Shunga Silence

"We will have the silence of Shunga."

It was the first thing I'd heard the film director we were trying to land speak during the first production meeting on the movie

Winter in Niseko

. Knut Johansen was the reason we were freezing our tails off here in Oslo, Norway, in the winter. Atmospherics. Johansen was all about atmospherics. We could just as well have had the meeting in L.A. But he was the director of pregnant silence, bleakness, and sultry looks set against night and snow, and Braxton wanted him for director for this gay art film.

To my questioning look, Braxton Saville, the film producer and my older lover, explained. "Shunga is the ancient Oriental art of pillow book prints. Erotic. Pornographic. Johansen's vision for this film. Homoerotic Shunga."

I was to do the filming. Braxton had also said I was to do anything needed to make Johansen happy.

At dinner, just the three of us, at the Hollmenkollen Park Hotel Rica's De Fem Stuer restaurant at the top of the former Olympic ski jump looking down into Oslo, Braxton played the frenetic, dark, Jewish L.A. operator, talking a mile a minute, while the tall, muscular but gaunt, rugged-faced Johansen played the mime—all nods, shrugs, and grunts. I played the bait, spending my time perusing the album of Shunga prints Johansen had brought.

"Do you want to have Jan for the night?" Braxton asked. Johansen smiled faintly and nodded his head.

* * * *

At a snow-devoured wooden home at the foot of the Hollmenkollen, I lay, naked and face up, on a massage table set beside a wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling glass wall looking out onto a snow-covered Japanese pocket garden and, beyond, the bleak, white mountains to the north of Oslo. The interior of the room was Japanese too—spare yet elegant. Utilitarian. Silent.

My arms dangling over the side of the table, bound there by red silk sashes. My ankles similarly bound at the edges of the foot of the table, my legs bent and spread, feet flat on the table. I turn my head from watching a Geisha warming oil over a charcoal fire to follow the larger Geisha-clad figure taking the bowl from her and approaching the table, tipping the bowl. In silence, the warm oil spreads over my chest, down my arms and legs, into my groin and rectum.

The larger Geisha, Johansen, massages the oil into my chest and arms and legs, slathering my erect phallus and balls, as, moaning and sighing low, but holding steady, I turn my face to the beautiful, bleak, silent winter scene beyond the window.

An oiled finger breaches my rim, finds my prostate, expertly starts to milk my shaft, as I arch my back, slit my eyes, and moan in quiet contrast to the silence of him.

He moves in the brilliant burgundy and gold Geisha robe between me and the silent whiteness beyond the window. The robe, brushed apart at his pelvis, reveals a thick, blue-veined, alabaster-white hard cock jutting from a salt-and-pepper wild pubic bush.

As I take the cock deep into my mouth, the scene holds, and Johansen whispers "One," in a low guttural growl. I know it's significant, because anything the man chooses to voice is significant. Since he holds for a moment before moving his cock in my mouth and resuming milking my prostate with the finger, I realize he is giving me direction for filming

Winter in Niseko

. It is to be a series of still Shunga shots connected with frenetic action or pregnant silences and the bleakness of snowy winter.

This comes home to me, as I am straining at my bounds, my mouth gaping open in what I know has to be a silent scream as my ejaculation arches over my belly and Johansen mutters, "Two."

I'm turned onto my belly and rebound to the table. Johansen lies on top full length, his Geisha robes streaming behind him and down the side of the table away from the window wall. Penetrating my passage with his cock, he mutters "Three." A contrast of shock transition ensues of wildly fucking me to passionate cries in a pistoning, thick, deep-penetrating display of athletic prowess for time interminable. He withdraws, his cum flowing across the small of my back, holds, and murmurs the word, "Four."

By the way he has draped the Geisha robe off to the side away from the glass wall, I understand the wall represents the camera's view of these Shunga print stills. The stills filmed in silence, the atmospheric music, such as it will be, servicing the transitions from one Shunga "moment" to the next.

I have never before so effectively and tersely been made to understand the director's vision of how a movie is to be filmed.

I almost say "Five" in unison with Johansen in the steaming pool outside the glass wall, in the Japanese pocket garden, at the moment of ejaculation. We pause, Johansen sitting on a bench rim inside the pool and me sheathed on his cock, facing away from him, and he grasping my ankles and spreading and raising my feet and calves out of the water, the other Geisha, who is ladling hot water into the pool, freezes. My pelvis rises out of the water, and I shoot off the ejaculation he brings me to.

In all, throughout the night, I am to learn that there will be more than a dozen "Shunga pauses" in the movie. Exhausted but cooing, I ride the Trek down into the center of Oslo with the silent giant the next morning having every confidence that we will win at the Cannes Film Festival.