Vita Sexualis Read Free Page A

philosophy, so he has no interest in writing along this line. Instead, he would like to write a novel or a play. But because of those high demands he imposes on works of art, it is not easy for him to begin.
    In due course of time Soseki Natsume began writing his novels. Mr. Kanai read them with great interest. And he felt stimulated by them. But then in rivalry to Soseki's I Am a Cat, something came out called I Too Am a Cat . A book appeared entitled I Am a Dog. Mr. Kanai was quite disgusted on seeing these stories and ended by not writing anything himself.
    In the meantime, naturalism was well under way in Japan. When Mr. Kanai read the works of this school, he was not particularly stimulated. But what he found interesting in these novels was extremely interesting. At the same time he felt them interesting, he thought there was something odd about them.
    Each time he read a naturalistic novel, he discovered that the author never failed to use every occasion in daily life to represent his hero in reference to sexual desire and that the critics themselves acknowledged these novels accurately depicted life. At the same time he was wondering if such representations were actually true to life, he suspected that perhaps unlike the rest of the human race he might be indifferent to such desires, that he might have an extraordinary natural disposition which might be called frigiditas. Especially when he read Zola's novels could he not deny that this thought about himself was probably justified. The suspicion about himself had occurred when he came to a passage in Zola's Germinal in which the hero secretly observes intercourse between a man and a woman in a village of laborers living under conditions of utmost adversity. His thought at the moment was not that such a scene was probably impossible, but why the author had deliberately taken the trouble to depict it. A situation of this sort was probably true to life, but he wondered why the author had described it. That is, he wondered if the author's focusing on sexual desire itself was not abnormal. Novelists or poets probably have an extraordinary capacity for sexual desire. This problem has some connection to what Lambroso expounded in his theory about men of genius. It is also grounded in the supposition that Mobius and his school make in their sweeping criticism of famous poets and philosophers as mattoids. However, the naturalistic school so popular in Japan of late presented a quite different phenomenon. All at once a great many authors began writing on the same subject. Criticism kept acknowledging that human life involved sex. And when it seemed psychiatrists were saying that every aspect of a man's life is tinged with sexual desire, Mr. Kanai became even more suspicious.
    Meanwhile, the Debakame affair came to light. A workman by that name had the habit of spying on women in their section of the public bath, and one day he followed someone on her way home from the bathhouse and raped her. Such an event is a quite common occurrence no matter what the country. If it had been mentioned in a European newspaper, the item would have taken up no more than two or three lines along the corner of a page. But all at once throughout Japan the case expanded into an enormous problem. It was linked with the so-called naturalist movement. A new term, debakame-ism, was used as a pseudonym for naturalism. The verb debaru became fashionable. Mr. Kanai could not help suspecting that either people in general had become erotomaniacs or he himself was abnormally frigid.
    One day during this period he noticed a student in his class had a small volume with him entitled Einleitung in Die Philosophie by Jerusalem. When his lecture was over, Mr. Kanai picked up the book and asked his student what he thought of it. "I found it at Nankodo's bookstore," the young man said. "I bought it thinking it might be a good reference. I haven't read it yet, but please take it, Sensei, if you want to look it over."