Edward Whittemore - Quin’s Shanghai Circus

Baron Kikuchi recognized his name at once, the young man’s father having been the surgeon who operated on his eye in 1905. Out of gratitude to the boy’s dead father he decided to help the boy if he could. He took him into the army and gave him medical treatment. He made him swear that he would never masturbate in public again. The corporal responded gratefully, so the General made him his chauffeur. He often had clandestine meetings in his car and the corporal’s loyalty to him was both deep and personal.

Mama knew all this. She knew the corporal was an invert incapable of performing the sexual act with a woman. But she also knew he was her only hope. There were no male servants in the house and no other man ever slept there, except the corporal when the General was with her.

She explained to the corporal that the General very much wanted to have a son but that he was unable to do what was necessary. The corporal understood at once. He hung his head and said he had a confession to make.

Mama reassured him. She said that she knew about his condition but there was still a way he could help if he wanted to. The corporal replied that he would do anything at all that was within his power.

She then asked him certain delicate questions. Somehow, despite his embarrassment, he managed to stammer out the answers.

She thanked him and excused herself, returning with a large photograph. She gave the corporal instructions and told him he had only three days in which to practice. Three days from then would be the right time of the month for Mama and she dared not wait another month.

It was a sign of the man’s profound love for Baron Kikuchi that he accepted the task of perfecting a technique, in only three days, that was entirely contrary to the habits of a lifetime.

Time was what she and the General lacked, timing was the hope of her scheme.

When the corporal masturbated he became ecstatically dizzy. He sank into a realm of fantasy. But if anything other than his own hand touched his penis while he was masturbating, the dizziness left him. The flight was over, immediately he wilted.

There was one exception to this and that was when his orgasm had already begun. Then his penis could be thumped or encased by any sort of foreign object and it would still remain erect for the two or three seconds the orgasm lasted. The difficulty, of course, was that he never knew when the orgasm was coming. In that other realm his mind was a blur. He was out of control.

These were the facts he had admitted to Mama. Her solution was the large photograph.

It was a formal portrait, the kind a family had taken on some very important occasion. Everyone was dressed in formal kimono, children and grandchildren, aunts and uncles and parents and grandparents, the one surviving great-grandparent, the nurse who had served the family for half a century. The members of the family stood in straight rows, unsmiling, staring into the camera. In the front row was a stiff young boy wearing the same timid expression the corporal had worn at that age.

The corporal knew the photograph well. Everyone in Japan knew it well. It was natural history, the world, existence.

Yet there was something more in this photograph. Another photograph had been superimposed upon it, or perhaps a clever drawing, or perhaps merely the suggestion of an image, vague and undefined. At first the corporal had difficulty making it out, but the longer he stared at the photograph the clearer the vague image became.

It was a ghostly naked boy lying on his back in front of the family. His elbow was bent, he was grinning, his fingers were flying.

Maniacal freedom right at the feet of the solemn, unseeing assembly.

The corporal practiced according to Mama’s instructions. He masturbated vigorously while concentrating on the ghost. The dizziness came, the ecstasy, he was out of control.

His prearranged signal was a sound that resembled a clap of the hands, the sharp knock of two blocks of wood made by the man who passed the house sounding the hour. When the corporal heard the clap he shifted his eyes from the reclining ghost to the other boy, himself, the one who wore a formal kimono and stood in the front row of the family, transfixed, timid.

Instantaneously he had an orgasm. It happened just as Mama had said it would. Due to the photograph he could control his fantasies to the second. The corporal practiced at the turn of every hour, day and night, and on the third day he was ready.

Mama had chosen raw oysters to serve the General that night. The basis of her sauce was ambergris, the grayish-white wax secreted from behind the ear of the sperm whale, a well-known aphrodisiac. To this she added musk and rhubarb and cinnamon for flavoring, lastly a dose of phosphorite. She hoped the General would benefit from the aphrodisiac, but if he didn’t the phosphorite would constrict his throat muscles, strangling him and thereby producing a sympathetic erection.

For as Lao-tzu had said, man is soft and weak in life but stiff and hard in death .

Timing.

The corporal and his family of respected surgeons.

An oyster and a sperm whale.

Poison and its antidote.

The scheme was dangerous because the antidote had to be administered quickly, otherwise the General would not only simulate strangulation but undergo it. And the antidote couldn’t be mixed beforehand. She had to do that part while the corporal was doing his.

Timing.

Time.

Mama decorated the platter with seaweed and placed it before the man she loved.

The General covered an oyster with sauce and swallowed. He gripped his throat. As he toppled backward his kimono fell open revealing an erection.

Mama slipped on top of him and moved up and down. The General seemed amazed and happy, but almost immediately his eyes began to close. Perhaps he had ejaculated, perhaps not. She left him unconscious on the floor and rushed into the pantry.

The corporal was waiting beside the medicine cabinet, masturbating, staring at the photograph. Mama raised her kimono and stepped in front of him, sharply clapped her hands, slid him into place. A few minutes later she was running back into the other room with the antidote she had mixed.

There was a smile on the General’s face when he fell asleep that evening. At the end of a month, just before he left for Manchuria, she was able to tell him she was going to have a baby.

The last night they stayed up together until very late. She played the koto as he sat with folded hands thinking of what was to come, the life he faced in Mukden. As the evening wore on she saw the signs come over him. She was sorry it had to happen then, for she knew he didn’t want her to remember him that way, the hands gripping each other and turning white, the good eye twitching more violently as it filled with water, closing finally under the weight of the sword.

The glass eye gazed at her helplessly, yet even then he still sat erect as she went on playing the quiet music for him.

The headache lasted longer than usual. Somewhere in the course of that intolerable pain the General once thought he heard a sound interrupt the music, a sharp sound, and another, a third, the sound made by a stone being slapped into place on a Go board, that ancient game of strategy and daring he had learned as a child. In fact he did hear the sound but it wasn’t made by black and white stones striking wood to acquire or lose territory. It was made by a hand on a face, her hand striking her face, a pathetic gesture of hopelessness because she could do so little for the man she loved.

The General went abroad early in 1935. In the spring of that year she received an invitation to visit his twin brother in Kamakura. Although she had never met him, she knew the history of this strange man who renounced his title and his wealth in order to become a Jew, whereupon he had at once begun to suffer uncommonly from hunger and thirst, to lose weight, and to pass an excessive amount of urine.