The Harunobu Face

The first time I saw my new neighbour Yuki, moving into the next door apartment on a Saturday morning in Spring, I thought she was special. Not everyone would see it perhaps. But I'm an Art History student, and one of the areas I love is Japanese woodblock prints. Yuki's delicate oval face could have been found in a print by Harunobu, or Kōryūsai. I've seen quite a few Japanese women, students or tourists (not to mention my grandmother, whose dear wrinkled face I know so well), but this was the first time for me to meet someone who could have stepped out of a print from the eighteenth century.

We greeted each other as new neighbours, exchanged names. She was friendly (she bowed slightly without taking my proferred hand, which I felt to be not coldness but just a cultural difference); I thought that there was a tinge of sadness in her smile.

She didn't seem to be moving much stuff in; the one man who was doing the lifting (he had been hired, I felt sure, rather than being a friend, and it was completely obvious that he was not a boyfriend) brought only some boxes up the three flights of stairs, nothing bigger. The thought crossed my mind that she must sleep on a futon, perhaps folded away in daytime, old-fashioned Japanese style. That could be handy; the apartments in this building are small.

Yuki was the quietest neighbour I had had in my two years there. For the first fifteen days, that is.

I kept seeing her out and about, every day. If she noticed me--sometimes she was walking with lowered eyes, and did not--she would usually give me the same smile; a "Hi" if we passed close to each other on the street or on the stairs.

The next Friday (her seventh day there) was the first time something strange happened: before I fell asleep that strangely beautiful face, the Harunobu face, with that smile, flashed with astonishing vividness before my eyes. Just for a few seconds (I think) I saw it, without wanting to, without preparation; it seemed close. Closer than I'd ever seen it in real life. I thought that tears were about to appear in those eyes, in spite of the smile.

It disappeared. I had been jolted out of my cherished sleep routine, with a vengeance. I found I could consciously recall the image with almost no effort, and I did, for a few seconds.

The whole experience left me deeply disquieted. It's hard perhaps to explain why. Something about the way the image had appeared (and disappeared) was completely unlike any mental visual image I'd ever had before. It took more than an hour before I finally fell asleep, listening to the sephardic instrumental music that had helped me before to sleep at the worst times.

It happened again on Saturday; that vivid brief flash, not called up intentionally, when I was close to sleep. It was as if someone else reached into my mind, if that were possible, and put Yuki's face there. The same Sunday. And Monday, and Tuesday. By then the experience was becoming familiar, and it no longer disturbed or delayed the process of my falling asleep. I didn't even question why it was happening, and I didn't feel as if I was so very specially interested in the neighbour whose face was now regularly invading my mind. But looking back, perhaps one reason why it now seemed kind of natural, not weird or eerie, was that my whole life, without my noticing it, had become subtly more dreamlike.

Wednesday night, as I lay down in bed, I thought to myself that in five minutes or so I would be seeing Yuki's face; it was almost a comforting or cozy thought. I was in for a shock of shocks.

When instead of just the familiar lovely face, I saw with blinding clarity a sharp image of Yuki with her body, mostly covered by a beautiful kimono, entwined with that of a Japanese man, his body likewise largely kimono-clad, but with the tip of his grotesquely huge penis clearly visible lodged in the exposed slit of her vulva, I screamed briefly in shock. Later, when the image had disappeared and I had calmed myself, slowed my pounding heart, I recognized that the image was modeled on a extit{shunga} erotic print by Kōryūsai which I had seen some months ago and had admired. But at the moment itself I only felt shock, a strong electric jolt of arousal, and one further thing, one of the strangest feelings I'd ever had; a feeling as if I were being pulled out of myself, a smooth but strong pull. Like soul out of body.

This time I couldn't sleep for hours. I had been jerked out of the almost-dream state of the past days. Was I on the verge of a breakdown? I had often thought to myself that, slight though I am, my inner strength was beyond most people's; that what I had gone through seven years before, close though it had come to breaking me, had in the end made me stronger; that I did not need a relationship or a strong support network, nothing more than the few, not very close, friends I had, my infrequent and cool contacts with my mother, and the even less frequent, though much more affectionate, meetings with my dad. But now I wondered if I was falling to pieces. The other possibility which kept returning to me was that I was cursed or haunted. Superstitions, yes, perhaps from my own Japanese side. I've never been there, but my grandmother, my father's mother, was born and raised in Japan, and when I was small and had sometimes stayed with her she had filled my mind with Japanese folk-stories, which included many stories about ghosts. And women who were not women, but fox-spirits...

It took a long time for me to calm myself. I tried many things: tricks for coping with panic attacks which the therapists had taught me back then; an attempt to dance the mood and my fears away with tango music (played a little too loudly, I suddenly realized at one point); praying. I even tried masturbating, but I stopped when the image of Yuki, her face bearing exactly the same calm expression that it usually had (when she was not smiling), in spite of the fact that her childlike slit was being entered by a giant cock, repeatedly kept emerging. This felt more like my own mind, working in the way it usually did, producing an image from things I'd seen that day and from my subconscious, not that eerie sudden flash of a sharp image placed before me. Still, it disquieted me again, and I let the feeling of arousal that I had been trying to foster and coax towards the edge of a climax fade away instead.

I desperately wanted the oblivion and rest of sleep, but I was afraid as well, afraid of what would happen when I approached the threshold again.

When I did fall asleep it was without a further vision, thank goodness. But the four hours of sleep that I got were intershot with dreams that were disturbingly, almost painfully, arousing. Yuki was in all of them.

I've never regarded myself as bi, certainly not lesbian (and as far as I've picked up, my classmates never seemed to think of me as possibly lesbian, in spite of what some must have thought a weird absence of any boyfriends). That was one reason, I thought in the morning, that the dreams were so strange. In spite of the fact that I felt very short on sleep, I was glad that I had a class at 10. I could focus on making coffee, eating something, getting ready for going out and for class.

But it was impossible to keep Yuki entirely away from my conscious mind. As I passed her door I suddenly was suffused with the desire to know what she was doing behind it. My quiet-as-a-mouse neighbour... And, with a clarity that was somehow slightly like that of those images of her before sleep, though not quite as weird, an idea came into my mind.

It was hard not to turn right back to try it out (I was on schedule to be ten minutes early for class), but shame and some kind of apprehension stopped me from doing that. I used the ten minutes for getting and drinking another coffee at a university cafe instead. The class was on a topic I liked very much, Buddhist art in South-East Asia, and I managed to become so absorbed in it that my breakdown or haunting or curse almost did not worry me for an hour and a half. Though I did feel a brush of anxiety when half way through it the thought occurred to me that there was a distinct similarity between the calm perfection of the face of a Javanese statue of Prajñā, the goddess embodying Wisdom, and the faces of some beauties in Japanese Ukiyoe prints--or was I imagining the resemblance?

I let classmate-friends take me with them to lunch, as I very occasionally did--the company might help perhaps? It had become an achingly beautiful late spring day, and I had the strange thought that I might not see many more such; I should try to enjoy it to the full... When we sat down together in a cafeteria, I soon began to regret having come, for a couple of them started talking about the news of a young woman having been found raped and murdered--I hate grim and gruesome topics such as that. But fortunately I wasn't the only one who disliked it. Soon Mary and the absurdly tall Dutch girl, Ina, had wrested the conversation into their hands, both talking mainly about boyfriends (Mary had a new one). On the other hand, when their talk started to be quite openly about sex--those two were a match for each other in that, neither at all reluctant to talk about their sex-lives--I felt a sudden stab of pain, partly jealousy, inside. That usually doesn't happen, certainly not when the sex sounds very vanilla, as it did. I tried not to show that I was paying attention, but every word of what they said actually was being picked up by my ears as if amplified. Amplified...

I was glad when Sara, the kindest one among my classmates, as I had often felt, provided distraction (had she noticed somehow that their talk was doing something to me?) by starting to talk directly to me. She said, with genuine concern, that I looked as if I was way too short on sleep, and I managed to smile as I said that that was true, and avoided the clear though wordless invitation to tell her, if I wished, what the reason was. I felt a sudden wave of gratitude to Sara, gratitude for her noticing and caring--and for having made me filter out most of what Mary and Ina were saying. But the warm feeling lasted only briefly. To my inner consternation, on some level, it was suddenly succeeded by a most vicious image of Sara naked, screaming as her breasts (which I had noticed as being ample and beautiful) were flogged brutally, stroke after stroke drawing blood... I was afraid that my face might show a snarl of animal ferocity, so strong was the wave of lust that I felt at the image of gentle Sara treated like that. I closed my eyes, dizzy, and for a few seconds was aware of nothing but that vertigo. Then my senses began to return; I felt a touch, heard a concerned voice... Sara...

Sara wanted to walk me home after lunch, "just to be sure," since I had so obviously had a spell of dizziness (as I told her), if not something worse. It was difficult to dissuade her, but I had to. I couldn't tell her that she herself was in part the cause of the dizzy spell, and that I was actually afraid that if she walked with me some destructive part of me would be scheming all the way, turning over scenarios in which I would invite her in and drug her or knock her out with a blow from behind. In order to... what?

When I had freed myself from the company of all of them, I felt momentarily better. But the idea I had had in the morning outside of Yuki's door came back to my mind in full force. Still, disturbing though that was, it was nowhere near as bad as the thoughts that had come up about Sara, about doing something to Sara. I almost threw myself on these other thoughts about my idea. How would I do it? It would be simple, so simple--illegal, no doubt, but in a relatively harmless way. (While Sara, drugged... )

It had been quite soon after moving in that I had discovered entirely by chance that, though the soundproofing was actually in general surprisingly good, there was a place where if I put my ear to the wall in my bedroom I could hear sounds on the other side with considerable clarity. At that time I had indulged a mild curiosity about my neighbours, a youngish couple, a number of times, but feeling sheepishly guilty while doing so, and without ever hearing anything interesting. (I had heard the main object of that mild curiosity, the sounds of their lovemaking, once, but their apparently totally vanilla sex lives seemed perfectly uninteresting to me, and I had felt mildly disgusted, though I wasn't sure whether it was by them or by myself.) I had made a point of moving my bed so that the place was near my feet, and had never felt the temptation to listen to subsequent neighbours. Until now.

As a child I had learned that I could hear sounds on the other side of a wall by putting a glass to it. My idea of that morning had simply been to combine the two things; my knowledge of that special spot and the use of a glass, and add to them just a touch of higher tech perhaps: a sensitive microphone... I felt rather certain that without anything James Bondish at all I would be able to hear quite clearly whatever sounds there were to be heard (music? phone calls?) on Yuki's side of the wall.

I was home by 3pm, my earlier notion of enjoying the beautiful day to the full forgotten because of the mental itch of the idea, but also because of a different and even more urgent itch that had begun to make itself felt; the need for some kind of release. Ignoring the first, I lay down, with my laptop, to take care of the second. I've learned to be careful online, you can be sure of that. Connecting with a secure VPN, and using an anonymous browser, I went in search of something to help. It had been more than a month since I had done this. I looked for some images of the type that arouse me; I reread a well-written story on AO3 which never fails to turn me on (even though its incest kink is usually not at all one of my fantasies); then something more extreme, viciously misogynistic (now it was not good writing but the brutality of the images that was working for me), on a far shadier website. And then, now nearly there, with eyes closed and with both hands doing what they know how to do, I let my fantasy go where it wanted, and I was with a big brute of a white man and we were doing Yuki together--Yuki was our slave, forced to kiss me while he caned her hard, then to lick us both while he fucked me equally hard, twisting my nipples viciously as he did so...

That certainly worked, and I bit down hard on my thin quilt as I came. Coming down gradually from that, for a little while I felt almost free of tension, and could wonder idly which had been the hotter element of my fantasy: Yuki's tongue in my mouth, her eyes sometimes closed and sometimes half-open in apparently sleepy lust, or the merciless male hand on my breast (simulated so eagerly by the cruel little fingers of my left hand).

But, my idea. When it came again to my mind (now less anxious after my cumming so hard) I was immediately eager to carry it out. The small electronics store just a block away proved to have a microphone that I thought would be adequate. I looked around twice to make sure that Yuki was not around when I bought it. My set up was easy. I listened for at least 15 minutes with my ear against the glass, which I had taped to the wall; I thought that Yuki might well be home. All was complete silence except for one moment just before 6pm when I thought that I heard what might have been her voice. It was so soft though that I might have been mistaken.

I set up the microphone to record on my phone while I made dinner, and after dinner resolutely sat down to study. I saw that there could be a danger that I would spend nearly all of my time listening or checking the recording. I managed two hours of study without my mind wandering to the next apartment too often. I showered and only when I felt I was ready to go to sleep soon (much earlier than usual) did I check the recording. Audio software told me that there was only one place where there was something more audible on it. It was just for about three minutes, approximately half way through the nearly three hours of recording. I listened to it through headphones, with the volume set as loud as it would go. This time there was no doubt that Yuki was speaking, on the phone I supposed (there were indeed pauses during which someone else must have been speaking), though her voice remained always tantalisingly low. I couldn't understand the words, but something of the speaker's feelings did seem clear to me. The tone was surprisingly emotional, pleading. She was begging someone for something, I felt quite sure. I couldn't help feeling concern, wanting to comfort her. (And somewhere in my mind I felt a little relieved, that the emotion that had been evoked in me was so simply human, not like what I had suddenly felt and imagined about Sara... ).

I listened directly through the glass, but only for a few minutes; all was silence. Then, though it was awkward, and required me to move the bed a bit (I did so as quietly as I could) to be sure that if I was restless in my sleep, as I can be, I wouldn't kick the glass, I arranged the microphone again to record on my phone, and lay down to try to sleep, awaiting what might come.

But not completely passively. Some instinct (survival instinct?) made me do something that wouldn't have occurred to me before. I let my mind actively go to Yuki and let it indulge in the feelings of desire which I by now had to admit that I had for her. First I tried using again some of the images from the fantasy that I had cum to in the afternoon; but then--wanting something less intense, sleep not another orgasm being my main goal--I tried imagining myself undressing her slowly, not with fervid desire but with sensual curiousity to see her body. Which evoked tenderness as well as gentle arousal as I uncovered its hidden beauties. I imagined discovering small, perfect, virginal looking breasts, kissing them, then kissing her between them; then laying my head on her there and closing my eyes while feeling a small soft hand on my head...

It worked; I slept, with no vision (for the first since last Friday) and for the most part peacefully. But around dawn, just before I awoke, there was one dream the end of which I remembered vividly: Yuki, dressed in a most splendid kimono (not, I realized, when I recalled the dream, the same kimono of the vision of her copulation), looking simultaneously beautiful in that eighteenth-century way and regal, or a goddess. Her back was towards me at first, rich glossy black hair done up elaborately. There was an almost unbearable feeling of tension for a short while. Then she turned slowly to face me, looked me directly in the eyes (her eyes wider than I had seen them), and opened her mouth to say... what exactly? It wasn't English, and it didn't sound like Japanese. It seemed like a short sentence, spoken in a voice which was no longer so soft and retiring. Not that it was loud, but without being that it sounded extraordinarily powerful, like a command that might make mountains move, change the nature of reality. I felt that it wasn't commanding me though; it was more as if she intended to teach me something. Perhaps she wanted me to repeat the sentence, I thought, but I could not. Her eyes were asking something (not supplicating me, there was no weakness or need in them), and I felt inadequate for not understanding what she wanted, especially since this goddess-Yuki surely wished me well. I woke, and wished the dream had continued, even though it had had a feeling of intensity to it that was not entirely pleasant.

I certainly felt better than I had on Thursday morning. Almost well-enough rested. I checked my recording; the night had been quiet on Yuki's side, except for one brief moment at about 1am: Yuki had cried out, rather softly, two times. A cry of sadness, not passion; again I felt moved. But probably it had been a sound made in a dream? I managed to more or less dismiss it, dismiss her, from my mind and focus on the mundane routine of the morning till I had finished my breakfast. But drinking my coffee afterwards (no class till 2pm), I tried to face my situation.