Читать книгу Amorous Woman - Donna George Storey - Страница 4

The day I left Japan, I stared at my reflection in the mirror in the airport ladies’ room and made the following vows:

I would never tell another lie, especially to myself.

I would never let desire overwhelm common sense.

I would never sleep with a man who was married to someone else, mime fellatio with a complete stranger on a stage, or take money for sex again.

In fact, to cover all bases, I would never have sex again with anyone, man or woman, for the rest of my life.

A tall order given my recent past, but I figured if the Amorous Woman could renounce her sluttish ways and spend the rest of her days meditating in a mountain hermitage, then so could I.

My vows were almost too easy to keep in my first month in San Francisco. I was busy training for my new job teaching Japanese culture to businessmen facing overseas assignment in Tokyo and finding my own place, a sunny townhouse on the Peninsula, absurdly spacious by Japanese standards. I began to feel so virtuous I wondered if I couldn’t just go ahead and become a real nun on the do-it-yourself plan. I’d already given up most of my possessions. I was eating spartan meals, although that was partly because I kept forgetting to go to the grocery store. Celibacy? So far so good, if you don’t count lustful thoughts, but those would fade with time, I hoped. I hadn’t shaved my head yet, but I did invest in a book on Zen meditation. I liked the idea of spending long hours in a state of serene mindfulness, cleansing away the years of illusion from my soul.

It may seem strange that I wanted to model my life on that of a Japanese courtesan-turned-nun, who existed only in the fantasies of her creator, the seventeenth-century monk Ihara Saikaku. Yet to me, she’s always seemed like a kindred spirit.

I remember well the first time I met her. My Japanese literature professor told the class, with a twinkle in his eye, that this week’s reading had been banned in pre-war Japan because the main character was a woman of strong carnal appetite and even reading about such behavior was thought to corrupt national morals. I purposely did the assignment on a day when my roommate was away, expecting I would need to slide my hand down my pants to take care of my own amorous urges. To my disappointment, I read the whole book with barely a twinge. True, the Amorous Woman was a nymphomaniac who spread her legs for every man who crossed her path—a common male fantasy that seems to vanish as soon as a guy meets a real-life woman who likes sex—but the act itself was buried deep in the footnotes and Japanese wordplay. I did learn, for example, that in seventeenth-century Japan, if a woman’s eyebrows itched it meant her lover would visit her soon. Interesting, yes, but hardly a turn-on.

The true threat of the Amorous Woman, I decided, and the reason I admired her, was her sense of adventure. She insisted on the freedom to live many lives and indulge her passions, difficult enough to do in this day and age and almost unknown for a woman in old Japan. At one time I yearned for the same thing, and in a way I got it. In my nine years in Japan, I did lead many lives and have a lot of sex—much of it very good indeed.

But as the California winter rains turned to the balmy sunshine of spring, I wasn’t so sure I really could follow in her footsteps as far as the total renunciation of worldly desire. How did a woman who once devoted her whole existence to sensual pleasure manage to pull that off?

I know now that the literal translation of ‘Amorous Woman’ in Japanese was ‘a woman who loved colors.’ Even for a nun, there was plenty of color to love in a mountain hermitage above Kyoto: the blushing cherry blossoms, the scarlet maples, the writhing golden flames of the summer bonfires lit to welcome dead souls back to earth, the pure white clouds of a spring morning that the old poets called ‘the floating bridge of dreams.’ Could the Amorous Woman still let herself enjoy the silken glide of spring water on her fingers and the scent of plum blossoms on a cold February morning? Or did the prayers lull her senses into sleep, so that her only yearning was to feel no desire at all? Did she ever tell herself that maybe what she did in the course of her colorful career wasn’t so bad—that millions of people have affairs, get divorced, have sex with strangers for thrills or money or both? Was it such a sin that she did her best to ‘fuck like a man’? Many women have done that, not to mention most men.

Only after I bought myself a new copy of the book at the local university store, did I remember that the Amorous Woman did not really give up desire. When two handsome young men made a pilgrimage to her hut to ask her advice in matters of sensual love, she soon fell back to her old ways, drinking saké with them and singing love songs.

A temptation I could easily avoid, I told myself, as I dressed for my class on Japanese business practices one Tuesday evening in April. My gray skirt and blazer—chosen to give a short, slender woman like me at least a suggestion of professional gravitas—were dull enough for a convent. So what if I added a blouse of periwinkle blue, a color that never failed to earn me compliments on the striking blue of my eyes? And so what if my students just so happened to be two young men, and rather good-looking ones at that?

I wasn’t that far gone in my fantasy. I knew it was the twentieth century, and I wasn’t really a nun, and there was little chance they would ply me with liquor and ask for a song.