Masako Togawa - The Lady Killer

My next worry was that I might be summoned to the court to appear as a witness. I decided to lose enough weight to change my appearance during the few months leading up to the trial. I started to starve myself; after a few weeks, I caught sight of my legs and was stunned. What lovely legs I used to have! All tanned and well shaped, with firm muscles, just like the legs of an antelope. How proud I had been of them! I always used to wear the shortest possible skirts when playing tennis, just to show them off. I used to let my skirts ride up, letting men see how brown my thighs were, right up to the briefest of pants, which I always wore. And underneath, right down to where the pants ended—Oh, if they could have seen how white were the secret places of my body!

But now they were like the colorless bones of a skeleton. I pulled my negligee up; the color was the same on both my legs and my private parts. They looked like the legs of a Jew in a concentration camp.

I took off the negligee and looked at myself naked; I really was becoming like a skeleton with only a few wisps of hair in the middle!

But it was affecting my health; I was taking purgatives to get my weight down and soon became too feeble even to open my mouth to issue instructions to the housekeeper. I even lacked the strength to pick up the blanket when it slipped off the bed. I was smoking heavily to repress my appetite; my right hand became a nicotine-stained claw. Having no strength, I would frequently drop my cigarette and set my bedding asmolder. The housekeeper scolded me on such occasions, but what could I do?

If I did start a fire, the atelier would be razed to its foundations, and then that would lead to my ruin… But I had to keep on smoking.

I dreaded that the housekeeper would stop getting me my cigarettes. I needed the smoke of those hot, dry leaves with their pungent smell and billowing, purple-colored smoke; I needed them to help the loneliness, terror, and obsessions of my lonely bed.

For a time I fasted on no more than a little thin gruel, but I needed more substance to make the cigarettes taste good, so I would occasionally take a little breast of chicken fried in a good-quality oil or else eat a quarter of a sugar-sprinkled doughnut.

Eventually, I couldn’t hold on to anything. I dropped everything I touched—a water jug, an ashtray full of butts, even the expensive antique German fountain pen that I had bought in Chicago.

But I couldn’t give up the cigarettes.

I always kept a big tin of Westminster by my bed, but it soon got empty. The old housekeeper used to complain about the smoke-filled atmosphere and open the windows. One cold February night, she didn’t close them properly, and the draft was freezing me, so I got up and tried to shut them. But I just didn’t have the strength.

That was when I was weakest, I think.

In those days, I was not bothered by visits from the dead. No, it was sex that dominated my mind: his sex, and my sex.

What dreams do men have who have been soldiers and who have killed? What do they think, falling asleep alone at night, of those whom they overcame after struggling hand to hand? Or those ancient warriors, naked between the sheets, dreaming of their youth and well-oiled nakedness, the bulging muscles of youth, the struggles… now all gone. What did they think of in bed?

I thought of the touch of his naked body, drenched with the sweat of the women that he had mounted…

I thought of myself, naked and giving myself to men to collect the evidence I needed. My palms still seemed to feel the flesh of those men to whom I had submitted…

Well, at any rate, it turned out that I would not have to appear in court. A clerk of the court came to see me, armed with a tape recorder to ask me about our married life together. He mainly asked about our sexual relations, or rather lack of them, since my husband became impotent with me. It seemed that our family doctor had already been questioned, so all of the questions were very much to the point. There were a few medical terms that I didn’t understand, but all I had to do was nod.

When he came to the word spasm he used the German word kampf , blushing as he spoke.

Perhaps he had a lascivious imagination; perhaps he imagined me naked and lying under him.

I can’t blame him or our family doctor, because how could they know the real reason for my fear of pregnancy?

Nobody knows… except us, and the alcoholic doctor in Mexico who swindled us out of two thousand dollars… Only we three know about the baby born without bones, the baby we disposed of.

Mad, that’s what it was, to go sightseeing in Mexico in the ninth month of my pregnancy. Why didn’t we go back to Japan instead? Then we would never have fallen into the clutches of that doctor… Then I would not have had to dye my hands with the blood of my infant.

And two weeks after the birth. I had recovered enough for sex. I lay under my husband, in his arms, in a hotel built like a mountain hut by the side of a lake.

We were just reaching our climax… and I went into a spasm. My body gripped his like a vise… he screamed with pain… I was in agony, too. Somehow, I managed to get hold of the phone, locked together as we were.

That boorish fathead of a doctor, looking at the nude yellow couple clasped in the first embrace shown in marital textbooks… just as if we were a pair of copulating monkeys or dogs. Because of the pain, we didn’t feel embarrassed. He injected a depressant, and eventually we were able to separate.

Well, when we got back to Chicago, Dr. John Wells diagnosed the reason for my convulsive spasm. It was, he said, a fear syndrome directed against pregnancy. He said the same thing would happen in the future if I made love to my husband, and that it would happen just as he was about to ejaculate. He said, “It’s like having a nervous pain in your muscle. You’ll get it even if you use contraceptives. You’ll get it with other men, too.” Unless I could overcome my fear of pregnancy. As it was all in English, it was less embarrassing to listen to.

Thus began the agony of the centaur. Does not the head wish to make love to a woman, whilst the lower parts can only cover a mare?

Or we were like the starving figure in Greek mythology, buried up to his neck with plates of delicious food just in front of his nose.

First we would look at each other’s bodies… exchange caresses… at last give up in desperation. Always so fruitlessly tired… always, the stain of our sweat on the sheets, full of the sorrowful smell that symbolized our barren love.

The doctor thought that my fear of childbirth was due to the failure of my first pregnancy—we had put it about that I had had a miscarriage in Mexico—and suggested that all would be well if we changed our environment. But my husband and I, knowing the real cause, knew better. Our future as man and wife had ended in a brick wall.

My husband found a post in Tokyo, and we came back to Japan. We lived apart, except for Saturday nights.

And so, once a week, we would sometimes search for each other’s body in the darkness, dreaming that a miracle might occur. However, after a while, we gave up. My husband told me that when he was with me, he was no longer a complete man.

With a weak smile like an old man’s, he would stroke the thick hair on his chest and say ruefully, “I am impotent. I have lost all interest in women. Sometimes I go to a strip show or look at nudes in magazines, though. That’s about it, I’m afraid.”

And like a fool, I pitied him, still young and handsome, and yet already impotent.

When we first met, he was a melancholic man, but in spite of that he was very quick-witted and seemed to be able easily to make others believe in love between men and women. I remember him well, standing in front of the redbrick university building in Chicago, wearing a red woolen shirt; he struck such a fine pose, his head slightly to one side, that he seemed to match the American scenery around him, and I immediately fell in love with him. I always loved him—the first man I ever knew.