The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica. Volume 3

Fugu by Bianca James

I came to Tokyo in the Year of the Snake, with the vague intention of doing research for my doctoral dissertation. When my informant fell through, I was left with an expired student visa, and over a thousand dollars in debt. I took a job waitressing at a seedy hostess bar in Kabukicho called Papillon.

Kabukicho was a hot bed of sex clubs and mob activity, but the bar where I worked paid well and let me drink for free, and booze was about the only thing I cared about at that point.

The thugs who frequented the bar were known as chinpira. The chinpira wore cheap suits in hideous shades of purple, red, and yellow, their hair teased into frizzy orange perms. They were low-ranking yakuza, missing teeth and bits of fingers. They were lecherous and rude, never tipped, sprayed me with spittle when they insulted me in torrents of Osaka-tinged Japanese. They never seemed to make it past the age of 30. I didn’t mourn when I found out that certain individuals had been busted by the police. There would be a fresh wave of over-eager 18-year-olds in less than a weeks time.

Daisuke was 35, hovering somewhere towards the middle of the yakuza hierarchy. It seemed improbable that a yakuza of Daisukes calibre would bother to penetrate the cramped confines of Papillon, but it was also difficult to believe he had ever been a chinpira. Perhaps the seven years he’d spent in prison had refined him, his jail cell like the proverbial oyster lovingly polishing the secret pearl tucked away inside.

Daisuke’s fingers were long and slender, fully intact, though he was missing the small toe from his left foot. He wore a full body tattoo concealed beneath his cream-coloured linen suits, carp and dragons inked in lurid shades of red and blue. He was soft spoken and polite, and I had to repeatedly remind myself that this was an evil man whose money came from murder and extortion. I knew about his obsession with fucking white women. I knew he had come for me. I did not care. I graciously allowed him to pay my debts, wine me, dine me, and fuck my brains out. One does not mess around with the yakuza.

Daisuke was a gourmet when it came to both women and food, his tastes running towards expensive shellfish. Every night Daisuke took me to a different restaurant with a new speciality to try. During this time I developed a taste for hot sake, the culinary enabler. Mild drunkenness allowed me to bypass my gag reflex and enjoy the erotic intrigue of Japanese food. It all seemed vaguely perverse, yet prepared to obsessive standards of beauty and cleanliness. Certain foods reminded me distinctly of sex: a gummy fermented substance known as natto stunk like unclean genitals. Viscous tororo starch, served over noodles, was white and sticky like come. Powdery soft mochi cakes made from pounded rice had the silky weight of a testicle.

Eating these things made me feel as though I was a culinary whore, being mouth fucked by one strange flavour, odour, consistency after another.

Everything was eaten raw, served with horseradish, pickled ginger and strong liquor in order to combat the ill effects of any parasitic micro-organisms hiding in the muscular striations of fish meat. The danger of food poisoning or tapeworms loomed perilously near, yet never close enough to be perceived as a real threat. As long as Daisuke was picking up the bill, he ordered and I ate shamelessly.

At a family-owned izakaya in Asakusabashi, we ate slick pink pregnant female shrimp, belly bulging with shiny black caviar, spindly legs and antennae jutting out at random angles. I fought the urge to scrape off the gelatinous eggs and eat the otherwise innocuous shrimp on its own, but consumed the delicacy whole, enduring the chitinous crunch of the tail, savouring the creaminess of the flesh, the hundred tiny eggs that popped in my mouth and got caught between my teeth.

While we ate, Daisuke told me about the first woman he’d made love to, a naive peasant maid, “the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen.” They’d sneak off at night to fuck in barns and fields. When she’d discovered she was pregnant, she’d killed herself to protect the honour of her family. He’d fucked her one last time as her body convulsed from the poison she’d eaten, mixed into sweet bean cakes, her spasming body ripping the orgasm from Daisuke’s loins.

“I could have kissed her,” he said. “The poison from her mouth would have killed me, our sin would have been wiped clean. But I didn’t. Now you know why I am a criminal.”

Daisuke related the tale with fond nostalgia. I took another sip of bracing shochu, liquor made from the clean wheat in the peasant fields where Daisuke had lost whatever semblance of innocence he’d once had, and ate another.

A week later we had fresh spider crab, eaten cold with lemon at a fancy restaurant in Ebisu. Daisuke told me what he’d done that day – breaking all ten fingers of a man who’d defaulted on his loans – as we snapped the spindly crab legs one by one, teasing out the red and white flesh with picks and scissors. When we had picked the crustacean clean of meat, there was an elaborate ritual of sucking out the muddy brains, then sipping hot sake from the bare shell.

At a bar managed by an Australian surfer in Hibiya, we drank cold Sapporo beers and slurped fresh Uni, the slimy orange innards of the sea urchin divested of its spiky purple shell. Each glob was daintily served on an edible green leaf, to be grasped by chopsticks quickly before it dripped to the table like fluorescent snot. Daisuke told me about the special sushi restaurant he went to, to celebrate his release from prison five years previous. He called it “sushi in the raw”, sashimi served off the supine bodies of beautiful naked women. The women shave their entire bodies and bathe in ice water beforehand, in order to lower their blood temperature by a degree or two. Then the raw fish is arranged artistically on the chilled body of the human serving tray. He’d said he’d never been so aroused. His erection was so hard it pained him. And they’d eaten his favourite, an exquisite tuna with fresh roe.

I asked him if he’d fucked the girl afterwards. He seemed appalled. She wasn’t a whore, he said, just a serving tray. Her flesh was cold; it would have been like fucking a corpse. He preferred the warm-blooded women in Kabukicho, their wet mouths slicked the colour of fresh tuna sashimi. They call adult video stars maguro, he said, because of the way a lubricated vagina looks shiny red like slabs of raw tuna.

After our meals, we’d retire to the love hotels of Shibuya to indulge in the next round of carnal pleasures. We’d fucked on the whorehouse beds of a hundred different love hotels, heart-shaped beds, black leather beds, revolving beds, beds shaped like racecars. We’d fucked on shag carpeting, in bathtubs, in chairs, in every imaginable position until Daisuke would fall asleep, and I’d stay awake watching TV and smoking cigarettes, the terminal insomniac.

He made love as one would expect a criminal to, grasping my arms and legs with strong fingers, leaving bruises in the shape of fingerprints. Daisuke’s sexual appeal was his violence: the fact that he was a gangster made me desire him more. I loved the shameless way he ripped off my panties and pulled my hair while he thrust his cock into me from behind. He rode the fine line between lover and predator that is socially unacceptable in the States, but it made me come like a hair-trigger every time.

His entire being fascinated me; he was so much different than a Western man. His body was hairless and smooth, lacking the musky animal smell that some men have. He was very lean and strong, the lines of his muscles outlined in golden skin and indigo ink. His hair was heavy, straight, and black like the feathers of the ominous crows that haunt the streets of Tokyo, getting fat on garbage, rumoured to occasionally attack dogs and small children. Yakuza were like crows in that way, despised, yet an unwavering necessary evil.

The love hotel we went to the night we ate Uni had red satin sheets and a black carpet. He’d removed his tie and his jacket, hung them carefully in the closet. Daisuke had placed his hands on my shoulders and gently pushed me back onto the bed. He unplugged the phone from the wall and used the plastic cord to bind my ankles to my wrists, leaving me splayed and open, an elaborate display of shibari. I felt like the sea urchin whose shell had been cracked open, oozing and vulnerable. Fully clothed in this absurd position, he unbuttoned my dress down the front, pushed my breasts up over the tops of my bra, worked his fingers in under the elastic of my panties, then cutting them off entirely using his knife, taking care not to nick my delicate skin.

Once my vulva was fully visible, he pushed the labia back with his thumb and index finger and squeezed lube into the crevice running from my pussy to my ass. He angled me against the mirrored headboard to display the maguro-pink of my cunt and ass. He worked his fingers into both holes, and licked my clit until I came, gasping. He grasped my hips to lift my glistening pink sex onto his, and entered me. Daisukes cock was curved upward in long graceful lines. There were bumps along the underside – pearls, seven in all, one for each year he’d spent in prison. Each bump caught at the entrance before popping in, the smooth ridge working against my G-spot as he moved in me. He kept his fingers in my lubed ass and fucked me in both holes while telling me his fantasies – that he wanted to take me to the Yakuza headquarters for a gang bang, that he wanted to hire another gaijin girl and have us sixty-nine while he took turns fucking us from behind.

Then, once his dirty talk had reached its climax, his cock seemed to simultaneously tighten and expand, and pulled out wet and glistening to spray his foamy white ejaculate onto my swollen vulva, like liquid pearls. He licked my neck and nastily whispered, “Maguro.” Sometimes I wondered if he viewed me as the great white tuna, chicken of the sea.

Daisuke called me at the bar one late afternoon in August. The day was unbearably hot and humid, my dress soaked in sweat. The air conditioning had broken and the heat was stifling. The bar was desolate, a few of us sitting drinking gin and tonics and fanning ourselves with the cheap paper fans the bar gave out to advertise drink specials.

I took a taxi to a hotel in the Ginza, the kind of place out-of-town dignitaries stayed when they visited Tokyo. Daisuke was holed up in a suite much classier than the love hotels where we held our nightly sex trysts. He opened the door wearing a white cotton yukata, a glass of whisky and crushed ice in one hand. The air in the room was so icy I felt as though I might faint from pleasure, my nipples visibly erect through my thin dress.

Everything in the room was cream coloured: the diaphanous curtains pulled against sealed French windows, the whipped-cream soft thick carpet, the huge bed covered in summer cotton sheets, the thin kimono that covered Daisuke’s tattooed body. I wanted to pull the robe from his shoulders, touch his belly and his sex, taste the whiskey ice cube flavour of his mouth. He bolted the door behind me and led me into the white marble palace of a bathroom. He helped me strip from my sticky dress, and we bathed together. He washed every part of me carefully with a soapy cloth, and then we slipped into the vast tub of hot water together.

He dried me with a fluffy white towel and gave me a yukata like his own. He led me into a smaller, dim bedroom adjoining the bathroom. A man in a suit was lying supine on the bed, limbs sprawled. A wet, red hole gaped from the back of his head. I shrieked in surprise.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” said Daisuke grimly. “He’s thoroughly dead.”

“Who is he?”

“My assassin. It seems I have made myself unpopular in certain circles.”

“He didn’t do a very good job, did he?”

“If you want a job done right, you’ve got to do it yourself,” Daisuke replied with little humour. He flicked on a bedside lamp and I jumped with a start. A white plastic bucket half-full of water was set on the floor beside the bed, and I was loath to look inside in case I might discover some disembodied organ quivering within. Instead, I found a grey, bulbous fish, swimming in circles, dazed by the light.

“Tonight, we celebrate,” Daisuke proclaimed grandly.

“Do you want to go out?” I inquired feebly. I wasn’t sure if I understood what we were celebrating.

“There isn’t a restaurant in Tokyo that will satisfy my desire,” he replied, lifting the plastic bucket. “The liver of the fugu is the most delicious of any fish. It is a delicacy a man gets to enjoy once in a lifetime. A mildly hallucinatory effect, followed by strong sexual arousal, and excruciating death. Even the finest restaurants in Tokyo refuse to serve the liver, its too risky. Fortunately, my mother taught me the proper preparation. She herself died from overindulgence. I will be joining her tonight.”

“Daisuke, you’re fucking crazy.”

Daisuke fixed me with a demented grin. “Am I? I have killed ninety-nine men in thirty-five years. Tonight, I will kill the hundredth, and then I will retire. I want you to help me celebrate. In fact, I plan to compensate you quite generously.”

“Daisuke, I refuse to eat poisonous blowfish. That’s where I draw the line.”

“It’s not for you, bitch!” Daisuke screamed. The door chimes sounded above his voice. He regained his calm, carried the bucket into the main room of the suite and placed it near the bed. He opened the door, and a bellhop pushed a golden cart laden with champagne, strawberries, and other delicacies into the room. The bellhop retreated with a bow.

Daisuke popped the champagne and poured it into two delicate glasses.

“There’s a man who wants me dead. There’s plenty more where he came from,” he continued, blithely gesturing toward the other bedroom. “I guess you could say I’m something of a traditionalist. Death before dishonour. I’d rather kill myself than suffer a fool’s death at the hands of some chinpira thug. I’ve had a good run. In fact, its a miracle I’m still alive.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Don’t worry, there’s only enough fugu for one person. Thats why I had room service bring the rest, so you could have a good meal as well. I will prepare the fugu and eat it within minutes. The poison can set in minutes, or it may take hours. The poison paralyzes the respiratory system, so I will become unable to move or breathe, but still fully conscious. I want you to fuck me to death. The orgasm achieved when completely deprived of oxygen is rumoured to be exquisite, and the exertion will most likely render me unconscious. Don’t stop fucking me until you are absolutely sure I am dead. When you are finished, return home, but make sure no one sees you. Wait until my sister Minako arrives, she will bring you a parcel with the money in the morning, then leave the country. I don’t want them going after you in my absence.”

“You’re completely serious, aren’t you?”

“I am. There is one last thing. Under no circumstances should you kiss me once I have eaten the fugu, in case the poison is transferred from my lips to yours.” Daisuke drew me close to his body. “So kiss me while it is still safe.” He buried his hands in my thick hair and pulled my face to his, pressed his mouth to my lips and throat. My heart felt crushed, making it difficult to breathe and fight back tears. Daisuke ran his tongue along each eyelid.

“You needn’t mourn me,” he whispered. “I’m going straight to hell.”

Daisuke prepared the tools of destruction – a sharp blade and the cutting tray. He removed the fish from the bucket and severed its head with a swift cut. He carefully cleaned and gutted the fish, and then he rinsed his hands and approached me.

“Don’t do it.” I tried not to get hysterical.

“It’s too late.”

“I love you.”

“That doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s best if you didn’t watch.”

Daisuke blindfolded me and had me lie back on the bed.

I felt cool sliminess on my belly. And then, I remembered – sushi in the raw. I laid still as I felt the fish being arranged on my stomach, breasts, and pubis, then sucked off without the formal assistance of chopsticks. He ate the fish from my body with pleasured moans, then licked my navel, my nipples, my groin. Then he entered me, slowly, one pearl at a time, and removed the blindfold. My heart was racing like a rabbit’s.

“How soon until you die?” I asked.

“I don’t know. But you may have to take over for me at some point.”

“I wasn’t kidding when I said I love you.”

“I know.”

He thrust his cock into me, harder now, slamming his hips against mine, grabbing my hair and biting my neck. I growled and buried my nails in his back. I felt my anger take over, and we wrestled with each other. He let me win, pushing him onto his back so I could ride him. I pushed his hands away when he reached to touch my breasts. “You bastard!” I shrieked. “I fucking hate you! How could you do this to me!” My screams made him push his cock deeper into my body. I slapped his face and yanked his hair, excited by the evil fire that glowed in his eyes. I pushed my cunt down to meet his upward thrusts, rubbed my clit with my left hand while making him suck the fingers of the other.

And then, his thrusts stopped, his body grown as rigid as his swollen penis.

The poison had set in. Daisuke’s eyes were glazed with horror. I knew he was still conscious, though his body had frozen. I slowed my pace a bit, my pussy sucking sinuously around his thick shaft, gripping him tighter with my internal muscles as I slid up and down. That’s when my orgasm set in, shaking my body with an unholy violence. My hair was tangled, my tits and back dripping with musky sweat. “I could kiss you right now, and you couldn’t do a damn thing to stop me,” I informed his dying body. I squeezed again, and felt his final jolt of life spurt into my cunt, and I fucked his come deeper into my body, savouring the extra lubrication.

Daisuke was dead. I was completely fucked up, exhilarated, probably in some sort of shock, my body stinking like sex and death. I pulled on my grimy dress and climbed out the hotel window and down the fire escape. I didn’t want to be trapped in that room with the corpse of my lover, especially when there were men looking to kill him. Outside, the night air was warm and quiet. I ran away from the hotel, relying on my instincts to get as far away as quickly as possible. This must be how he felt when he killed those men, I thought, though I hadn’t truly murdered him. Assisted suicide, the Dr Kevorkian of cocktail waitresses. Somehow I managed to find a cab to take me home to the relative safety and comfort of shower and bed.

I was awoken from troubled sleep by the doorbell. No dream could rival the nightmare I’d already been through. Minako, I thought. I answered the door haphazardly wrapped in the sheet from my futon. Minako was in her early forties, tall like her brother, and curvaceous, with beautiful long straight hair and full lips. She wore sunglasses to hide eyes that were red from crying. She was wearing a long black dress and was perspiring lightly, exuding a faint spicy odour. She entered and closed the door after herself.

Once inside, she reached for the hand that had been clutching the sheet to my body, leaving me standing nude in my shabby apartment. Minako eyed my body approvingly, traced the purple bruise that marred my throat with one long, red, fingernail.

“My brother loved you,” was all she said. She handed me a package wrapped in red silk and tied with elaborately knotted gold cords. “I suggest you take the money and leave Tokyo as soon as possible,” she advised. “Where you go is none of my business.”

“Thank you.”

“There is one last thing he asked me to do,” she said hesitantly. She kissed me with her full red lips, probed me with her tongue. I felt electricity jolt from my mouth straight to my cunt.

“A last kiss from my brother,” she finished. She turned away to leave.

“Wait,” I called after her desperately. “Stay with me.”

She smiled. “Tokyo is my home. I can’t leave. And I am not Daisuke.” She closed the door after herself.

I fumbled with the package she gave me, yanking on the complicated cords like an overeager child. A hefty stack of 10,000 yen bills spilled out. And then, seven identical silver pearls rolled from beneath the money and landed on the woven straw carpet of the room.

I went to Thailand and had them made into a necklace.