I AM NOT ASHAMED 05 THE MEGUMI STORIES BY MEGUMI KATO AND FRIENDS VOLUME 03: I AM NOT ASHAMED BY KIMIKO KOBAYASHI AND MEGUMI KATO CHAPTER V Two Sisters The next morning I woke late, even for a Sunday. The first thing I experienced was an extraordinary sensation of well-being. I stretched luxuriously on my futon, abandoning the modest self-effacing posture a well-brought-up Japanese girl is supposed to maintain even in bed.[3] My body felt as if it had been through some miraculous process of reconstruction, and I had never been so at peace with myself and the world. All at once this spiritual and physical harmony was shattered as memory came flooding back. Had I really - oh, _no_, I couldn't have done! But I _had_ - oh, how awful! How _could_ I have? And how could I live down the shame? I must have been mad! Hardly able to face the horror of it all, I leapt out of bed, scrubbed myself fiercely in the little wash-room, and deliberately chose my longest and most modest skirt. Despite what my new friend from last night had promised me, I felt my mother must be able to read at once in my face the awful truth that her daughter had become a shameless and perverted slut. Fortunately she left me alone to get my own belated breakfast. She was preoccupied with a lunchtime get-together with other ladies she had become friendly with in the PTA, and still kept in touch with even after all three of us had left school. My father had left the house early for his Sunday golf game. While I was trying without success to eat, my sister Fumiko turned up unannounced from her university, dressed in a filthy t-shirt and jeans and carrying a bag of - presumably - even filthier clothes for our mother to wash. I long ago learnt to accept that I was the dunce of the family. My brother Ken, as I have mentioned already, went to a specialist college to study film and is beginning - or so he tells us - to establish a career as a director. Fumiko is very brilliant and had no difficulty getting into the university of her choice where she is studying politics. I have no idea what she wants to do later. She seems to be opposed to just about everything Japanese society values - even cleanliness, which makes it difficult to imagine her with either a husband or a job. But we have always got on well together, ever since as a teenager she insisted that we form an alliance against our brother's bullying. Before she left to join her friends, our mother prepared us a simple lunch: some soup and some rice-balls with a little sour plum in the middle of each. As we ate, I plucked up the courage to ask Fumiko about her sex life. She was always very frank about such matters, but it cost me quite an effort nonetheless, and she looked at me shrewdly. "Why do you want to know, Kimi-chan? Have you got a boyfriend at last?" "Well, yes ..." I said, conscious of blushing furiously. But in a way it was true. "Do you think that's wrong?" "Of _course_ not, don't be silly. You're old enough to know what you want. Enjoy it." "How old were you when you ... I mean ..." She could see I needed information, and kindly decided to give it to me without making me squirm. "My first year at university I was sex-mad," she said in a matter-of-fact tone. She had finished her lunch and put her chopsticks aside, pulling a squashed packet of Seven Stars from her jeans pocket and lighting one. She leant back on the _tatami_ matting on one elbow. "I discovered sex in my first week, and realised what I'd been missing all that time at school. All that year I had non-stop sex with anyone who wanted me." "Was that good?" "It was fantastic. Marvellous. But after that first year I became more selective. Now we're a group who hang out together. Maybe ten or twenty couples: people come and go. We switch round as we feel like it. It's better that way: plenty of variety but we all know and like each other." She drew deeply on her cigarette. Smoking like a man was part of the rebellion, I guessed. "Of course," she went on, "sometimes I break out, go and spend a night or a weekend with a gang I've never met, taking them all any way they like - just as I used to do. That's nice, occasionally. But after that I go back to the group." "When you say," I said carefully, "you take them any way they like, do you mean you ... I mean, what ways ... you know ... I ..." "Ah, so that's the problem!" she said. "Your new boyfriend wants to do some kinky things to you and you're not sure about letting him?" I tried to answer but couldn't. I shook my head and looked away, blushing worse than ever. "Or is it that you love them, these perverted things he makes you do, but you're not sure if they're allowed - is _that_ it?" "Well, yes ..." I said. In a way it was; but could I ever explain - even to her - that it was my own desires that worried me, and that I wanted to know if _they_ were allowed? She stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray of the "smoking set" kept on the table for my father's occasional use. "Look at me," she demanded. I gazed into her eyes, my nose irritated by the wisp of smoke still rising from her incompletely extinguished cigarette. "I don't ask you to tell me what it is he does to you - though I could guess - but do you enjoy it?" I was overwhelmed with rapturous memories from the previous evening. I suppose my face showed it only too clearly. I did not need to say anything. "Well, then," Fumiko demanded, "what's the problem?" "But can it be right?" I blurted out at last. "It seems so unnatural." She looked at me carefully. "You know, I think you're asking the wrong person. You shouldn't be asking me, you should ask yourself. In fact, I guess you _are_ asking yourself, but I don't think you're listening to the answer." I wasn't sure I really understood, but I said nothing. "Your body will tell you if it's right," she went on, "and if it's right it's natural. What does your body tell you? _Is_ it right? Whatever it is?" she added with a dismissive gesture. "Oh, _yes_!" I murmured, overwhelmed again by ecstatic memories. "But there's still something troubling you," she said after another pause. "It feels right, but _is_ it right?" I managed to say. "I mean, I know this sounds very peculiar, but what I've been doing - oh, Fumi-chan, it's so difficult to explain -" "Try." "Well, if I were free to decide for myself, I couldn't possibly do it - I mean, I'd be so ashamed. I'd be telling myself I couldn't do anything so perverted and, you know ... so, well, disgusting. But if I'm in a position where I can't stop them doing these things to me, then I'm not ashamed any more because I can't stop it happening ... does that make sense?" I added in a whisper, suddenly aware that in referring to "them" doing "these things" to me I had given away far more than I had intended. "Yes, very good sense. And you sound to me like a very lucky girl. Bondage, was it? And at an orgy? All right, don't answer that if you don't want to. But I think you're still not listening to yourself. Not your body this time, your mind. Your mind is telling you you love these things and want to have them done to you." "Well, yes," I managed to say, "but only because I can't stop it. If I could run away from it I would." "And how do you feel when you run away? Or would you feel if they let you?" "Terrible," I said with a sudden burst of perception. "I should never forgive myself for being so silly and ... and schoolgirlish." "And how does it feel when they tie you up - I suppose that's what they do? - and fuck you or whip you or whatever it is?" "Unbelievable. I've never known anything so wonderful," I said. There was no turning back now. "So part of your mind wants you to run away and feel a fool, and another part wants you to stay and experience a miracle." "Yes, I suppose so." "And your friends make you stay by tying you up." "Yes." "What does that teach you?" I could not reply. I knew where she was taking me, and one part of my mind wanted to go there. But only one part. Another was horrified at this wholesale change in my attitudes and beliefs. "Well, how does it feel afterwards? Is there harmony? Peace? Does it make you feel complete?" I suddenly remembered how I had felt in bed that morning, before my conscious mind had destroyed everything. "Oh, _yes_!" "And if you ran away from what you really want, would you experience harmony and peace?" "Of course not! I told you." "So now I think you know what is right for you. Listen to yourself. Then you'll always know what's right. Promise?" "Yes, I promise. Thank you, Fumi-chan," I added in a rush, "now it's all so much clearer. Next time I shan't need to be tied up." "Oh, but if you enjoy it, of course you must be!" she exclaimed, suddenly sitting upright again. "Even if you don't need it, it can still be marvellous fun. Being helplessly tied up, I mean. You're so lucky." "Do you think so?" I was honestly surprised. I thought I was anything but lucky to be subjected to such miseries of indecision. "Oh, yes. You've got so much to enjoy. And you've given me some _lovely_ ideas for what I'm going to have done to me tonight." FOOTNOTE [3] "Boys might stretch themselves into the character _dai_, carelessly outspread; but girls must curve into the modest, dignified character _kinoji_, which means 'spirit of control'." Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto: _A Daughter of the Samurai_, London 1933 chapter III. - M K [Next in Part 06: Chapter VI: The Evidence] For complete series so far see /files/Authors/Bob_Williams