Intermission 1

Over my first year working at the docks, where I started around the beginning of that summer after quitting my company position and deciding that working a soul-sucking job behind a desk wasn’t for me, I was introduced and got to know a certain individual who had been working there for around 15 years. His name was Amane Hirofumi, but everyone called him “Amane Porno” or just “Porno” for short.

A lanky man with baggy eyes and sagging jowl, Porno was a self-declared reviewer and expert on all things pornography-related – videos, magazines, photo books, erotic games, everything. He would walk around and that’s about the only thing he’d talk about and the only thing about which he boasted to have a large amount of expertise. He was very proud of his knowledge, or at least not at all ashamed of it, and regaled everyone at the docks with information and reviews about the newest videos, photos, actresses, and so on, as well as his favorite picks and choices. Of course, such a pervert had a predilection towards videos with a focus on feet, but that is not very much important.

It’s important to note, however, that Porno, pervert and pornographic savant, was never caught part-taking (either illicitly or openly) in his hobby in any way while at work. He was never caught watching any videos or browsing any dirty websites or reading anything uncouth or masturbating or doing anything pornography related. In fact, aside from this little obsession of his, his behavior was completely normal and no woman had ever reported that she’s been harassed or even leered at by Porno at any point in time during his 15 year stint at the docks. If anything, everyone thought he was a generally okay guy and, aside from his asides about pornography, people generally didn’t mind him and didn’t feel too uncomfortable around him once they got to know the man.

In the middle of my second summer, we received news that Porno had died. Suddenly and out of nowhere, he’d apparently killed himself by shoving a pipe with a sharpened end in through his mouth and up into his brain. It was confirmed a suicide and no foul play was found, but he’d left no note and hadn’t said anything before that might’ve served as some forewarning for what he’d done. The news came as a surprise to all, to the dismay of many, and to the indifference of a select few with whom he never got along.

His funeral was held at a run-of-the-mill funeral place, and the whole thing was organized by his estranged wife and daughter who apparently hadn’t spoken to him at all in around 5 years (though they’d been estranged for many more before that) and both of whom cried too hard and for a little too long considering their strained relationship with Porno. Most of us from work attended the funeral and found the whole thing to be uncomfortable, not only because hearing a grown woman and young university-aged girl loudly crying their eyes out was discomforting, but because we all knew what happens next when someone dies. Your next of kin are contacted and they rifle through your stuff, taking, collecting, organizing, and throwing away things as they like. Only we all knew Porno’s apartment wasn’t a place family should be looking through. Quite frankly, we imagined his family’s horrified reaction and couldn’t bear how disgraced he would be, dead though he was. So, when the wife had explained to us that it was very difficult (emotionally) for her and her daughter to clean up and vacate his apartment of things, a few of us including myself volunteered to go through and bag up any valuables or family-related items or heirlooms for the family and throw away any garbage. His wife assented, being much too grief-stricken to think about why his coworkers might be too eager to look through his stuff (or to think that maybe we just wanted to rob the dead man).

Porno’s apartment was a small 6 tatami mat apartment in an out-of-the-way 2-story derelict apartment complex called “Sunny Days” and as soon as we entered, we found that the interior matched the exterior quite well. The walls were chafing and the tatami mats were ripped in many places – nevermind the mold that you could see around the corners and along the ceiling. Porno wasn’t a clean freak, but he didn’t have last week’s garbage bags piling up in a corner either. The room was messy, and you could tell that he never bothered to clean or sort his stuff before he shoved the pipe up his brain. Somehow, at the time, I never thought about why he might have chosen such a method to go, a method which would require an incredible amount of will and was prone to fail and could’ve ended up being very painful. Maybe it was. I’d like to think he didn’t suffer, but he must’ve already been suffering if he wanted out.

The moment we walked in, everyone’s eyes of course looked for specific items of a specific kind. The room smelled as well but it wasn’t the sort of smell we were expecting. We looked first superficially, but then dug deeper. We looked through his drawers, his closet, under the mats and in his garbage. We looked inside his mattress and through his DVD player and since Porno wasn’t too tech-savvy, we managed access to a small laptop sitting in the middle of the room on top of a tiny table. We turned every corner in his room, trying to clean up as his family asked all the while, but focused mainly on finding and disposing of certain items.

The task we were assigned took us all day and by the end we were exhausted and wanted to leave. An older guy volunteered to take the valuables and family items to Porno’s estranged wife, while the rest of us walked to the station in silent confusion.

In the end, we never found any pornography inside of Porno’s apartment – not a single video, magazine, photobook, or any paraphernalia for that matter – and there wasn’t anything on his computer either, even though we checked his history and found it untouched.

Porno’s apartment was clean and unsullied, and just about the only picture we found was an old picture of a 20 year younger version of Porno with his wife as she carried a baby, one where Porno had on a smile that I don’t think anyone at the docks had ever seen him wear.