Twelve Views from the Distance

Chapter 9: The Shore of Sexuality

149 x The shore of sexuality 1 From the dawning, distant shore of my young sexuality, I hear the strains of a certain song: Gikkon battan Shall I put on the obi? Whom shall I put the obi on? Shall I put the obi on Mut-chan? Gikkon battan . . . This song is what one calls an ayashiuta, a“humoring song”—a song that we would sing to entertain a small child—and it was accompanied by a particular game. An adult would lie on their back, bend their knees up, then have a young child straddle them. The adult would stick out their hands and take those of the child, and then by distributing the child’s weight over all four limbs, the adult would raise the child up and down while singing the song. Gikkon battan is onomatopoeic in Japanese for the sound of a loom shifting back and forth, and as the adult says this, he would lift the child up then lower him once again. Who was it that performed this role for me during the dawn of my earliest youth, singing this song to me? Was it Mother? For most of my early days, she was far away. Grandmother or Grandfather? Both of them worked from morning to night and hardly had any free time at all to humor me with games like this. My uncle? Such games hardly fit the image of my 150 The shore of sexuality pale-faced uncle,who during his late teenage years seemed at least five years older than he actually was. He was too taciturn for such things. So who was it that might have played these games with me? I cannot remember. All I know is that now, two pale legs rise from the far shore of oblivion, wrapped in layer upon layer of mist, and I am poised on them as they rise up and down like a children’s carousel. On my face is an expression as if I am about to burst into tears at any moment. Visible in this expression is both anxiety and a sense of intoxication. I can safely say that was my first experience with the intoxication of sexuality—or to put it more precisely, that was my first sexual experience, and in it I experienced both anxiety and a sense of intoxication, rolled up into one.When Mother embraced me and carried her on her back—those feelings did not have to do with sexuality. Perhaps that is because mother and child, who relate to one another through the acts of embracing and carrying, are linked through the invisible tube of the umbilical cord. At best, mother and child are little more than two elastic, adaptable masses of different sizes. I believe it was when I was taken away from Mother’s breast and placed on the legs of the man I cannot remember that I had my first experience with sexuality. I say this because it was in this childhood game I first experienced the sensation of rubbing against the flesh of another in the particular way one associates with sex. One characteristic of sex seems to be rhythm, and I cannot help but wonder if the true nature of that rhythm isn’t actually wrapped up in anxiety. Rhythm involves repeated rising and falling, and both rising and falling are types of flight that take one beyond the boundaries of one’s ordinary state. No sooner was I hurled toward the unbounded emptiness of the sky than I was pulled back; no sooner was I tossed into a bottomless fall into hell than I was pulled back once again. . . . In the anxiety that took hold of me with each repetition of this cycle, I took another step on that faintest of staircases and learned a little more about the sensations of sex. This knowledge was transmitted to me not intellectually but through the more intimate sense of touch—through the flesh of my hips straddling the man’s adult legs and the smooth skin of my inner thighs. The connection between anxiety and sexuality are even clearer in another children’s game calledYou Can See Tokyo. The adult would cover 151 The shore of sexuality the child’s ears with both hands and raise the child high above his own head. This would be the part of the game we called Up High, Up High. When...