made Bird tremble. He had just slightly more than thirty thousand
yen in the bank, but it was money he had deposited as the beginning of a reserve
fund for his trip to Africa. For the present, that thirty thousand odd yen was
hardly more than a marker indicating a frame of mind. But even the marker was
now about to be removed. Now, except for two road maps. Bird was left with
nothing that related directly to a trip to Africa. Sweat gushed from all the skin on
his body, and Bird felt a damp, ugly chill on his lips and ears and fingertips. He
took his place at the end of the line at the bus stop, and, in a voice like the
droning of a mosquito, swore: “Africa? What a fucking laugh!” The old man
directly in front of Bird started to turn around, decided against it, and slowly
straightened his large, bald head. Everyone had been beaten senseless by the
summer that had consumed the city prematurely.
Bird, too, closed his eyes feebly and, shivering with a chill, sweated. Soon he
could smell his body beginning to exude an unpleasant odor. The bus didn’t
come; it was hot. Folding in the shame and all the rage eddying in Bird’s head, a

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reddish darkness spread. And then a sprout of sexual desire pushed up through
the darkness and grew before Bird’s eyes like a young rubber tree. His eyes
closed still, Bird groped for his trousers and felt his erected penis through the
cloth. He felt wretched, base, rueful; he longed for the ultimate in antisocial sex.
The kind of coitus that would strip and hold up to the light the shame that was
worming into him. Bird left the line and looked for a taxi with eyes brutalized by
the light, seeing the square as though in a negative, with blacks and whites
reversed. He intended to return to Himiko’s room, where the light of day was
shut out. If she turns me down, he thought irritably, as if to whip himself, I’ll
beat her unconscious and fuck her then.

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7
Y
OU
know, Bird, you’re always in the worst condition when you try to get me
into bed with you.” Himiko sighed. “Right now you’re about the least attractive
Bird I’ve ever seen.”
Bird was obstinately silent.
“But I’ll sleep with you just the same. I haven’t been fastidious about
morality since my husband committed suicide; besides, even if you intend to
have the most disgusting kind of sex with me, I’m sure I’ll discover something
genuine in no matter what we do.”
Genuine—authentic, true, real, pure, natural, sincere, earnest; the English
instructor at a cram-school arranged the translation words inside his head. And
in his present state, Bird thought, none of those meanings came even near to
applying to him.
“Bird, you get into bed first; I want to wash.”
Slowly Bird took off his sweaty clothes and lay back on top of the worn
blanket. Propping his head on both fists he squinted down at the paunch around
his belly and at his whitish, insufficiently erected penis. Himiko, with the glass
door to the bathroom wide open, lowered herself backwards onto the toilet,
opened her thighs wide and doused her genitals with water from a large pitcher
which she held in one hand. Bird watched her from the bed for a while and
supposed that this was wisdom obtained from sexual relations with foreign men.
Then he returned to gazing quietly down at his own belly and penis, and waited.
“Bird …” Himiko called as she vigorously rubbed herself dry with a large
towel; the water had splashed all the way to her chest.“… there’s a danger of
pregnancy today; have you come prepared?”
“No, I haven’t.”
Pregnancy! The flaming thorns on the word pierced Bird to the softest quick
and a low, grieved moan escaped him. The thorns burrowed all the way into his
vital organs and continued to burn there.
“Then we’ll have to think of something, Bird.” Himiko lowered the pitcher to
the floor with a noise like a pistol report, and came back to Bird’s side rubbing
her body with the bath towel. With one hand, Bird clenched his wilted penis in
embarrassment.

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“I lost it all of a sudden,” he said. “Himiko! I’m no good at all now.”
Breathing strongly, healthily, Himiko peered down at Bird and continued to dry
her sides and her chest between her breasts. She appeared to be speculating on
the meaning hidden in Bird’s words. The smell of her body roused acute
memories of college summers and Bird caught his breath: skin toasting in the
sun. Himiko wrinkled her nose like a spaniel puppy and laughed a simple, dry
laugh. Bird went scarlet.
“You just think you’re no good,” Himiko said carelessly and dropping the
towel around her feet, she moved to cover Bird’s body with her own, her small
breasts thrusting like fangs. Bird, like a child, fell captive to the self-defense
instinct; still clutching his penis with one hand, he drove his other arm straight at
Himiko’s belly. His hand sinking into her soft flesh made his skin crawl.
“It was your shouting ‘pregnancy’ just now that did it,” he said in hurried
justification.
“I did not shout,” Himiko objected with a look of outrage.
“It hit me awfully hard. Pregnancy is the one word I just can’t take!”
Himiko covered her breasts and abdomen with her arms, probably because
Bird was doggedly concealing his penis. Like the wrestlers of antiquity who
wrestled in the nude, they first defended their most vulnerable parts with their
bare hands and then stood their ground, eyeing each other warily.
“What’s wrong, Bird?” Himiko said without anger. Gradually she had
realized the gravity of the situation.
“I thought about pregnancy and—fell apart.”
Himiko brought her legs together and sat down next to Bird’s thigh. Bird
twisted away on the narrow bed to make more room for her. Himiko, lowering
the arm that still covered her breasts, gently touched the hand that Bird still
clenched around his penis.
“Bird, I can make you hard enough,” she said quietly but with conviction. “A
lot of time has passed since that lumberyard.”
Bird submerged in a feeling of dark, clammy helplessness, and endured the
ticklish play of Himiko’s fingers on his hand. Would he be able to present his
own case convincingly? He had his doubts. But he had to explain, to leap the
wall of his predicament.
“It’s not a question of technique,” he said, turning his eyes away from the
earnest, sorrowful aspect of Himiko’s breasts. “The problem is fear.”

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“Fear?” Himiko appeared to be turning over the word in her mind in hope of
discovering the bud of a joke.
“I’m afraid of the dark recesses where that grotesque baby was created,” Bird
said in an attempt at explanation in a joking vein, which, failing, sank him even
deeper into gloom. “When I saw the baby with his head wrapped in bandages, I
thought of Apollinaire. It sounds sentimental, but I felt as if the baby had been
wounded in the head on a battlefield, like Apollinaire. My baby got hit in
solitary battle inside a dark, sealed hole I’ve never seen. …” As he spoke, Bird
recalled the sweet, redeemable tears he had shed in the ambulance—but the tears
of shame I wept in the hospital corridor today are already beyond redemption.
“... I can’t send my weakling penis onto that battleground!”
“But isn’t that confined to you and your wife? I mean, isn’t it a fear you ought
to experience when she first approaches you about sex after she’s recovered?”
“Assuming we ever make it again—” Bird faltered, already oppressed by a
moment of consternation still weeks away, “—I know I’ll feel as if I’m having
incest with my baby son on top of this fear of mine. Now wouldn’t that make
even a steel penis go limp?”
“Poor Bird! If I gave you enough time, you’d count off a hundred and one