Hokkaido Highway Blues

cluttered shelves. There were groovy, black-lit nude zodiac charts from California (boy, am I glad I missed the sixties); there was even a display of “British erotica”—surely a contradiction in terms. Paintings from Pakistan depicted an assortment of fanciful bestiality, including a man and a camel, a man and a gazelle, a man and an alligator (don’t ask) and a young princess with the entire Bronx zoo. (What is that? A giraffe?) There was a woman with a giant octopus, her body covered with suction-cup hickeys.
    Mind you, some of it was educational. A chart of Tantric hand signs demonstrated how to delay orgasm through finger position and breathing patterns. I was practicing one such arrangement when a tour group went by and I burned red from embarrassment. “Scientific interest,” I mumbled and hurried on to the next floor.
    From Hinduism to pop-art porno. Marilyn Monroe over a steam grate, sans panties. Disney characters in flagrante. Anatomically correct versions of Mickey and Minnie. The Mona Lisa topless and the Statue of Liberty in a leather bra. There was something to offend everyone. The Seven Dwarfs had added a new member to their ranks, a well-endowed little chap named Sleazy. The trio of See-No, Hear-No, Speak-No monkeys had recruited a new participant: Feel-No-Evil. My head was swirling. How to make sense of this rummage sale of the psyche? There was even a collection of Cubist Nudes, which is possibly the stupidest concept ever in the history of art. “Is that a breast? I think that’s a breast. Or maybe a chair.” Cubist Nudes give you a headache; it’s like watching the Playboy Channel after they’ve rescrambled the signal for nonpayment of bills.
    A display case depicts the various fertility festivals still being held in Japan. They are disarmingly unabashed. In one, women pull portable altars containing enshrined decorated penises. They aren’t in the least bit embarrassed to be doing this. One penis is made of stone and weighs two tons. In another festival, men in red demon masks, with suspiciously shaped sausage noses, run amok in the crowds, poking phallic staffs at women. In another more solemn event, women in kimonos queue up, each with a giant wooden penis, and proceed down the street like soldiers bearing arms.
    As I stood marveling at the sheer weight of the museum’s collection, a tour group came through. They were led by a requisite Perky Tour Guide in a perky outfit with white gloves, a perky stewardess-style hat, a perky smile, a very perky hairdo, and just a general all-round perkiness. She was leading a group of retired men and women through the museum and they dutifully filed past each display case with the same dulled half-attention one gives to any museum. “On our left we have erotic ukiyoe prints, or shunga , that date to the days of the Floating Pleasure World. Notice the careful attention to detail.”
    The tour group shuffled by and only a pair of gray-haired matrons held back, giggling like schoolgirls and pointing surreptitiously at various displays. I tried to imagine my own grandmother coming through this place and enjoying it as much as these two ladies were. I couldn’t do it.
    “Do you see anything you like?” I asked them.
    “Oh yes,” they said and broke into fits of giggles. They fled, hands over their mouths and almost weeping with laughter.
    By now I was growing numb, as though Novocain had been injected directly into my brain. I was getting awfully tired of looking at penises. Pound for pound, male body parts were overrepresented. Every second display case was stuffed with penises: strap-on penises, corkscrew penises, telescopic penises, penises with wings, penises with wheels, and penises in shapes truly imaginative—fish, deities, flutes, candles, saké bottles—all worked into that same familiar shape. One room contained hundreds and hundreds of wooden phalluses crowded into the center of the floor like a crop of mushrooms. A rope partitioned the harvest from passersby, and you walked around clockwise as you might an altar. Or an accident scene.
    I did, however, make one genuine historical/sociological observation. So you can see that my trip to the sex museum was not some cheap ploy to pique reader interest and increase sales of this book. No sir. What I noticed was this: the old pornographic ukiyoe prints from the Tokugawa Era, with their ludicrously large and grotesquely detailed depictions of copulation, are not offensive to womanhood.