Taeko and Ayako - My Alien Lovers

The men of yesterday are gone, and it is doubtful whether those alive today will still be here tomorrow. The destiny of a single man scarcely allows time for a single breath
(Hojo Shigetoki)

The first time I met Taeko I was struck by the firmness of her breasts. She sat bolt upright on a horse. I admired her martial beauty as she cleared fence after fence, her posture oddly unyielding. Her generous breasts stood firm, immovable, like marble to my eyes.

When I encountered her in the flesh it was her face that intrigued me. She smiled vacantly. Two deep, sweet eyes laughed in unison with her mouth. The light was so intense I had to look away. Her face was like a porcelain mask – polished, polished to a sheen that seemed to deny its own life.

When I was introduced, it was Ayako who offered a compliment:

- Pretty dress. I like it to death.

I did not catch Taeko’s reply, for at that moment the announcer proclaimed the entry of another rider into the arena. Show jumping was a sport unknown to me, alien in the same way as Taeko’s reputation, which had drawn me there. She had been described with precision as a woman of unusual tastes:

- Do not be deceived by her apparent lack of personality, I had been warned. She is a strong girl, though she is almost entirely without malice. At first she may seem dull, but she is not. She lacks any inclination towards passing enthusiasms. She does not display the passions she harbours within. She acts as though she has none.

That phrase  - lacks any inclination towards passing enthusiasms - struck me like a wake‑up call. Then I saw those breasts, incapable of swaying, and I understood at once her essence. She was held by an invisible rope. That rope stretched far above, vanishing into space, tethered to a distant star that had given her life. She lived suspended, sustained by a power not her own.

Her smooth face, like a porcelain cup, her marble‑hard breasts - they embodied the light that fell from that star, barely contained as she collapsed upon this planet. That far light had thrust her down to earth, tightening the rope, forbidding any return to her distant and unattainable origin.

Ayako, unlike Taeko, was a heedless girl. She possessed an innate sensuality, yes, but she was alien to rigid codes of conduct. She was incapable of any form of literary reasoning, of logic, of art, of moral commitment. She loved diversion and provocation, and she lived by them.
A man loved by Ayako would surely have profited from that sensual, aesthetic way of inhabiting the world.

Ayako had grown up in a house of women. It was steeped in giggles, whispers, and hypocrisy. For her, hypocrisy was the normal way of being in the world. To be hypocritical was not a fault. She knew no other way of being.
That gynaeceum had certainly endowed her with an innate taste for food, clothing, and opera. Perhaps it was her father who had shaped her disposition for opera and bel canto.
From childhood, she had taken singing lessons, and more than once she had travelled to Italy to study the technique of lyrical singing.

She had no ambitions.
Was that a fault?

If one had to define her, she could be described not as beautiful, but as refined and seductive.
Men often prefer refined and seductive women to women who are simply beautiful.
She had a fiancé, and he had always been the same one, since secondary school. Tatsuya. A muscular, unripe youth.
Although Ayako was always surrounded by suitors, and although hypocrisy was her natural state, she remained faithful to Tatsuya.

Yet she loved handsome, youthful men. Above all she loved men without ambition. Like Tatsuya.
Fat men appeared to her grotesque and incomprehensible. Especially those devoted to study and politics: she found them tedious and contemptible. Those full of ambition she considered little better than degenerates.

Unlike Taeko, she was a woman of this earth. She was not moved by invisible strings, but by the fire of this planet smouldering beneath the crust thousands of kilometres below the surface.
If Taeko was cerebral, Ayako was visceral. She lived life first and foremost with her belly, disinclined as she was to speculation.
She knew it. She knew she was different from Taeko. For this reason she had no ambitions. She was daughter of humble earth.

She was in love. In love with herself. She felt within her the fire of the earth burning, keeping her alive regardless of her being.