Grotesque

by Natsuo Kirino

I’ve been a prostitute since I was fifteen years old. I can’t live without men, yet men are my greatest enemies. I’ve been ruined by men. I’m a woman who has destroyed her female self.

It’s just that beauty seems to function as its own compass; beauty attracts beauty, and once the connection has been made it remains so for life, the arrow holding steady, pointing in the opposite direction.

“I forget. It was really all so silly. But is it? Is it really just a silly story? If anything, it’s terrifying. That’s because it represents precisely the value system that holds sway in Japan today. Why do you think I got involved in a religious organization with such a similar structure as Q School? I believed that if I renounced my family and entered the religious organization, I could advance my social position, make my way up the ranks of the hierarchy. But even though my husband and I practiced all kinds of austerities, we would never have been permitted to become executives in the innermost circle of power, and we would never have been in line to assume leadership of the organization. Only the founder and his entourage were ‘born into the privilege.’ They were the true elite. See? It’s exactly the same as what we faced at Q, don’t you think? I figured this all out while I was in prison. I realized that my life took a turn down the wrong path when I entered the Q system in junior high and tried so hard to blend in with those who were born to power. You and I are the same. And Kazue too. We all had our hearts wrested away by an illusion. I wonder how it looked to others. I wonder if we looked like victims of mind control.

And once she’s past thirty-five, she can’t help but despair over the fact that she is losing it. Men have excessive demands. They want a woman to be educated and to have a proper upbringing and a pretty face, and they want her to have both a submissive character and a taste for sex. They want it all. It is difficult to meet those demands and to live in a world where demands like this take precedence. No, more than that, it’s ridiculous even to expect that one could. And yet women have no choice but to try to manage, searching as they go for some redeeming value to their lives.

The delusions arise from believing that prostitution is the only way—that the only way for a woman to have any control over her world is to do what Kazue did. A woman who awakens to this fact will know it was all just a big mistake.

I suspect there are lots of women who want to become prostitutes. Some see themselves as valued commodities and figure they ought to sell while the price is high. Others feel that sex has no intrinsic meaning in and of itself but allows individuals to feel the reality of their own bodies. A few women despise their existence and the insignificance of their meager lives and want to affirm themselves by controlling sex much as a man would. Then there are those who are actuated by violent, self-destructive behavior. And finally we have those who want to offer comfort. I suppose there are any number of women who find the meaning of their existence in similar ways. But I was different.

Women have only one reason for turning to prostitution. It’s hatred for others, for the rest of the world. No doubt this is incredibly sad, but then men have the capacity for countering such feelings in a woman. Still, if sex is the only way to dissolve these feelings, then men and women really are pathetic.