The Girl Who Played Go

34

The train comes to a sharp halt. The jolt tears me from my sleep and I hear the order to start marching. As I get out of the carriage, dawn clasps me in its icy fingers. Under a sky tinged with the tiniest hint of mauve, the scorched earth lies uninterrupted as far as the eye can see: not one crop, not a single tree.

The train leaves and we envy our comrades who are traveling on into the inner territories. Our detachment has responsibility for the security of a small town in southern Manchuria, with the curious name of A Thousand Winds.

Huddling my neck right down inside the collar of my uniform, I continue to doze and let the rhythm of the marching carry me along. In just a few months I have learned to sleep and walk at the same time. The regular swinging of my legs warms me and the rocking motion soothes me.

The “wedding night” took place in a pavilion in the middle of the park where Sunlight had already asked me to meet her. After dinner a young servant girl took me to a bedroom where a futon had been unfolded. She helped me to undress and to put on a yukata. I lay down on my back with my arms crossed and tried to gather my thoughts.

I did not know the time, but it must have been late. The silence was oppressive; it was hot. I got up and pulled aside the screens that led out onto the veranda.

The moon was ringed with opaque clouds, and the croaking toads and sighing crickets seemed to be answering each other’s calls in the darkness. I closed the doors and went back to the bed. My feeling of intoxication melted away as I became increasingly impatient. I had never come across virginity, so how would I know what to do?

An almost imperceptible sound made me look up. Sunlight was standing in the doorway, draped in a white kimono. She bowed slightly. Her face was painted in a regal mask, which made her seem all the more inaccessible. She crossed the room silently like a ghost and shut herself in the next room.

She came back out without her ceremonial kimono, but wrapped in a crimson yukata. Her jet-black hair stood out against the fiery silk. She was just a little girl.

She sat for a long time with her hands on her knees, staring into space, then suddenly broke the silence: “Take me in your arms, please.”

I held her awkwardly, pressing my cheek against hers. Her perfume wafted from the neckline of her yukata, making my heart pound.

She lay with her arms by her sides as if she were dead. When I parted her legs she nervously held me to her with all her might. I had to force open her tightly clamped thighs and found that she was icy-cold between her legs. I was dripping with sweat and my sweat mingled with hers, carving dark furrows through her white makeup. Her soaked hair snaked across her cheeks, sometimes creeping into my mouth. She was like a strangled animal, unable to let out even the slightest sound. I wanted to kiss her, but I found the bright-red lipstick repulsive. I stroked her body, enveloped as it was in the yukata. It felt clammy and feverish, and her flesh puckered into goose pimples wherever my fingers touched. In the depths of her pupils I suddenly saw the same terrible fear I had seen in the eyes of condemned men before their execution.

I felt crushed and overwhelmingly discouraged. I let myself fall away from her body and went down on my knees.

“What is it?” she asked in a wavering voice.

“I’m so sorry.”

She burst into tears. “Oh, please.”

Her despair was indescribably distressing. I thought I knew about women but, at twenty, I did not yet know that beyond the realms of pleasure, men enter a twilight world where dignity is lost and where devastated souls stumble through the darkness masked like performers in the theater of Noh. I decided to cover her face with the sheet in which we were both lying and to lift up the bottom of her yukata. In the lamplight her legs looked deathly pale. The long cleft between her legs had sleek fur like an otter. I tried to imagine she was just a prostitute picked up in the street. I could not think of her as just a cavity to be filled by a triumphant phallus seeking its glorious release.

I masturbated, but my member did not respond. Seeing how still the young girl was, I thought suddenly that she had suffocated and was lying there dead.

I lifted the sheet: Sunlight was crying.

To save face, I cut my arm with a dagger and let my blood flow onto the strip of white cloth that was meant to be colored by her virginal blood. A little before dawn, I helped her repowder her face. She rolled up the bloodied strip, put it up her sleeve and left.