Rainy Day in Tokyo

There had been rain off and on all day, and it started up again as I was walking from the theater in Tokyo’s Ni-chome district of Shinjuku, so I dipped into a small grocery store entered by a foyer in a small apartment building. The deluge, although heavy, hadn’t lasted long, and I could use some snacks for the hotel, so I walked the aisles of the store in search of snacks I recognized and liked. I was feeling at bit out of sorts, caused I think by an aura of being isolated. I was so much into everything in New York City, where I was an assistant professor in theater arts at NYU. There were always Off Off Broadway experimental plays to work with and interesting people working in them. Everything in Tokyo was alien and isolating to me. And I was jittery as I’d come to Tokyo hoping explore a new kind of experience.

I’d just spent two hours, at the behest of Professor Gokyo, consulting at the Sudonobu Theater in the center of the Ni-come gay district on an interesting, to say the least, Japanese-language production of Ira Levin’s play, Deathtrap. My specialty was set design and the producers of this production weren’t sure they’d gotten the set right. The production itself was a gay sexual version of the old hit Broadway play in which a fading playwright sells an idea for a new play big time but it is actually an idea of a young playwright he is mentoring and the play revolves around the older playwright’s need to get rid of his protégé so he can claim ownership of the writing. The two men have a close relationship in the original play; the Japanese theater was doing an interpretation that brought the two men even closer—a relationship in which the playwright was mounting as well as mentoring his protégé. The protégé blows the older playwright and is passionately fucked by his mentor on stage during the production. It was a clever interpretation to be staged in Tokyo’s gay district but a bold move even there. The house would be sold out for every performance—indeed orders for tickets were already pouring in from the mere rumor of the production.

My problem had been a language barrier in the consultations. There was an interpreter, who wasn’t too good, and there was considerable misunderstanding going both ways. I didn’t know any Japanese and I’d felt isolated and incapable of my usual fast pace in formulating, sharing, and conveying ideas. It didn’t help that the young Japanese men swirling around me were sexy and were giving me the eye. The set I was supposed to be consulting on was still being erected, they were working on the lighting, and the two actors were practicing on the stage. There was entirely too much activity going on and I constantly felt like I was three steps behind grasping the “discussion” and contributing to it.

It was a feeling that I hadn’t expected to have in coming to Tokyo, and now that I was here, it was unavoidably closing in on me on all sides—language I couldn’t understand, signs I couldn’t read, customs that were alien to me despite how understanding and sensitive the Japanese people were about trying to help, and possibly welcomed hookups being thwarted by the failure to connect interests.

I wondered if Professor Gokyo had felt the same way when he was visiting New York, where the people aren’t as solicitous of foreign people and sensibilities. But then Shotei Gokyo could speak good English and Professor Gokyo had hooked up. My basic problem was that I neither spoke nor understood a word of Japanese. Compounded to that was that I wanted to understand them. I found Japanese men sensual and alluring. And, in my limited experience, they were expert and refined in the act, bringing a sense of the romantic to sex while still making it highly arousing and satiating. I had looked forward to some interesting-technique encounters during this trip.

What was most frustrating with this stage play was that they were trying for a refreshingly bold and uninhibited production and I would normally have been all over helping to create this, given the sanction and financial backing to do so.

But I wasn’t in Tokyo to consult on a gay theater or, officially, to seek sexual adventure, for that matter. I was part of an international consortium of theater academicians who were attending seminars around the world. Two months previously the seminars had been in New York. Now they were in Tokyo, starting with a reception this evening at the Tokyo University of the Arts in Senju, where Professor Gokyo taught production arts. I had met Gokyo in New York and we’d hit it off well—better than well. We were much the same age—he in his early thirties and me twenty-eight—among an appreciably older crowed. We were, of course, both actively gay, as were most involved in the discipline, and we were attracted to each other and we had fucked.

A drink at his hotel had led to me fucking him in his hotel room. He had been an inventive and athletic sex partner, and we moved with each other in achieving mutual satiation as if we had been long-time lovers. With Gokyo whispering guidance, we both wore kimonos covering naked flesh and fucked on the floor of his hotel room, in front of a floor to ceiling window overlooking nighttime Central Park and the Manhattan skyline. We achieved full, deep penetration, athletic thrusting, and mutual ejaculations without removing the kimonos and still with a sense of each other’s arousing nakedness. And after a rest, we did it slower, longer, and more intimately. Our physical and professional attraction to each other had then led to a continuing international correspondence that had been aflame both with the exchange of ideas about the theater and high heat of the orgiastic interactive movement of body parts and exotic technique.

When I’d arrived at my hotel in Tokyo this morning, there had been a note from him. “I have seen that you arrive today,” the note said. “I regret I am tied up in preparation meetings for the seminar and could not meet you at the airport or see you before tonight’s seminar, but I have taken the presumption of giving you to the Sudonobu Theater early in the afternoon to consult on what I think you will find is an inspired production of Ira Levin’s Deathtrap. If you aren’t too tired or haven’t hooked up already, here is the address, in both English and Japanese—the Japanese for the hotel driver—to the theater. They will be expecting you at about 1:00 p.m.—if you are able to attend.”

I had smiled at the hint that he was giving me busy work so that I wouldn’t hook up with someone else before seeing him this evening. I also was taken with the image of him giving me to the theater, as if he owned me. Normally I would have objected, but I had left that one coupling with him in his New York hotel with the feeling that he did, indeed, own me to the extent he wanted to. I topped, but he dominated. When I had been inside him, he had spoken to and of my shaft as if it were a separate personality, one that was his to remain steely hard and to give him pleasure. And he was not shy about telling me of the pleasure it was giving him. His was a sweet and sour approach of refinement and reserve flowing into hot passion and quite frank verbalization of pleasures, and, yes, he had told me, this was a Japanese approach to sex. He had whetted my appetite for knowing and experiencing more of that.

The labels on the shelved packages were overwhelming to me as I moved down the narrow aisle in the small grocery store. I couldn’t concentrate on the items and I constantly had my eye to the front window of the shop and the status of the raindrops outside. I traveled extensively in Europe and was used to the euro and dollar ruling everywhere. Japanese money was beyond me—as were Japanese Kanji characters instead of an alphabet I knew and the exclusively Japanese chatter going on around me. Even the music wafting through the store in half tones was alien to my world. I could only pick out a few items and hope that I had enough money to cover them.

I was staring, blindly, at a shelf of snacks that looked like maybe an octopus was the origin of the chips when I noticed a young man standing at the end of the aisle with a basket of goods in his hand. He was familiar to me, although I couldn’t discern from where or why, and when he looked at me, he showed a surprise of recognition as well and smiled. He was, of course, Japanese and young, small of stature but beautifully formed. As he smiled, I realize that he had been the one directing the lighting work at the theater. He had smiled at me like that then—a smile of interest that I was quite familiar with and was frustrated at the time of not being able to pursue—and he smiled at me like that now.

He disappeared around the end of the aisle. In walking up and down the aisle, though, I encountered him twice more, and we nodded to each other and smiled each time. He appeared to be a few years younger than I was, in his early twenties. He was short but muscular—not in an overbuilt way, though. He was berry brown, had long, straight. lustrously black hair that was bound up in a ponytail, and his eyes were dark and expressive. He wore a T-shirt sporting a Japanese sporting hero cartoon on the front that so tightly clung to his body that I could discern the bars pierced in his nipples; cargo shorts, with multiple pockets for the equipment he’d had to carry with him to work on the lights; and open-toed sandals.

Tokyo was in a heat wave this summer, so I was lightly dressed too—a white, billowy, loose and open cotton shirt over a tight red athletic T-shirt, white cotton trousers, and sneakers without socks. I knew it to be a gay look, but I wasn’t hiding anything during this trip; I was open to possibilities, and I had nothing in appearance to be ashamed of. I’d been hard since I’d first heard there was a conference for me to go to in Tokyo and that Professor Gokyo was involved in it.

Having gathered a few things I hoped I was recognizing as something I could eat, I approached the checkout counter with trepidation. He, the young Japanese lighting man, was there already and helped me count out the right money for my purchases, which was quite a bit less than I had thought it would be.

He smiled at me, pointed to himself, and said, “Hoshikawa Niho.” He then said just “Niho,” signaling that that would be enough for me to attempt. He pointed to me.

I responded, “Timothy Lord,” with a smile. And mimicking what he’d reduced that to, I added, “Tim.” It was obvious that we weren’t going to do much conversing with each other—not here, in a crowded, claustrophobically stuffed grocery store, with aisles spaced for small, trim Japanese bodies. Niho’s body certainly was trim. I must have passed muster with him, as he reached out and put his hand on my forearm. If that wasn’t an invitation, I don’t know what was. In the States it might have been overlooked as a signal, but not, I was sure, in Japan, with its emphasis on honoring personal space even in a crowd.

We both looked out of the store window and viewed the ongoing deluge. He shrugged, squeezed my forearm to get my attention, pointed toward the ceiling, and gave me a questioning look. Then he pantomimed going up stairs with his fingers. I understood that he was offering me refuge until the rain stopped and that he had access to somewhere above to wait it out.

He was cute and had made me go hard, so I followed him up the stairs—up six flights of stairs to the building’s attic.

His room was small. It was dominated by a sheet-covered mattress on a platform. A kitchen counter ran down the interior wall and two deeply recessed dormer windows were cut into the street-side wall. A doorway covered with a beaded curtain led to a small bathroom, with shower. Clothes were hanging on pegs on an opposite wall. They were of more than one size, some of them made for a larger man than Niho, so he didn’t live here alone. The room was impeccably clean, though, and there was nothing here that wasn’t both functional and esthetic. It would have made a good theater set for a trysting room.

That’s what it became.

Motioning to the only chair in the room, a legless Zaisu chair, a classic Japanese design, he went into the bathroom and I squatted, cross-legged, on the chair, blessing all of the yoga classes I’d taken and how diligently I’d endeavored to remain flexible.

He used the toilet and undressed and redressed with the bathroom door open and all within my increasingly aroused eyesight. He didn’t look to see if I was watching, though. It all seemed quite natural, as if this was how it generally was done in Japan, with less privacy and more acceptance of the body’s functions than Americans demanded in their own world. I had the opportunity to confirm that his berry-brown body was beautifully formed. He was smooth bodied except for the long hair on his head and a trimmed pubic bush with, what I could see in glimpses, an erect cock.

I hadn’t misjudged his interest.

When he came out of the bathroom, he was wearing only a fundoshi loincloth, the traditional Japanese one-piece garment to cover a man’s privates. He walked over to me and stood in front of me, fingering the knot at the side of the fundoshi and giving me a questioning look.

I didn’t have to know Japanese to know that he was offering himself to me, if I was interested. There was no need to establish interests beyond what we already knew of each other. We had both been in consultations about the technique of male characters fucking on stage; the play we were discussing was being done as a gay production. There was no question that we both were gay and comfortable with being so. It was evident that he instinctively knew or had been told that I was a top. His signaling had been rather explicit, and in the grocery store he had, more than once, dipped his head to me, lowering his eyes, a universal sign of a willing submissive. Of course I was interested. I reached up, untied the knot, let the fundoshi fall to the floor, pulled the young man to me, and opened my mouth to his hard, slightly upturned cock.

He pulled my shirt and T-shirt off my torso as I was sucking him off and then he pulled away from me, went down on his knees, and pulled my sneakers off my feet and my trousers and briefs off my legs. He sat, yoga style, on my thighs, facing me. His legs crossed behind the small of my back and mine crossed behind his back. We kissed as he frotted our cocks together—mine appreciably thicker and longer than his. I sighed as he docked the cocks, bringing the bulbs together in a kiss, and pushing his foreskin over my cut bulb.

This was what I remembered from the evening with Professor Gokyo in the New York hotel—taking our time to become fully aroused and spending that time in highly erotic sex play, bringing a sense of romance into the encounter, setting it up so that it would be sensual and more mutual giving than taking to the end. We knew we were going to have sex. We knew I was going to fuck him, although here, in this atmosphere, it would be more that I was going to make love to him. We savored the moments of preparation and foreplay—or, rather, like Gokyo had done, Niho held me in check, guiding me in savoring the moments, while, throughout, assuring me that I was going to have him completely.

I reached around and pulled the band of his ponytail out, causing his straight, black hair to fall down to below his shoulder blades. He was more beautiful than handsome like this, and I cupped his chin, tipped his face up, and took possession of his lips. He opened them to my tongue, which he sucked on as I ran my fingers through his luxuriant hair.

He had brought a condom and lubrication from the bathroom when he’d come to me, and we sat, facing each other, our legs entwining each other, our foreheads together, both of us looking down, as he rolled the condom on my cock, smoothed it out, and rubbed both my cock and his opening with the lube. This all seemed so Oriental and exotic to me—something that must be a Japanese form of foreplay. I liked it; the almost ritual nature of it aroused me.

We both were panting lightly and groaning and moaning in low tones, as he lifted and rolled his buttocks up. He placed his hole against the bulb of my cock and slowly moved his hips forward, ever so slowly impaling himself on me, making me shudder with every millimeter of me that disappeared inside him. His hips were narrow and his hole seemingly not more than a rosebud, and my cock was thick and long. He moaned as he slowly took the cock in, miraculously opening to it as and when needed, and I moaned as well. Penetration had been almost a sacred ritual with Gokyo too, and it had remained in my mind as something I wanted to experience again.

We both watched the journey of the penetration, mesmerized. He was making an art form out of the fusing of our bodies. Images of the primeval power of the cock in the act of fusion exploded in my head, and I was panting as hard in feeding the cock inside him as he was in receiving it, pulling it deep inside him, moving back off the cock, exposing the shaft bit by bit, to the rim of the glans, and then pulling it back in deep again, squeezing the shaft with the muscles of his passage, pulling off, repeating. And then again and again until he was open and molded to me personally, and I was gliding in and out with both the desired ease and friction. Never before, before making Japanese love, had I fully observed and appreciated the act and art of the penetration and achievement of possession, how intimate and sensual it was. Japanese lovers were showing me so much more about the sensuality and pleasure of man sex. We embraced and kissed as we rocked against each other and he fucked himself on my cock.

I gave him full control that first time, loosely wrapping my arms around him, clutching his buttocks as he was clutching mine, and kissing his mouth, his cheeks, and his throat and descending to suck on the bars in his nipples as he moved his hips on the steely hard shaft inside him. At length, he arched his head and torso back, his hair fanned out on the tatami matting, and gave me a glazed-over half smile as, feet flat on the mat on either side of my buttocks, he continued moving on my cock and I stroked him off with my hand, while continuing to have a full view of my cock appearing and disappearing inside him. As his flow ended, mine, peaceful and prodigious, started, and seemed to roll on and on.

Later, we positioned ourselves in one of the deeply recessed, narrow window wells. There were no curtains on the window. I crouched down, my back pressed against one side of the well, my legs spread and my feet flat on the floor, the palms of my hands pressed into the opposite side of the well, while Niho, shoulder blades leveraged against that wall, fists pressed into the hollow of my shoulders, and feet leveraging on the wall behind my back, fucked himself on my cock. All of it was slow, sensual, all in slow-burning passion. None of it in anger or assertion of domination. Since I was doing the penetration, in one sense I was fucking Niho. But in another, more satisfying sense, we were making love.

My face was turned to the window, watching the raindrops hitting the glass and rolling down it. All was silence except for the sounds of our sex, which was universal. No Japanese chattering or half-toned music. Just the gentle sound of slow, sensual, satiating sex.

Niho, naked, was at the kitchen wall, making tea, when Utagama Roko, obviously his roommate and just as obviously the actor playing the playwright’s protégé in the Levin play I’d consulted on at the Sudonobu Theater, arrived. I was sitting, naked, on the side of the platform bed.

Nothing was said; nothing needed to be said. Roko had come home in the rain—oblivious to it raining. My mind told me that he had come straight home, regardless of the weather, to be with Niho. His soaked clothes were plastered to his body. It was as if he weren’t wearing any, and his body was beautiful. He, like Niho, was small of stature, but perfectly formed.

He immediately discerned, without trying to communicate in our disparate languages, that Niho and I had been fucking for more than an hour and intended to continue to fuck. This quite evidently was fine with him. He shucked his wet clothes, taking them to the bathroom, and returned naked. He brought another condom with him, approached me, and leaned down into me for our lips to meet as his hand worked my cock to hard again. He crowned me with the condom and sat in my lap, on my cock. Niho returned to the platform bed and snuggled in behind me, covering my pecs with the palms of his hands and working my nipples with his fingers. I turned my face back to Niho, and we kissed. I gripped Roko’s thin waist between my hands, and, as he arched back to the floor and placed his palms on the floor board, I pulled the young actor on and off my cock, slowly, sensually, savoring the view of the cock bulb spreading the opening to the passage just enough to penetrate and then spreading it more with the expanding thickness of the shaft followed behind. The actor was somewhat better endowed than Niho was and was hard as a rock. As Roko fucked himself on my shaft, Niho reached around and stroked him off.

Roko was murmuring in Japanese, but I didn’t need a translator to know that I was pleasuring him well enough. He certainly was pleasuring me.

Roko didn’t let me finish inside his passage. He knelt between my spread legs, pulled the condom off my cock, and while Niho continued running his hands over my torso and flanks, gave me a blow job that told me that the older actor was going to be very happy during every performance of the sexed-up Deathtrap to be receiving a blow job from his young man on stage.

Later, as Roko and I were back in the window well, with his back to the wall and the soles of his feet plastered to the well wall behind me, using them for leverage to fuck himself on my cock, I crouched between his legs, clutching his buttocks and pulling him on and off my cock. Niho lay on his back on the platform bed, legs bent and spread, and worked his passage with a thick black dildo while he watched Roko and me fuck.

I noticed, after I’d come, that it no longer was raining. The light was bright coming in through the window panes, still beaded with water droplets.

I knew it was time to leave. I left the two stretched out against each other on the bed, Roko holding Niho in his arms and working the dildo in Niho’s ass. They were very much into pleasuring each other—quite the romantic pair. I was grateful that they had made room to include me as well.

* * * *

“I hope you didn’t mind the consulting stint at the Sudonobu Theater today, Timothy,” Professor Gokyo said as he came to me where I was standing by the window at the Tokyo University of the Arts Faculty Club window.

“No, it was quite stimulating,” I answered, with a smile. I was reflecting that he seemed to have turned me in that direction to keep me from hooking up with someone before I could with him—and it had led to two quite satisfying hookups. “It was a very satisfying afternoon,” I added.

“I thought you might be amused and inspired by the production slant they are taking with Deathtrap.”

“Yes, that too,” I answered. He gave me a quizzical look, but I just smiled a little smile—I would have purred if I could—and didn’t elaborate.

“I hope you didn’t have too much trouble with the language barrier.”

“It didn’t prevent me from achieving anything I wanted,” I said. Which was true, despite the initial frustration and irritation of the isolating nature of the language barrier. Niho, Rico, and I hadn’t been stymied by a language barrier; we’d all managed to get what we wanted—at least I had. I’d achieved an uncountable number of quite satisfactory ejaculations.

“I’m sorry about the rain,” he said. “It usually isn’t that persistent or dousing in Tokyo in the summer.”

“I enjoyed that too,” I answered. The image of Niho slowly riding my cock in the window well with the rain beating on the windowpane and that of Roko arriving in the flat soaked to the skin—and, indeed, the whole scenario that had me ducking into the small grocery store and being taken up to Niho’s room for an afternoon of very pleasant fucking—no, lovemaking—floated across my mind. No, I didn’t mind the rainy day in Tokyo at all.

“Oh, terrors,” Gokyo said, looking out of the window we were standing by. “It’s raining again, and it looks like it’s settled in. You can’t be going out into this after the reception. I’ll have to drive you.”

We both knew he wouldn’t be taking me back to the hotel from here, though. “I think you mean that you want me to drive you,” I said, giving him a grin.

“I think it’s time we left the reception. We’ve been here long enough for politeness sake.” He said this as he reached out for my half-full glass of scotch. It was good scotch, but, after taking a generous slug of it, I handed the glass to him without regret.

An hour later, we were on the platform bed in his traditional-style wood-frame house, with the tiled roof and the shoji screens marking off the room separations. He was as inventive and athletic as he’d been in his hotel room in New York City. I was lying on my back on the bed and he was suspended over me, facing up at the ceiling, in the position of a crab. He was leveraging off his hands, his arms on either side of my shoulders and on his feet, his legs bent and planted on either side of my knees. And he was raising and lowering his buttocks on my cock, as I held his waist in my arms.

I knew we’d be going on like this for a couple of hours, Gokyo employing increasingly inventive and athletic ways to ride my cock. As he fucked himself on me surrounded by the muffled sounds of satisfying and totally immersed sex, I became aware that the sound of the rain beating on the roof tiles was whipping up into a frenzy of a storm—just as, eventually, in a reach for a new plane of satisfaction, our taking and giving would become a frenzied race to a shared orgasm—or two or three. Gokyo and I were a perfect fit, sexually.

As I became increasingly aware of the sound of the rain on the tile roof I also became more attuned to the changing of the pattern in Gokyo’s rise and fall on my cock. I realized that he was hearing the rain as music and was melding the fuck to the patterns of this music. When I’d realized this, I started going with him in the effort until we were moving as one perfect fucking machine merging with the rain, becoming one with the elements.

And, no, I didn’t mind at all that it had been a rainy day in Tokyo.