Indian Summer by Mieko Kanai

Author:Mieko Kanai [Kanai, Mieko]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University East Asia Program
Published: 2012-04-16T17:00:00+00:00

My aunt managed to cover up her shock and avoid having to tell Hanako what she meant. I already knew the story about Hanako’s Dad. And it wasn’t a nice story at all. “Does this often happen?” I asked my aunt when she told me. “I can’t really say,” she answered. “But since I haven’t heard any other stories like this one I don’t think there are too many people who are as depraved as he is.”

The story went something like this. Hanako’s Dad was the chief editor of some new “we all need to be aware of physical fitness”-type magazine called help. Anyway, along came some good-looking, young woman photographer—whom some men might have thought at first glance that it wouldn’t take too much to seduce even though all she wanted to do was sell her photos to the magazine. So the chief editor, who was Hanako’s father, told her she had a good photographic eye and suggested that, if she had no other plans, they should have dinner together. Now, it was a bit hard for her to say no because, not only did she want the job, but Hanako’s father was your typical authoritarian middle-aged man who used to be in the radical anti-Yoyogi faction of Zengakuren during the sixties student movement. (I knew his voice from talking to him on the phone and he sounded exactly like that sort of middle-aged man.) It never occurred to the young woman photographer that he would ever say to her, as he did, “I’ll give you a job if you sleep with me.” She simply thought that, being a fellow journalist, it’d be worthwhile for him to know what professional “information” she might have and that he’d be interested to find out about recent developments in the photography world; anyway, she seemed to believe that this dinner would just be a work-related exchange between an editor and a photographer.

Now the idea that it’s okay for a man to expect sex from someone he asks to dinner might be the type of classic sexist myth that circulates in places like New York or Paris, but I can assure you that most of the editors that I’d seen at my aunt’s place were desperate for information rather than sex. Whether they’d read the material themselves I wasn’t sure, but they were always bringing my aunt first issues of new magazines and newly published novels by young writers and trying to save themselves work and get easy access to information by asking her opinion. Anyway, to get back to the woman photographer—who’d been a junior student at the photography school my aunt’s friend, Natsuyuki, went to—my aunt said that she’d been so angry that she’d written a letter of complaint to the publisher. Apparently, she’d asked Natsuyuki what he thought she should do and was pretty annoyed when he told her that there were these sorts of men out there in the world, that she should just think of them as being

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