There had been rain off and on all day, and it started up again as I was walking from the theater in Tokyo's Ni-chome district of Shinjuku, so I dipped into a small grocery store entered by a foyer in a small apartment building. The deluge, although heavy, hadn't lasted long, and I could use some snacks for the hotel, so I walked the aisles of the store in search of snacks I recognized and liked.
I was feeling at bit out of sorts, caused I think by an aura of being isolated. I was so much into everything in New York City, where I was an assistant professor in theater arts at NYU. There were always Off Off Broadway experimental plays to work with and interesting people working in them. Everything in Tokyo was alien and isolating to me. And I was jittery as I'd come to Tokyo hoping explore a new kind of experience.
I'd just spent two hours, at the behest of Professor Gokyo, consulting at the Sudonobu Theater in the center of the Ni-come gay district on an interesting, to say the least, Japanese-language production of Ira Levin's play, Deathtrap. My specialty was set design and the producers of this production weren't sure they'd gotten the set right. The production itself was a gay sexual version of the old hit Broadway play in which a fading playwright sells an idea for a new play big time but it is actually an idea of a young playwright he is mentoring and the play revolves around the older playwright's need to get rid of his protégé so he can claim ownership of the writing. The two men have a close relationship in the original play; the Japanese theater was doing an interpretation that brought the two men even closer—a relationship in which the playwright was mounting as well as mentoring his protégé. The protégé blows the older playwright and is passionately fucked by his mentor on stage during the production. It was a clever interpretation to be staged in Tokyo's gay district but a bold move even there. The house would be sold out for every performance—indeed orders for tickets were already pouring in from the mere rumor of the production.
My problem had been a language barrier in the consultations. There was an interpreter, who wasn't too good, and there was considerable misunderstanding going both ways. I didn't know any Japanese and I'd felt isolated and incapable of my usual fast pace in formulating, sharing, and conveying ideas. It didn't help that the young Japanese men swirling around me were sexy and were giving me the eye. The set I was supposed to be consulting on was still being erected, they were working on the lighting, and the two actors were practicing on the stage. There was entirely too much activity going on and I constantly felt like I was three steps behind grasping the "discussion" and contributing to it.
It was a feeling that I hadn't expected to have in coming to Tokyo, and now that I was here, it was unavoidably closing in on me on all sides—language I couldn't understand, signs I couldn't read, customs that were alien to me despite how understanding and sensitive the Japanese people were about trying to help, and possibly welcomed hookups being thwarted by the failure to connect interests.
I wondered if Professor Gokyo had felt the same way when he was visiting New York, where the people aren't as solicitous of foreign people and sensibilities. But then Shotei Gokyo could speak good English and Professor Gokyo had hooked up. My basic problem was that I neither spoke nor understood a word of Japanese. Compounded to that was that I wanted to understand them. I found Japanese men sensual and alluring. And, in my limited experience, they were expert and refined in the act, bringing a sense of the romantic to sex while still making it highly arousing and satiating. I had looked forward to some interesting-technique encounters during this trip.
What was most frustrating with this stage play was that they were trying for a refreshingly bold and uninhibited production and I would normally have been all over helping to create this, given the sanction and financial backing to do so.
But I wasn't in Tokyo to consult on a gay theater or, officially, to seek sexual adventure, for that matter. I was part of an international consortium of theater academicians who were attending seminars around the world. Two months previously the seminars had been in New York. Now they were in Tokyo, starting with a reception this evening at the Tokyo University of the Arts in Senju, where Professor Gokyo taught production arts. I had met Gokyo in New York and we'd hit it off well—better than well. We were much the same age—he in his early thirties and me twenty-eight—among an appreciably older crowed. We were, of course, both actively gay, as were most involved in the discipline, and we were attracted to each other and we had fucked.
A drink at his hotel had led to me fucking him in his hotel room. He had been an inventive and athletic sex partner, and we moved with each other in achieving mutual satiation as if we had been long-time lovers. With Gokyo whispering guidance, we both wore kimonos covering naked flesh and fucked on the floor of his hotel room, in front of a floor to ceiling window overlooking nighttime Central Park and the Manhattan skyline. We achieved full, deep penetration, athletic thrusting, and mutual ejaculations without removing the kimonos and still with a sense of each other's arousing nakedness. And after a rest, we did it slower, longer, and more intimately. Our physical and professional attraction to each other had then led to a continuing international correspondence that had been aflame both with the exchange of ideas about the theater and high heat of the orgiastic interactive movement of body parts and exotic technique.
When I'd arrived at my hotel in Tokyo this morning, there had been a note from him. "I have seen that you arrive today," the note said. "I regret I am tied up in preparation meetings for the seminar and could not meet you at the airport or see you before tonight's seminar, but I have taken the presumption of giving you to the Sudonobu Theater early in the afternoon to consult on what I think you will find is an inspired production of Ira Levin's Deathtrap. If you aren't too tired or haven't hooked up already, here is the address, in both English and Japanese—the Japanese for the hotel driver—to the theater. They will be expecting you at about 1:00 p.m.—if you are able to attend."
I had smiled at the hint that he was giving me busy work so that I wouldn't hook up with someone else before seeing him this evening. I also was taken with the image of him giving me to the theater, as if he owned me. Normally I would have objected, but I had left that one coupling with him in his New York hotel with the feeling that he did, indeed, own me to the extent he wanted to. I topped, but he dominated. When I had been inside him, he had spoken to and of my shaft as if it were a separate personality, one that was his to remain steely hard and to give him pleasure. And he was not shy about telling me of the pleasure it was giving him. His was a sweet and sour approach of refinement and reserve flowing into hot passion and quite frank verbalization of pleasures, and, yes, he had told me, this was a Japanese approach to sex. He had whetted my appetite for knowing and experiencing more of that.
The labels on the shelved packages were overwhelming to me as I moved down the narrow aisle in the small grocery store. I couldn't concentrate on the items and I constantly had my eye to the front window of the shop and the status of the raindrops outside. I traveled extensively in Europe and was used to the euro and dollar ruling everywhere. Japanese money was beyond me—as were Japanese Kanji characters instead of an alphabet I knew and the exclusively Japanese chatter going on around me. Even the music wafting through the store in half tones was alien to my world. I could only pick out a few items and hope that I had enough money to cover them.
