It was forbidden, that street. When I was a girl, I was not allowed to go down that road. My mother had made it clear that I could only go as far as the end of our street when I went out on my bicycle, never to wander. The forbidden street was at the bottom of the hill, just to the left, at the end. The entrance was shaded with trees, sloping down into the park. At the end, the road turned into hiking trails, eucalyptus trees, mystery.
I wanted him to drive me through the neighborhood where I grew up, where I skinned my knees from bicycle falls, where I played and drew in colored chalk on the sidewalk. We drove around and up and through the hills, my memory as a girl following along the asphalt. “Where can we go?” he asks. I give him a look, wanting. We kiss quickly. He leans close to me as he curves the moving car through the narrow roads, guiding the steering wheel through my childhood memories. I nestle my head into the scoop of his shoulder, planting little kisses lightly along his neck, nuzzling my nose to smell his skin. I trail my fingers along the edge of his ear, the curving shell roundness of it. Just then, at the bottom of the hill, was the forbidden street I wasn’t supposed to go down.
“Let’s go down that street. Turn here.”
The street is quiet. There are houses on one side. The other side is hidden by the densely wooded brush and trees. The tires crackle slowly along the road. We look for a spot to park. I have butterflies in my stomach and a melancholy ache in my bones. He turns the car around at the end, finding a place. We kiss for a moment. It’s dark, headlights off, streetlights buzzing in their orange glow. We can hear someone’s television in the distance. Like teenagers on a date, we cannot wait to kiss. I clasp his face lightly with my hands. The natural scent of him, his warm mouth melting against mine, I’m intoxicated by his kiss. He leans across the center and unbuckles his seatbelt. The click of his seatbelt undone, the sound, opens a place in my body. My blouse, my wide leather belt, my jeans, the seatbelt—confining me. I want to remove everything, remove the things in my life that keep me from him. I want undoing. I unbuckle my heeled sandals. I undo the seatbelt. His hands tuck up underneath my hair. He pulls my face deeper into our kiss.
His mouth and mine, his mouth, mine.
I look out the window into the nigh, and see myself as a girl, running down toward the end where the dirt path begins. I see myself looking back at the older me in the car. She knows— that little girl— where I am going. Whatever she knows, it’s discovered here, this secret place at the end of this street. She sees me, thirty years later, in a minivan full of my children’s things– a baby seat, a baseball bag, the sand toys for the beach all cluttered in the trunk, kissing a man I am having an affair with, a man I am falling in love with, in the dark, stealing a moment away. Secret. It seems that my life has come to this secret and hidden end of a street, to rediscover something forgotten within me.
We climb into the back of the van, my jeans pulled off, removing my belt, my pussy wet, his hard sex in my hand. “You are so hard,” I marvel, as the length and swell of his cock is warm and heavy with thick arousal. I caress his sex with one hand. I cup his balls with the other. He is sitting on the seat, half dressed, still wearing his shirt. I lean up and into him, kissing him deeply. Holding his body to mine, my blouse is sticking from sweat and desire, the fabric coming between the smoothness of our bodies. I want to feel him naked and breathing upon me. I pull the fabric away to feel his belly and chest against mine. He pulls his shirt away, too. We want our skin touching. I want to dissolve into him where the world is golden-yellow and soft like sunlight in summertime memories. I want to melt away into the light as he plunges his body into mine. No barriers, nothing between us, not even the years we lived so close to one another, never knowing that all this time, we were already close in parallel existence. I want his hunger, his sadness, his memories, all of his colors inside of me, blending both of our shadows, touching, like watercolors all bleeding together until the paper is saturated with imperfect beauty.
My lover’s face in the shadows is luminous and delicate. There is something within him that is intangible, revealing itself to me. His face is like moonlight through a raincloud. I put my hand to his cheek, making sure he is there. Here in the dark, the blueness of the evening, illuminated by the amber street lamps lighting the shadows within ourselves, the forgotten places within us can no longer stay hidden. I open my eyes to see him in the dark. He cannot see me entirely. We can only see each other in the half-light. We are shadows of each other. We are radiant with desire, opening and tasting what is true, kissing him, kissing him. By this desire, he is awakening my soul. His fingers and hands light along my body, undoing me, releasing me, bringing me back to life.
I feel released from everything when we kiss. Nothing is binding me to the gravity of my existence. I am a butterfly coming out of a chrysalis. I am returning to myself within his embrace, by his kiss. We move around in the back, trying to find the right position. We kiss, and I laugh like a teenage girl. My legs are up, bare and dangling over his shoulder. He can’t see my face at all now. What he can see he finds with his hands. He discovers me in the slip of my wanting. My skin against his, my pussy is flowering with ripeness, and, as he touches me there, as he slides his fingers inside, he has me, he possesses me— all of me— the girl running down the street and the woman in the back seat of the car.
We kiss. I press my body into his. My hands are slipping all around his shoulders, feeling the fabric of his shirt, flattening my palms, smoothing and stroking his chest, squeezing his arms, and pulling him against me. I want him inside of me. My hands caress up along the back of his neck. My fingernails claw into his black hair. I have this erotic need to kiss him in the back of the car, half naked like this. It brings moments from girlhood into womanhood colliding within me like a surreal dream. I pretend it is him that I first gave myself to in the back of a car. I pretend, all this time, it was he, this man I see in the half-light, the blue shadows curving along his handsome face, his smile, his sighs. I suckle his lower lip, and he says something, pulling away, mystified, searching for my face. He says something beautiful. He is beatific in that moment. I suck his lip in a kiss again, and the same reaction comes. He is searching for my face. The kissing is making us dizzy with the feeling we have. We are in this dream together, looking out the windows at the broken indigo and granite colors, just shapes now, the houses, the street. We are dreaming each other. What we cannot see with our eyes, we can see with our hands, with our kisses. We can see everything about each other and all the years that paralleled themselves, bringing us to this moment, all the secrets once so elusive, now illuminated.
Thirty years before, I ran down that street, not supposed to go there, not allowed. Danger. My mother worried about someone kidnapping me, taking me away. Now, I want to be taken, I want someone to kidnap me. “Take me,” I whisper.
We are in the back of the van. My body is longing for him to be deep inside of me. I am sucking him as he straddles the farthest back seat, slinking into a position so I can take his cock into my mouth. My face nuzzles into his belly, making my way down. I inhale his musky scent, petting the soft nest of hair there with my palm, pressing down upon where his pubic bone meets the base of his sex. Tenderly I open my mouth to take him in, my mouth wet, longing to suck him, licking the head, savoring the length of his erect cock. He is hard. So hard, I have never felt him harder than that. I want him to kidnap me, just take me and take me. I don’t want to go back. I want to run away. I want him so much I can’t imagine how it’s happened. It consumes me, this want, and there’s no stopping it.
Outside the car windows, it’s deep night. We can only hear our breath and our sighing, our desire for one another climbing over the velour car seats, reaching the branches of the trees outside, shaking. I am shaking with orgasms. He gives them to me, over and over until everything blurs together and I don’t know who I am anymore.
The gray concrete of the street softly encompasses us. There is no time, only our breath, our hands, our kisses. My body sinks upon him, I climb upon him, slide him within me. When I am like this, on top of him, I am his. I belong to him, and that is what I need. It doesn’t really matter what we do, or how we do it.
He moves us down onto the carpeted floor of the back of the van. My leg is cramped against the side of the car interior. I cannot see his face now, but he can see mine by the dim light of the window. I feel him watching me as I ride him, moaning a little, feeling the marvelous way his cock slides in and half out of my cunt, my wet and juicy place where he is entering me. He grasps the sides of my hips, holding me upon him. He holds, squeezes me, and shakes my fleshy hips with yearning. I feel like a woman. When he holds my hips like that, I feel him possess me. The softest place of me, not just the inside of my body, but the most secret place, he finds, he uncovers. I am naked inside. I am his. I am myself again.
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In the floating world where all things change
Love never changes by promising never to change.
(Geisha song)
During Edo-period Japan (1600-1867), the yujo were the highest class of all courtesans. These sex professionals were trained in the bedroom arts from the time they were young: blossoming into womanhood, mastering the erotic arts, flourishing as a prostitute of a high order. Prostitution during that era of Japan was legal, but carefully licensed. One such ‘red lantern district’ was Shimabara, the Pleasure Quarter of Kyoto. Another was Yoshiwara, the Pleasure District of Edo (Tokyo).
The yujo were not geisha. They were the royalty of prostitutes, the refined artisans of erotica and lovemaking. Seduction was their art form from the way they used their harigata (dildo) to how to pleasure a man (shakuhachi しゃくはち or fellatio). Yujo knew about aphrodisiacs and the exotic practice of kissing (seppun). The Yujo women were “love artists.”
This romantic era of Japan was called Ukiyo
(Japanese: 浮世 “Floating World”)
From the Wikipedia resource, this Renaissance period of art and pleasure described the Edo pleasure district as:
“Yoshiwara, the licensed red-light district of Edo (modern Tokyo), which was the site of many brothels, chashitsu tea houses, and kabuki theaters frequented by Japan’s growing middle class.
People involved in mizu shōbai (水商売) (“the water trade”) would include hōkan (comedians), kabuki (popular theatre of the time), dancers, dandies, rakes, tea-shop girls, Kanō (painters of the official school of painting), courtesans who resided in seirō (green houses) and geisha in their okiya houses.
The courtesans would consist of yujo (women of pleasure/prostitutes), kamuro (young female students), shinzō (senior female students), hashi-jōro (lower-ranking courtesans), kōshi-jōro (high-ranking courtesans just below tayū), tayū (high-ranking courtesans), oiran (“castle-topplers,” named that way for how quickly they could part a daimyō (lord) from his money), yarite (older chaperones for an oiran), and the yobidashi who replaced the tayū when they were priced out of the market.
In addition to courtesans, there were also geisha/geiko, maiko (apprentice geishas), otoko geisha (male geishas), danna (patrons of a geisha), and okasan (geisha teahouse managers). The lines between geisha and courtesans were sharply drawn, however – a geisha was never to be sexually involved with a customer, though there were exceptions.
The term “water trade” (mizu-shobai 水商売) is the “floating world” which is metaphor for floating, drinking, and impermanence. Sex was like water. Water was “yin” and feminine, and, conversely, a man’s sexual energy was “yang” energy. Sex during the Edo-period Ukiyo life was imbued with poetry, art, and dream-like desire. Longing and secrets, mystery and lust.
Waiting anxiously for you
Unable to sleep, but falling into a doze—
Are those words of love
Floating to my pillow,
Or is this too a dream…?
My eyes open and here is my tear-drenched sleeve.
Perhaps it was a sudden rain.
(Geisha song)
Geisha were not permitted to have sexual relations with the yujo’s customers. The term “Geisha” means “Artist” and the art of Geisha was entertainment— dance, shamisen playing, and flirtatious conversation. The yujo were the sexual artists, great lovers, and ladies of pleasure. They were elegant enchantresses of the pillow.
Within the shoji screened worlds of tea houses, brothels, and the theater, geisha and yujo were not the only women of pleasure. There were varying levels of class and status within their own floating worlds— the Shiro (white) Geisha that entertained and flirted, the Joro (whore) Geisha were the tawdry types, and the Machi (town) Geisha were former dancing girls (odoriko). Lower class prostitutes and amateur whores were illegally working the towns outside of pleasure districts.
Even further into darkness were the unmentioned girls and women that came into the world of prostitution without a choice. Girls sold into brothels, not the beautiful sort of life that the yujo and geisha led. The Yoshiwara district alone was home to about 1,750 women in the 18th century.
Geisha embody the extreme feminine allure in Japan, as opposed to the wife’s position in Japanese society. Geisha are witty and elicit fantasies; they intrigue and delight. The wife at home may appreciate the geisha’s art of entertaining her husband, relieving her of such matters. The wife ruled the domestic household and her husband’s finances, raised children, while the geisha entertained, flirted, and enchanted.
Shunga-e paintings were the erotica of the Edo-period, and the artists that created shunga-e were sometimes the same as those who made the famous Ukiyo-e woodblock prints— famous artists of Edo were also the creators of erotic prints and pornographic fantasies.
Artists of the Erotic Shunga-e were also great artists in general. Such as Katsushika Hokusai, who created Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (富嶽三十六景 Fugaku Sanjūrokkei) and the famous image The Great Wave off Kanagawa (神奈川沖浪裏 Kanagawa Oki Nami Ura).
Hokusai’s erotic art was also made with great talent. Most notably, The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife
(蛸と海女 Tako to ama, Octopus and shell diver).
Making love with you
Is like drinking sea water.
The more I drink
The thirstier I become,
Until nothing can slake my thirst
But to drink the entire sea.
(Marichiko)
(Hokusai ~ Exhausted Lovers)
Romance and courtship in Heian-period Japan, pre-Edo times set in ancient Kyoto (Heian-kyo), painted the landscape for lovers brushing their hearts out in calligraphy into fervent love letters. Poetry was the vehicle of erotic love, longing, passion and desire. Lovemaking etiquette was such that even the ladies of the court and their noblemen were hot for sex and romance, writing poems to pursue, to enchant, and to express their innermost secrets of their hearts.
An excerpt from Lesley Downer’s book, Women of the Pleasure Quarters: The Secret History of Geisha:
“But what made Heian period most extraordinary was the way in which art and the cult of beauty were bound up with love. For more than sexual desire or gut-wrenching passion, love was an art form, an opportunity to put brush to paper, to immortalize the moment in a small literary gem.
Having heard that a certain lady was very beautiful or, even more titillating, had beautiful handwriting, a nobleman would sit down to compose a waka, a thirty-one syllable poem, and brush it, in his finest calligraphy, on delicately hued scented paper. When she received it, the lady would assess the handwriting and color of the paper as well as the wit and appropriateness of the poem before brushing a reply. The nobleman would be waiting with bated breath to see whether her handwriting and poem lived up to expectations.
If the exchange of poems was satisfactory, he would eventually assay a visit. He would creep in at night and immediately, in the pitch darkness, remove his clothes, lift the silken counterpane, lie down on the hard straw mat next to the lady and without further ado consummate the relationship. Slipping away before dawn, he would then brush an eloquent morning-after poem, bewailing the rising of the sun or the crowing of the cock announcing the hour of farewell. The lady in her turn would brush a reply. Thus through poems they communicated their decision as to whether to continue the affair or not.”
Erecting like
The upwards curve of a
Threatening shakuhachi
The shakuhachi is a flute, and ‘shakuhachi curve’ suggests a strong penis. The phallic symbol of the instrument allowed Edo-minded lovers to playfully muse about fellatio. As provocative as blowing a flute was to the lustful minds of Ukiyo era, the flute was used in many woodblocks prints to suggest the oral pleasure. Other slang terms for sex and sexual innuendos were “jade gate” for a woman’s sex and “jade stalk” and “matsutake” (or mushroom) for a man’s penis, and “selling spring” was to suggest selling sex, as the season “Spring” was utilized in poems and the sex trade as a multi-purpose term for sex.
I hold your head tight
Between my thighs and press
Against your mouth and
Float away forever in
An orchid boat
On the River of Heaven.
(Marichiko)
Geisha were not allowed by their very nature to fall in love. Neither were prostitutes. It was the danger of the heart that neither sort could manage. It would mean disaster for their very existence as temptresses. To pretend to love was one thing. To fall in love was another thing entirely. Flirtation and courting was full of sexual desire— the art of seduction was a play, an illusion. So then, what happens when the geisha or the prostitute falls in love?
Historically in such circumstances the geisha and prostitute were ruined, overcome by passion and desire, the longing too great for them to handle while luring and beguiling other men. Suddenly, the art of seduction she used for others is seemingly powerless, as her heart is unable to bear the games she once so artfully played, with her mind lost in reverie for her lover. She becomes overwhelmed by dreams of running away with her beloved. No longer can she play the seductress to the many men that pay her for her attentions. She is consumed by passion and caught in the great tidal pull of life’s mystery: Love.
Love me. At this moment we
Are the happiest
People in the world.
(Marichiko)
And her art and erotic craft is love. Like the saying “live by the sword, die by the sword,” the prostitute and geisha, artists of seduction and flirtation, are the femme fatales, the unattainable feminine, for which men would do anything for, and therefore the power they wield is turned upon them. Longing. Heartache. Waiting.
Night without end. Loneliness.
The wind has driven a maple leaf
Against the shoji. I wait, as in the
old days,
In our secret place, under the
full moon.
The last bell crickets sing.
I found your old love letters,
Full of poems you never published.
Did it matter?
They were only for me.
(Marichiko)
In this world
love has no color—
yet how deeply
my body
is stained by yours.
(Izumi Shikibu)
There are many stories about geisha and prostitutes falling in love with their customers that are married and cannot change their lives or young and impoverished men that cannot rescue them out of their bondage or position. In such cases, the solution was death. Like Romeo and Juliet, the lovers were doomed to tragedy. Kabuki plays such as Love Suicides at Sonezaki re-enacted the true story of a double suicide in 1703 by the great Japanese dramatist Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1724) known as the “Shakespeare of Japan.” The story was about a beautiful courtesan Ohatsu that falls in love with handsome Tokubei, who is too poor to buy her out of her position as prostitute. He cannot follow through with his arranged marriage to another, due to his love for Ohatsu. His dowry already granted to him for his arranged marriage is then revoked by his uncle. The story continues and sorrow unfolds as the star-crossed lovers cannot be together.
Black hair
Tangled in a thousand strands
Tangled my hair and
Tangled my tangled memories
Of our long nights of lovemaking.
(Yosano Akiko)
But sometimes, when lovers meet, the erotic desire flames their very souls. Even as a customer pays for sex and affections, whether pretended or not, it enters a realm that is human. It can be a source of inspiration. The nature of sex is union, when two lovers are as one. Regardless of money and position, sex is the essence of life and the mystery of our being alive. If sex and flirtation and the realm of erotic are the prostitute’s trade, then the question is — what does the prostitute do when she herself falls in love? How can she continue being a lover to many men, when she only wants to belong to the one man she loves? Like any other, she feels it ravage her very soul— awakening her, making her feel alive, passionate, and creative. The heart has its own reasons and mysteries. But how can she give her body to other men for money (her livelihood) when her instinct is to be devoted to the one she loves?
Your tongue thrums and moves
Into me, and I become
Hollow and blaze with
Whirling light, like the inside
Of a vast expanding pearl.
(Marichiko)
”To fall in love is to play with fire,” Beautiful Eiko laughed. She had a tumbling mane of silky black hair, porcelain skin, and a mouth that tempted. She had many customers that adored her, dazzled her with gifts and exquisite kimonos. Then she met a man who had nothing but himself to give. He listened to her, understood her. For the first time in her life, she felt alive, inspired by love. But their love affair had to be secret. She was locked within the world of the prostitute’s life. This was unbearable for Eiko. When other men touched her, she felt only her lover’s hands. When other men embraced her, she longed for her lover only. When in the arms of her beloved, he became the only man in her world. She only wanted him, to belong to him, as her love was an all consuming passion, the very fire that awakened her soul and lit her aflame with desire.
No different, really—
a summer moth’s
visible burning
and this body,
transformed by love.
(Izumi Shikibu)
{References used for this article: Downer, Lesley, Women of the Pleasure Quarters: The Secret History of the Geisha, and Dalby, Liza, Geisha}
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He came through her door
their eyes met the first time.
Their bodies suddenly together
without hesitation.
Embrace. Arms tangled,
holding each other
scent of each other’s skin discovered.
Kiss
It was the kiss of lovers in a film noir
as she stood, weightless, nearly breathless.
But his kiss was real, unlike a fairytale kiss,
or a romance novel kiss.
His kiss, fragile and strong
and full of heaven.
All words washed away,
nothing left but his mouth.
She felt raw and much like a little girl
in his wide arms.
His long arms that enveloped her body,
pulled her near.
He kissed her with the juice of ripe fruits
from the hands of goddesses,
the golden apple tossed into his mouth by Aphrodite,
and she tasted the earth
and the tears of angels on his tongue.
Nothing else existed but his mouth
in that moment of complete surrender.
She had thought she had lovers before him.
She had thought she had kissed a man.
And now that he held her so close,
his lips creating poems, his tongue speaking
another language only her soul can understand.
This kiss brought her back
to remembering who she was.
There in that moment, her desire was bare.
She was naked inside and out.
Her heart, an apple peeled open, her body, ripe fruit.
This moment, she was naked to the universe,
floating from the golden haze of the taste of apple
the golden apple that Aphrodite threw to Adonis
in an offering of love.
His kiss.
If nothing else, that moment.
Everything else she knew,
in the kissing of his mouth,
she tasted.
His kiss: hungry, animal, growling and fiery
His kiss: angelic, shining, ecstatic and light
She wants him to take her with the passion of fires
that burned down forests,
take her with the strength of waves
that sank ships and destroyed sea towns,
the kind of magic that myths are made of.
She wants the orgasmic oblivion of his love
His hands holding her
full of artist’s madness and passion,
His kiss tells her she is whole and because of this kiss
her body swaying sea-tossed in his arms,
she wants the kiss of freedom.
A kiss that awakened her from sleep.
His kiss was the kiss
that broke all spells.
~Butterfly
by Dorianne Laux (b. 1952)
She is about to come.
This time, they are sitting up, joined below the belly,
feet cupped like sleek hands praying
at the base of each other’s spines.
And when something lifts within her
toward a light she’s sure, once again,
she can’t bear, she opens her eyes
and sees his face turned away,
one arm behind him, hand splayed
palm down on the mattress, to brace himself
so he can lever his hips, touch
with the bright tip the innermost spot.
And she finds she can’t bear it—
not his beautiful neck, stretched and corded,
not his hair fallen to one side like beach grass,
not the curved wing of his ear, washed thin
with daylight, deep pink of the inner body—
What she can’t bear is that she can’t see his face,
not that she thinks this exactly— she is rocking
and breathing— it’s more her body’s thought,
opening, as it is, into its own sheer truth.
So that when her hand lifts of its own volition
and slaps him, twice on the chest,
on that pad of muscled flesh just above the nipple,
slaps him twice, fast, like a nursing child
trying to get a mother’s attention,
she’s startled by the sound,
though when he turns his face to hers—
which is what her body wants, his eyes
pulled open, as if she had bitten—
she does reach out and bite him, on the shoulder,
not hard, but with the power infants have
over those who have borne them, tied as they are
to the body, and so, tied to the pleasure,
the exquisite pain of this world.
And when she lifts her face he sees
where she’s gone, knows she can’t speak,
is traveling toward something essential,
toward the core of her need, so he simply
watches, steadily, with an animal calm
as she arches and screams, watches the face that,
if she could see it, she would never let him see.
*
Se Praj (17th century)
Your breasts will not fall.
Why clothe them with flowers?
Your folded arms are a wall,
love inviting me over.
*
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(He)
Legs trembling,
he asks
why desire is like
the summer heat.
The moon tonight
is the color of wine,
making me drunk
with his question.
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