from J

KENZABURO OE

How much would you risk, what would you sacrifice to sip from the deepest well of human experience? The question usually comes up regarding murder: Would you kill a person just to know what it feels like? To know what it means to rob someone of their life? To push the knife blade till it breaks the skin, then turn it in the spurting artery? Most of us, thankfully, are not born to become disaffected, murderous Patrick Batemans of American Psycho, the upper-class kids in Rope, or the randomly shooting “model Surrealists” of André Breton’s Second Manifesto. We live quiet, contained lives, for the most part as morally as we can, and only infrequently wonder what we might be missing. The film Fight Club challenged this ethos in a particularly poignant way: would you hit rock bottom to know what that meant, to know you would survive, to allow yourself the understanding of absolute abjection? As in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian or René Girard’s analysis of ritual, violence is an age-old gateway to enlightenment. Would you?

When the question is taken from extreme violence to extreme sex, it loses none of its intrigue. Most of us have indulged, at least in the safety of our own minds, in outlandish sexual behavior and felt the icy burn of its appeal. Much of the porn industry is based on precisely this instinct for sexual tourism. But what if the objective is not mere arousal but a kind of philosophical redefinition of the Fight Club kind? What if there was a kind of sexual abjection that you could pass through in order to emerge in nirvana, enlightenment, or at least outside the straitjacket of quotidian boredom?

This is the question raised when the protagonist of Kenzaburo Oe’s 1963 novel J decides to become a chikan—a groper of women on commuter trains. Oe, a Nobel Prize winner, crafts the philosophical birthing of a pervert with incredible nuance. This excerpt, where J has his first encounter, is one of my favorite passages of erotic prose in the entire history of literature. There are things one can only know through experience; it is up to us to decide whether we dare to do them.

Standing immediately in front of him was a woman of about his age. She was at a right angle to him, and their bodies were pressed together, with her chest, stomach, and thighs fitted to his. J caressed the woman. His right hand moved into the space between her buttocks, while his left hand traveled down her belly toward the space between her thighs. His erect penis was touching the outside of her leg. He and the woman were about the same height. His heavy breath stirred the down on her flushed earlobes. At first J trembled with fear and his breathing was irregular. Was the woman not going to cry out? . . . When his fear was at its peak, J’s penis was hardest. Now it was pressed tight against the woman’s thigh. He shook with profound fear as he stared straight at her chiseled profile . . . If the girl cried out in disgust or fear, he would have an orgasm. He held on to this fantasy like fear, like desire. But she didn’t cry out. She kept her lips firmly closed. Suddenly her eyes closed tightly, like a curtain with its ropes cut falling to the stage. At that instant the restraining pressure of her buttocks and thighs relaxed. Descending, J’s right hand reached the depths of her now-soft cheeks. His left hand went to the hollow between her outspread thighs.

J lost his fear and, at the same time, his desire weakened. Already his penis was beginning to wilt.

—translated by Luk Van Haute