Life Ceremony, page 9
Going by these standards, probably the most clued in of us all in our class would actually be Shiho. Shiho had had a boyfriend since first grade, had kissed him in the fourth grade, and had initiated sex with him in the summer of their first year of junior high. But that wasn’t why I thought she was grown up. Even if she hadn’t had those experiences, I would have thought the same thing. It was because she wasn’t interested in being “clued in” like everyone else. She never used other people’s words or sense of values in talking about her own body or her desires. And she always approached her body with the utmost care. This was what I admired most in her.
The first time I heard Shiho talk about sex was in the winter of our first year in junior high.
After school, Shiho and I often found ourselves alone together in the art room. The art club was divided into two sections, oil painting and watercolors, and we were the only two who used oils. The materials were expensive, and working with oils looked difficult, so everyone else chose watercolors, busying themselves with that in art room 2. It was a bit awkward with just the two of us in art room 1, painting in silence, so I struck up a conversation with Shiho, and we gradually became good friends.
She was always well-behaved and serious, just the way she was in our homeroom, and whatever the topic of conversation, she never made fun of me and always carefully considered her answers, so I enjoyed talking with her. Soon after the end of the first winter vacation, we’d been talking about falling in love, and I’d been really surprised to hear that she’d already had sex with a boy. I thought having that experience in the first year of junior high was a bit early, even for the more grown-up girls who played around a lot, and at first I found it hard to believe that such a well-behaved little girl could have done so. My first thought was that she must have been taken advantage of by some pervert with a Lolita fetish.
“No, it’s nothing like that. I had sex with my boyfriend of my own free will. So it’s all okay.”
“What? But how old is your boyfriend? Isn’t he taking advantage of you?”
“He’s the same age as me. He’s my cousin. I started it, both when we first kissed and when we had sex. Of course I didn’t do anything that would frighten Yota—oh, that’s his name, by the way.”
“You started it? But why?”
“Mmm, it’s hard to explain, but . . . well, I didn’t really think of what we were doing as sex. We were cuddling, and I just wanted to get inside his skin. That’s all.”
I gazed in disbelief at Shiho’s immature body. She didn’t even look like she’d started her period yet! After a while, though, listening to her talk, I began to realize that she hadn’t done it just to go along with the boy’s sexual desire, nor from curiosity, nor from any self-awareness of wanting to be more grown up than those around her, but from pure sexual arousal.
Shiho and her boyfriend could meet only once a year during the summer Obon festival. Every year, all her relatives gathered at the family home in the mountains, and the ten or so cousins spent their time playing with fireworks, eating watermelon, and so on. Shiho and Yota had made a promise when they were little that they would marry each other, and during these summers they would secretly slip out of the house and go exploring in the traditional old storehouse and walk along the paths between their grandmother’s rice fields, holding hands.
Shiho lived in Tokyo, whereas the boy lived near their grandmother’s house, and at such a distance, it was difficult for them to meet up alone, so during Obon, they spent as much time together as possible. When they were in fourth grade, they’d kissed for the first time, in an attic room of the house, and last year they’d had sex in the storehouse. I was astonished by the way she talked about it all so casually.
I’d always thought kissing and sex was a bit gross. But listening to Shiho, I began to think it was something innocent and pure.
When we were in second grade, Aki from my group and a girl from the classroom next to ours started going on about how they’d been kissed by older boys, and things like that, but to me, the kisses they’d experienced didn’t sound anything like what Shiho was talking about.
Wanting to get inside someone’s skin. That sort of thing had never even occurred to me. The other girls didn’t look like they were kissing boys out of any particular desire of their own. It was more like they wanted to prove to themselves that, having been subjected to a kiss, they were all clued in and grown up.
Shiho had never once said that she had “been kissed.” For her, kissing was something she did of her own volition.
If adults heard the sorts of things that Shiho was saying, there would no doubt be a huge scandal, but I thought she was just being true to her own body. She looked carefully at her own desire, and after seeing what her body wanted and respecting her partner’s wishes, she had sex. Shiho’s kisses were not something lewd created by someone else, but something all her own.
I was not so immature that I thought experiencing sex early would make me grown up. I just wanted to be true to my own sexual arousal in the way that Shiho was.
The weather was clear, without a cloud in the sky, and the watercolor art group had all gone with the teacher to sketch at a local park. With nobody at all left in art room 2 next door, things were quieter than usual.
“Hey, Shiho, when you kiss, do you use your tongue too?” I blurted out as I mixed together some red paint.
Her brush paused, and she laughed.
“Ruri, where did you hear something like that?”
“Yesterday, from Miho and Aki,” I said in a small voice, feeling terribly childish.
The only things I knew about kissing and sex were what I’d learned in our health education class. Maybe because of Shiho’s influence, I didn’t really like people talking about that sort of thing, using vulgar language, and I tended to walk away from the group when they started this kind of talk. “Ruri really hates it when we talk dirty,” Aki and the others would say.
I generally ignored anyone who said Hey, Ruri, did you know . . . and tried to force me to listen to something dirty, which was probably why I hadn’t actually known until yesterday that tongues were involved in kissing. Aki, Miho, and the others burst out laughing. “What, Ruri, didn’t you even know that?”
“The way you use your tongue too, there are lots of different techniques, you know!”
“That senior student was about to do it to me, but I got creeped out and ran away. He’s really cool, but he does act like he’s in a porn movie sometimes.”
“Right! Remember that movie we watched online at your house the other day, Aki? It was so sexy!”
It felt quite dangerous hearing the two of them. They probably knew a lot more extreme stuff than Shiho did.
But Aki and Miho and the others were only repeating other people’s lewd words. I couldn’t help feeling that they were not properly nurturing the lust in their own bodies, which meant they were easily drawn into other people’s lewdness. But shouldn’t I know about these sorts of things at my age? Mom always told me that sex education was important. “If you didn’t know anything, you wouldn’t be able to defend yourself,” she said. So I had gone to class, but that didn’t tell me anything about the “dirty” side of things, and it seemed there was plenty of that out there.
“Is it weird not knowing that sort of thing?” I asked Shiho.
“No, it isn’t weird. And what’s more, you don’t know until the moment comes what sort of kiss you’re going to do. When Yota and I kissed, we had no idea that adults did that sort of thing. It’s just that it happened to coincide with something I’d thought I wanted to try.”
“So it’s not that you knew how to kiss when you did it?”
Shiho shook her head and smiled. “No. The two of us just made it up by ourselves. When I later read in a book about other people doing it, I felt a bit relieved, but also a bit disappointed. I thought Yota and I had invented it!”
“Don’t you know why you wanted to do it, Shiho?”
“Nope. We started out licking each other’s cheeks ’cos they looked so soft and juicy. And then I wanted to get inside Yota’s body. I wanted to go inside his skin, and I licked his eyelid. Yota was so surprised, his mouth dropped open, so I stuck my tongue in it. Yota was really shocked, but when I explained it to him, he understood. And he told me to go ahead.
“Yota’s skin is suntanned, and thicker than mine. I liked touching it with my tongue, but it was different inside his mouth. First I licked the inside of his lower lip. It was so soft, like a baby, and I was amazed by how soft the internal parts of people’s bodies are.
“I wanted to taste more of Yota’s insides, and when I flicked my tongue across the back of his teeth, I tasted a little blood. There was a mouth ulcer, a little hole in Yota. I softly licked it with my tongue, taking care not to hurt him. The inside of his body is so complex, and however much I touched it with my tongue, I never got tired of it. Tons of water kept welling up from inside him, making the inside of his mouth wet. His gums were hard, and his veins formed ridges at the root of his tongue. I felt so happy at the thought that I was among his innards!
“I never knew that the inside of Yota’s strong body was so soft, and I kept licking the inside of his cheek. He laughed, saying it tickled.”
This sounded very different from the “hot kiss techniques” Aki and Miho talked about.
“I wonder if I’ll ever feel that way about someone.”
“I’m sure you will! You’re so grown up, Ruri.”
I was taken aback. “What? But Aki and the others say I’m a child. They say I don’t know anything.”
“I think the only reason you don’t know, Ruri, is that you cherish your ignorance. I think it’s important to be able to talk properly about dirty things, but maybe it’s enough to do so with people who are important to you. I’ve only ever spoken about this with Yota and you, for example. Somehow I get the feeling that if you talk too much about it, you might know how to kiss, but you’ll no longer be able to kiss your own way. It’s not that you don’t want to know, Ruri, it’s that you want to be free, isn’t it?”
I felt better for hearing her say that. Feeling a bit nervous, I swallowed some saliva and said quietly, “Um . . . there’s something I haven’t told you, Shiho. A long time ago, just once, I had a dream.”
“A dream?”
“A strange dream. I was in grade five of elementary school, and I’d just got my first period a little while before. I was asleep in bed, enveloped in my duvet, which smelled of the sun after Mom had aired it outside. And I had a dream of floating lightly in soap bubbles.”
Shiho was watching me intently. Normally she never stopped painting when we talked, but today she put her brush down on her palette.
“I started feeling kind of wiggly, and then suddenly all the soap bubbles burst at once. And it felt as though all the veins in my body constricted, as if something inside my body had actually burst too. I was so surprised, I woke up. It was only a dream, but I felt a kind of numb sensation all over, and really refreshed. I still wonder what it was! I tried looking it up in books in the library, but I couldn’t find anything about it.”
Shiho thought a moment, then said, “I think it was probably what boys call a wet dream.”
“A wet dream? Do girls have them too?”
“So I’ve heard. I think I read about it in a novel. It sounds like a wonderful experience!”
“Haven’t you ever experienced it, Shiho?”
She shook her head. “I’ve done it by myself, so I’ve had that feeling of your body bursting. But I’ve never had it in a dream.”
“Oh.” Mixing the red paint on my palette, I asked her, “What does it feel like to do it by yourself? If you don’t mind me asking.”
“I don’t mind you asking me, Ruri. Um . . . it feels like you’re doing something really pure.”
“Pure?”
“I can’t explain it very well, but it’s kind of like your body becomes innocent, like a child, and starts feeling nice, and then something bursts in your body. Afterward you feel pleasantly tired and floaty, kind of relieved, and you get sleepy.”
What Shiho was saying sounded quite similar to my experience, but it also sounded amazing, like something in a fairy tale.
We heard the teacher’s footsteps outside and hastily picked up our brushes.
Shiho got on with painting a rural scene from a photo she’d taken in the summer. I was having trouble painting the plastic apple set on a table, and I carried on mixing the red paint on my palette.
When I came back from swimming in the school pool, the classroom always felt more humid than ever, and I sometimes had the illusion I was still swimming.
I’d let my hair down so it would dry. My hair was black and reached almost to my waist. It smelled faintly of chlorine from the pool water.
The fourth period was self-study English.
I was half asleep, feeling languid and floaty, listening abstractedly to Aki and Miho chatting playfully with some boys as they filled in the worksheets.
Suddenly one of the boys, a loudmouth called Okazaki, said, “Hey, do girls play solo?”
“Solo play? Ha ha ha! You’re crazy, Okazaki!”
All the boys roared with laughter at Okazaki imitating masturbation with his hand.
Grinning, he went on mischievously, “I mean, they all do in porn movies, don’t they?”
“Okazaki, you’re disgusting! Of course we don’t,” Aki said loudly, her face bright red, then rolled up her English worksheet and hit him on the back with it.
“I guess. But you know what? I bet Seto has. Maybe her boyfriend taught her or something.”
“Yeah, Seto’s really sexy!”
Hearing my surname come up so suddenly made my ears burn. Normally I would have yelled back at him, but the conversation I’d had with Shiho the day before replayed in my head, and I couldn’t move.
Had the boys heard about that conversation from someone and been laughing about it behind my back? Was that why they were talking about it now, teasing me for being a slut, enjoying seeing my reaction? Just the thought of it made me want to run away.
I couldn’t speak and was hoping they’d drop it, when I heard a small voice say “Okazaki-kun.”
Okazaki, who was sitting on his desk with his knees up, turned around to see Shiho’s small figure standing there.
“Okazaki-kun, here’s the class log. The teacher just gave it to me. You were on class duty yesterday, weren’t you? The teacher said you should rewrite it.”
“Oh, er . . .”
The boys who had all been getting into the dirty talk seemed somewhat stunned by the sudden appearance of childlike Shiho.
She took a deep breath and, still holding out the class log to Okazaki, muttered in a small, feeble voice, as if chanting something, “Our pleasure is ours, your pleasure is yours, we discover our own pleasure, and we don’t betray our own pleasure, we don’t betray our own bodies . . .”
She was muttering tonelessly and fast, not really intending to be heard. It sounded more like a spell. The black file containing the class log that she was clutching looked like some kind of magic book.
Shiho never normally talked to boys, and everyone looked as though they hadn’t managed to catch her words. “Eh? What? What did she say?” They all looked at one another in confusion.
For some reason, I’d clearly heard what she said. She didn’t repeat it, just smiled and, looking down, handed the class log to Okazaki, went back to her desk, and started doing the English worksheet.
“Hey, what did she say? Did you hear?”
“No, I didn’t. I wonder what it was . . . something about you guys . . . and bodies . . . I kind of heard something, but . . .”
“I don’t know, but wasn’t it basically something like telling you to stop talking dirty? Hey, Okazaki, you even got told off by little Hashimoto, you idiot!”
“It’s true,” Aki said, laughing. “Boys always go on and on about things like that. You even made Ruri embarrassed, didn’t you?”
Relieved, everyone started up again with the dirty talk.
They all vied with each other to be as slangy and vulgar as possible as they displayed their knowledge and experience. Aki and Miho kept gleefully screeching “No way!” and “You’re so disgusting!” and everyone burst out laughing. They were all starting to laugh at their own sexuality.
Shiho never did anything like that. I stared at her, intently completing her English worksheet without looking up.
At lunchtime, as everyone took out their lunch boxes, I grabbed Shiho’s arm as she started to stand up, and I pulled her onto the balcony.
“Ruri, what’s wrong?” she said. “It’s time to have lunch!”
I closed the door behind us so the two of us were alone. Shiho looked mystified.
“Shiho. Um, just now I felt embarrassed about myself. And that made me feel really, really ashamed. So I was super glad when you intervened.”
Shiho looked relieved, and her expression relaxed. “You know, me too. I felt somehow that it was me they were laughing at, like they were turning something really important to me into a laughing matter, and I worried that it would be destroyed as a result. So I said those magic words. My voice is really quiet, so I didn’t think Okazaki and the others would hear what I said, but I wanted to say it out loud all the same. I had to prove to myself that I could say it, that deep down I didn’t feel embarrassed, in order to dispel my own fears. It’s a magic charm to protect my world.”
Distressed, she kept looking at the floor. “If I hadn’t done it, I felt like I could be swallowed up. Same as you, too, Ruri.”
Seeing her in her oversize uniform, her face downturned, that same Shiho I’d always thought of as being so grown up now looked terribly frail. I couldn’t help wrapping my arms around her small body.
