The Woman in the Dunes - Machi Abe [44]
He vaguely sensed that there were two kinds of sexual desire. For example, on the basis of the Möbius circle, when you courted a girl, you always began, it seemed, with lectures on nutrition and taste … that is, before you got around to sex. Food exists only in an abstract sense for anybody dying of hunger; there isn’t any such thing as the taste of Kobe beef or Hiroshima oysters. But once one’s belly is full, then one begins to discern differences in taste and textures. Sexual desire was the same. First came desire in general, and only after that did particular sexual tastes evolve. And sex couldn’t be discussed in general; it depended on time and place … sometimes you needed a dose of vitamins … sometimes a bowl of eels and rice. It was a well-thought-out theory, but regrettably not a single girl friend had offered herself to him in support of it, with a readiness to experience sexual desire in general or sex in particular. That was natural. No man or woman is wooed by theory alone. He knew this, but he naïvely observed the theory of the Möbius circle and kept repeatedly pushing the doorbell of an empty house, only because he did not want to commit spiritual rape.
To be sure, he himself wasn’t so romantic as to dream of pure sexual relations. You could do that when you were looking death in the eye … like the bamboo grass that bears seeds just as it is beginning to wither … like starving mice that repeatedly and frantically copulate as they migrate … like tuberculosis patients who are all seized by a kind of sex madness … like the king or ruler who dwells in a tower and devotes himself to establishing a harem … like the soldier for whom every moment is precious as he awaits the enemy attack and who spends those final moments masturbating.…
Fortunately, however, man is not indiscriminately exposed to the dangers of death. Man no longer needs to fear, even in winter; he has been able to free himself of the seasonal sexual urge. Yet when the struggle is over, weapons become an encumbrance. Order has come about, and the power to control sex and brute force lies within man’s grasp, in place of Nature’s. Thus, sexual intercourse is like a commutation ticket: it has to be punched every time you use it. Of course, you must check to see that the ticket is genuine. But this checking is terribly onerous; it corresponds precisely to the complications of order. All kinds of certificates—contracts, licenses, I.D. cards, permits, certificates of title, authorizations, registrations, carrying permits, certificates of membership, letters of recommendation, notes, leases, temporary permits, agreements, income declarations, receipts, even certificates of ancestry … every conceivable type of paper must be mobilized into action.
Thanks to such checks, sex is completely buried under a mantle of certifications … like a basket worm. It would be all right, I suppose, if this were satisfying. But even so, would that be the end of certificates? Wouldn’t there be something else we had forgotten to declare? Both men and women are captives of an oppressive jealousy, always suspicious that the other party has purposely left something out. To demonstrate their honesty they are compelled to issue a new certificate. No one knows where it will ever stop. In the last analysis, the certificate seems to be infinite.
(She blames me for being too argumentative. But I’m not the one who’s argumentative. It’s just the truth.)
“But isn’t that the obligation of love?”
“Not at all. It’s what’s left after you have struck out the restrictions by a process of elimination. If you don’t have that much confidence, you might just as well not have any at all.”
There’s no obligation to go along with this to the extent—and the poor taste—of gift-wrapping sex. Let’s be freshly pressed every morning in sex too. In sex, once the coat’s been worn, it’s already old. You press