Author's note:
In 1964, Japanese film director Kaneto Shindo made a samurai-era horror film called "Onibaba," about a mother and daughter-in-law who lived in a swamp and murdered passing travelers. In a world that fears women's sexuality these two took on the personification of female evil, of Onibaba, a character from Japanese mythology. Traditionally, in Noh and Kabuki theater, Onibaba appears as a shriveled old woman with a somewhat maniacal appearance, wild-looking hair and an over-sized mouth full of sharp teeth. She is an Yokai, which generally gets translated into "spirit" or "demon," and, much like the classical opinion of Medusa, even when she is minding her own business, the male protagonists of these stories have no qualms about trying to kill her.
I am a hairy barbarian, a Gaijin, a foreigner, one with only the slimmest grasp on Japanese culture, and I tend to root for the underdog, especially when it comes to erotic fantasies. As a translation note, the word "Okaasan" that Iriai uses is simply the informal term for "Mother." Cheers!
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"I know that perversion is the most important thing between heaven and hell. Greater than uninspired love, greater than sterile death, greater even than the wisdom both bring about. For without transgression, there can be no insight. Without debauchery, there can be no compassion. Without the drunken revelry there can be no sobriety. And without any of these, all of life, and indeed, all those who have ever lived it, are a tedious lot of old men, indeed."
-- Kasannoin (Japanese courtesan, 1477)
In the city Hiroshima, in the latter half of the seventeenth century, there lived a curious musician. We shall call him Tatsuo Soga. He was an artist of great genius, though, truth be told, not of popular genius, by which I mean that most people could not stand his music. There was, it was said, something in all his work that was both offensive and fantastic, and as Ludwig van Beethoven will attest, the bourgeois loath all that is both offensive and fantastic. Soga was too fond, his critics claimed, of introducing unfamiliar subjects into his tonal poems. One should not listen to music to discover new terrors, they claimed. The names of his compositions suggested their queer natures: "Tsukuyomi: death of a moon god," "The Oni at Fukuoka Bridge," "The Descent of Emperor Jimmu into Hell," "The Hungry Ghost's Climax," as well as many others, all that pointed toward a powerful imagination that delighted in the perverse, the supernatural; an artist that often executed odd, airy, delicate melodies, crafting passages of exquisite beauty, but always formidable, always unnerving.
Tatsuo Soga believed in the decadence of the ancient union between Drama and Song, and brought that decadence to such a fevered pitch in the Kabuki and Noh theaters of Hiroshima, that his Magnum opus, his grand infernal, unpublishable, unperformable composition, "Onibaba, My Love," an audacious, darker, far more sinister take on the Shinto tale surrounding the legendary female demon who visited lovers in their sleep. It was in vain that he had struggled to get it performed before the stage. Even the non-judgmental, open-minded dramatist, Sawamura Zenji, master of Saruwaka-cho-style Kabuki theater shook his head when Soga favored him with a sample of one of his most thrilling passages. For, as he explained, the more ribald and obscene the music became, the more the general public who attended the Theater sneered at it, especially a general public whose ears had grown lazy, some might even say indolent, on the tawdry melodies of mediocre composers of the day. Hiroshima has never been on the cutting-edge when it comes to music, even in those heady days.
Tatsuo was not only a composer, however, he was also an excellent performer as well, especially on the high pitched bamboo flute called a 'Nohkan', heard in concert halls throughout all of Japan. By that instrument alone he earned a decent livelihood as a member of the troupe of music-hall musicians that performed at the Great Theater of Chiyo. Here formal, harmonious scores by respected composers kept his lewd and gonzo-freak fancies in check, though it was recorded that no less than five times had he been kicked-out and banished forever and ever from the troupe for shocking his fellow musicians with his ribald performances, throwing the whole company into confusion with impromptu variations of so vile and diabolic a nature that one might have well imagined that the mountain ogres, the Oni, who had inspired his many of his compositions, now had somehow gotten hold of his instrument as well.
The impossibility, however, of finding anyone his equal -- which is to say, his equal during his more lucid, chaste moments -- had forced his reinstatement, time and time again. He had now, for the most part, resigned himself to the narrow world of performing the assigned 'Debayashi' and 'Gidayubushi', those traditional, drab parts that Nohkan flute players were excepted to perform. But at home he would make amends for his loathing donkeywork that paid the bills, and, wide-eyed, panting, grasp the rigid, throbbing bamboo with ferocious fingertips, pouring forth all night, often until the dawn, sending his chaotic, lascivious melodies out into the street, startling the early morning shop keepers just opening up with superstitious glances at the sky, as if the noise of that high-pitched flute foretold the arrival of some cataclysmic tsunami.
And yet-- and yet, his music, his inspirations, his nightmares, did not come to him during the long hours of sleep, like so many wretched souls, they were born during his waking hours, hours spent with his wife, Iriai. Often, on dark nights, she would wait at the theater door with her paper lantern and blue umbrella, to help Tatsuo with her steady arm to lean on; otherwise, in his day-dreaming reveries, who knew where her poor musician husband might stumbled to? He would, after all, follow his "darling Onibaba" anywhere. Neighbors thought it cruel of him to use such an unpleasant nickname for such a beautiful woman. In the legends, Onibaba, the "night hag of Adachigahara," appeared as a shriveled old woman, dried paps, an abyssal cunt that would literally suck a man's essence away with a Mephistophelian hunger for flesh. Iriai was, on the other hand ... well, if not always respectable in her dress and appearance, then she was at least saucy in her personality and obviously loved the poor man. Which was odd, because she made most men uncomfortable when she stood too close. Her hair was wiry and dark like onyx, which she brushed back from her temples in two magnificent braids. Despite her modern charms there was something slightly queer about her, though it was a challenge to say what, exactly, that was. Perhaps it was that she smiled slightly too widely, giving her neighbors the alarming notion that she was about to sink her teeth into their jugular. Perhaps it was that her eyes didn't blink often enough, so that when a local Casanova or one of the big-cock merchants down in the market talked to her for any length of time their own eyes began unwillingly to blink on her behalf. Regardless, the reason that Tatsuo referred to his wife as his "darling Onibaba" was that, in fact, that she was a Yokai, a night demon.
If Tatsuo's wife caused heads to turn when she entered a room, it was nothing compared to his mother-in-law who lived with them, Raikou, who caused stoic monks to break out in sweat and erections simply by breathing in the same air she had recently exhaled. Of course, living with such a family caused problems of one sort or another. Raikou rarely went out into public, for most human males, driven as they are by simple hormones and a disregard for women, found they could not help themselves with such otherworldly pheromones lingering in the air as she passed by. Still, demonic Alpha females are nothing to trifle with, and more than one merchant and self-styled rake found himself nursing a black eye and broken nose every time he tried anything that was remotely indecent with the strange older woman.
What this meant, though, was that Raikou, accustomed to a randy and libidinous love-life, was stuck at home most days, moodily masturbating over memories of mountain god cocks she use to know, and how, during a thunder storm, a 100 million volts of lightning, if it struck you just so, was much more satisfying than those lame-ass leather and wood dildos the Christian nun missionaries with their unhygienic ways kept swearing by, damn hairy foreigners.
Of course, Raikou wanted her daughter to be happy. It was the whole point of why she had pushed Iriai into marrying Tatsuo in the first place. Most human males made puny lovers, the sort that broke after a good, hard fuck. If a man can't hold an erection for nine and a half hours then is it her fault that she has to grind his pelvic bones to jelly just trying to ride out the last of her orgasm? Such disappointments. Not like her son-in-law, though. Often Iriai would be shuddering in orgasm as Tatsuo worked her cunt and clit over with his tongue. He was one who knew the worth of a gentle lick. Soon his wife would be trying to jam his face deeper into her drenched swampland, her back arced as she climaxed, literally flooding the bed for a good five feet in every direction. Then the two of them -- she, blurry-eyed from cumming; he gummy-eyed from her cum -- would blink and realize Raikou had been sitting nearby the entire time, watching with something close to religious rapture on her face.
"Okaasan!" Iriai would cry at her mother, trying to disengage her husband's face from between her thighs, always with little success. Oni cum, it has been noted, especially in the process of drying, becomes something akin to glue. In fact, as the haiku master Issa notes, more than one samurai has met his fate in post-coital bliss when he was not quick enough to wipe his face clean.
"Oh, don't mind me," Raikou would grin and blush. "After the first eight hundred years sex doesn't embarrass you like it once did when you were a kid."
Time passed. It was a difficult peace between Raikou and Tatsuo. His mother-in-law tolerated him, though she claimed she could not stand his music. He, on his part, found her obsession with her daughter's sex life a bit troublesome. One night over sake Iriai and her mother were reminiscing about their earlier years, during the heady years of Empress Jingu, when people weren't so hung up about sex.
"I mean, look at me," Raikou cried, pink-cheeked from inebriation, her breasts ready to fall out of her kimono as she leaned forward to drag her daughter toward her, to whisper-slobber into her ear. "I've done it all -- boys, girls, octopus demons from Mariana Trench and after all that fucking what did I get?"
"You mean, besides me, right?" slurred Iriai.
"O! My darling daughter!" cried Raikou, smothering the younger Oni in her cleavage. "Of course, besides you! I know you are happy. I know you cum every night--"
"Okaasan [mumble-mumble]" Iriai's words were lost for a few moments until she was able to pull herself free from her mother's warm embrace. "I, uh, yes," she said, tossing her long hair back over her shoulder and downing the remaining sake in her cup. "But you know, Tatsuo has such a lovely--"
