back to notes

Shuzo Oshimi's afterword to Okaeri, Alice

Girls. When I was in high school, I was obsessed with girls' bodies. I was on the boat of my own body, a boat that I could never get off: a boat of daily masturbation, sexual desire, and my bruised member. From there, in the distance I saw another boat, that of a girl, and on it was my ideal body.
I don't remember when that longing began. I found myself seeking it. At that time, magazines like that, with pictures and manga series, were usually lined up in bookstores. I'd buy them and stare at them behind my parents' backs. Also, I was utterly astonished by the girl dolls made by a man named Hans Bellmer, and I was always looking at his photo books.
But were the naked girls I saw there objects of my sexual desire? I think not. To me, they were the physical manifestation of my inner self, of who I really am. Somewhere along the way I had misstepped my path and was trapped in a body that was getting dirtier and dirtier. In my fantasy I was dissolving the boundary between myself and girlhood, becoming a girl, becoming a doll. getting off the boat of being a man. I'd let myself forget the idea of the man that was masturbating while I masturbated. But the moment I ejaculated, I was brought back to reality, finding myself trapped in the boat of manhood from which I could not escape.
But why girls? Was it because I wanted to be far away from men, and violence? I always felt alienated and inferior in school and society (I developed a stutter when I was in junior high school, which instilled in me a definite sense of inferiority as a male specimen): as a man, I was pathetic and weak. I was always frightened, yet it seemed like I loved myself many times more than others. I didn't want to face it, I wanted to run. I wanted to go back to the way I was before I was forced to be a man. Were girls the intersection of those desires and reality? But among them, choosing girls who are also women, the object of my sexual desire, would perhaps have meant that I had not quit being a manafter all.
So when the chance to have sex with a woman actually came, I forgot all about it (or pretended to forget it), and my mind was filled with the vanity of "as a man, as a male specimen, I must carry through sex impressively." My mind and body were in pieces. I didn't want to make the other person feel good, nor did I want to feel good myself. I only kept repeating the words "I have to do it right" in my frightened blank mind. I could not do it properly, as I should have. Before the penetration happened, my body'd become totally unexcited and I could not get an erection. Strangely, I had forgotten about the birthmark that had worried me so much.
No matter how many times I tried, it didn't work. But eventually, little by little, I started to "get it right." The trick I found was to erase my girl self only while I was doing it. To be one machine in a boat of manhood. I am a machine. I am a machine, a sex machine. By telling myself this and pushing my body to the limit, I was finally able to have sex.
But every time, the girl in me is wounded, bloodied, and torn to pieces. And then, before I know it, she becomes dim and begins to fade. It's as if she was never there, as if I was always the sex machine, like, "all men are nervous when they have their first time, often they can't get an erection, that's how we all grow up, you shouldn't have sex like in porn..."
But I couldn't forget the girl covered in blood inside me. How can I help her? I always feel some sort of tearing pain when feminism attacks men's unconscious misogyny - because I am exposed for the sin of trying to be a male specimen: I am forcibly confronted with the guilt of hurting the girl inside me. I cannot stop being a man. But I can't be a girl, I can't be a woman. How can I quit being a man?
I dream of what sex would be like after I stop being a guy. Sex where no one spills blood. I want to get out. Out of manhood, out of the boat, out of this reality. But if that's possible, or where it is - that, I don't know.

Okaeri Scanlations
Raws. ranispin TL: Holmes TLC: pfunctor TS: Holmes
https://discord.gg/NY9nFFM


last updated 4 weeks ago