t is quite clear to me now. When I was a girl I was abundantly endowed with that certain something that attracts older men. I had the power to arouse a man’s so-called Lolita complex. As fate would have it, though, the older I’ve become the harder it is to retain this charm. It didn’t abandon me all at once. I was still able to turn it on to a certain degree while in my twenties. And because I was born with a beauty far surpassing that of the ordinary woman, I’m still attractive now that I’m thirty-six. But now I work as a hostess at cheap clubs and occasionally I’ll work as a prostitute. I suppose, in the true sense of the word, I’ve grown ugly.

My lascivious blood leaves me no choice but to lust for men. No matter how common I become, how ugly, how old, as long as there is life in my body I will go on wanting men. That’s just my fate. Even if men are no longer amazed when they see me, even if they no longer desire me, even if they belittle me, I have to sleep with them. No, I want to sleep with them. It’s the retribution for a divinity that no one can sustain forever. I suppose you could say my “power” was little more than sin.

My uncle Karl came to meet us at the Bern airport with his son, Henri. It was early March, and the air was still crisp with frost. Karl wore a black coat and Henri a yellow down jacket. Wispy-soft whiskers had begun to grow around his lips. Karl looked nothing like my skinny golden-haired father. He was dark and solid. If anything, with his upturned almond-shaped eyes and his black hair, he had an Asian look about him. Karl wrapped Father in a hug, happy to see him again, and then he shook my mother’s hand.

“Welcome! Welcome home. My wife wants you to come over to our house right away.”

Mother nodded slightly, withdrawing her hand from Karl’s grasp as soon as she could. Unable to disguise his embarrassment, Karl turned his gaze on me and then backed away. In that instant I knew. Karl was just like Johnson.

When Johnson and I met, I was twelve and he was twenty-seven, so even though I could hear him murmur in his heart, Hurry and grow up, there was no answer I could give immediately. But when I met Karl I was already fifteen. I recognized at once the lust that lingered in his gaze, and I decided it was time to answer.

I soon became friends with Henri, who was closer to me in age; he was twenty. He took me to movie theaters, cafés, to the slopes where he skied with his friends. Whenever one of his friends asked, “Who’s she?” he answered, “She’s my little cousin, hands off!” But going out with Henri grew tiresome. All he wanted to do was show me off.

I noticed something strange. With boys like Henri and classmates who were close to my own age, I was not able to exert the same kind of magical power that I held over grown men. It was practically as though they did not feel my charm. To the boys I was just an ordinary girl, hardly a goddess. Even though they fussed over me, I was not able to arouse in their eyes the same kind of excitement I found in older men. Bored with Henri, I began to devise ways to be alone with Karl.

One afternoon I stopped by Henri’s house on the way home from school, pretending to have misunderstood when it was we had agreed to meet. I knew at that hour Henri would still be at the factory. I also knew that my aunt Yvonne would be at the bakery where she worked part-time and that Henri’s younger sister would be at school. No one else would be home. My father had told me Karl had to go home shortly after noon to meet with the accountant. Karl was surprised to see me.

“Henri won’t be home until after three.”

“Really? I must have misunderstood the time he said. What should I do?”

“Want to come in and wait? I could make you a cup of coffee.” I couldn’t help but notice the way his voice trembled.

“Well, if I’m not interrupting anything…”

“Not a problem. We’re just finishing up anyway.”

Karl ushered me into the living room. The accountant was in the midst of collecting his papers. I sat on the sofa, which was covered in plain cloth upholstery, and Karl brought me a cup of coffee and a plate of cookies my aunt had baked. The only thing my aunt’s cookies had going for them was their sweetness. Otherwise, they were awful.

“Have you gotten used to your school?”

“Yes. Thank you for your concern.”

“And you seem to have no problem with language.”

“Henri’s taught me.”

Karl always wore jeans at the factory, but today he wore a crisp white shirt with gray trousers and a black leather belt. Businessmen’s attire did not suit Karl; he looked stiff and uncomfortable. He sat down across from me, fidgeting, his eyes darting from my legs, stretching out from under my short school uniform skirt, to my face. The tension was growing tedious. I began to believe I was stupid to think that I could get Karl to act. But just when I glanced at my watch, he said, in a voice hoarse with desire, “Oh, if only I were Henri’s age!”

“Why?”

“Because you are so charming. I’ve never met anyone as beautiful as you.”

“Because I’m part Japanese?”

“Well, let’s just say I was smitten the moment I laid eyes on you.”

“I like you, Uncle Karl.”

“Too bad it’s taboo.”

“Why is it taboo?”

Karl blushed just like a schoolboy. I got up and went over and sat on his lap, wrapping my hands around his shoulders, just as I had done so many times with Johnson. His hard thing pressed against my backside. It was just like it was with Johnson. Could something that hard and big really fit inside me? How it would hurt!

“Ahhh.” I let slip a small sigh, just imagining what it would be like. That was the signal Karl needed. He plastered his lips over mine in a hungry kiss. With trembling hands he tore impatiently at the buttons on my school blouse, the hooks of my skirt. They fell to the floor around us, along with my shoes and socks.

Once he’d stripped me down to my underwear, Karl lifted me in his arms and carried me into the bedroom. I lost my virginity there on the hard oak bed that Karl shared with his wife. It hurt a lot more than I had expected, but at the same time it brought such complete pleasure that I was convinced I liked it more than I could stand.

“Oh, my God. How could I have raped a child—and my own niece at that?”

Karl pulled away from me so quickly he practically threw me off the bed and covered his head with his hands, muttering as if in pain. What was so horrible, I wondered, in what we’d just done? It had been wonderful. I was disappointed with the way Karl, who was overcome with regret, returned so quickly to reality. But for his part Karl too felt dis-enchanted. The awe and admiration that I had found in Karl’s gaze disappeared after he had finished with me. That was the first time I noticed that the men who embrace me, every single one of them, end up with an expression of emptiness when they are done, as if they have lost something. Maybe that is why I am always in search of a new man. Maybe that is why I am now a prostitute.

After that, I met Karl on the sly any number of times. One time, I can’t remember when, he picked me up in his Renault on my way home from school and drove, with me in the backseat, without looking at me once. We went to a cabin owned by a friend of his at the foot of a mountain. It was off season and no one was around. The cabin was dark and the water had been turned off. Careful not to get the carpet dirty, we spread out newspapers and had ourselves a little picnic of wine and salami slices between pieces of bread. Karl undressed me and arranged me in various poses on the white bedspread of the double bed. He took pictures with a single-lens reflex camera. By the time he finally came to join me on the bed, my passion was as chilled as my body.

“Uncle Karl, I’m cold.”

“Just put up with it.”

Before we started having sex, I knew it was inappropriate behavior for blood relatives. And we were blood relatives. The one person we could absolutely not let find out about our relationship was Karl’s older brother, my father. We feared his reaction. Inevitably, after Karl had finished, he would mumble nervously, “If my brother knew about this he’d kill me.”

Men live by rules they’ve made for themselves. And among those rules is the one specifying that women are merely commodities for men to possess. A daughter belongs to her father, a wife to her husband. A woman’s own desires present obstacles for men and are best ignored. Besides, desire is always for the man. It’s his role to make advances on women and to protect his women from the advances of others. I was a woman who was seduced by a member of her own family. Among the rules in a man’s world, this was a big taboo. And for that reason, Karl was terrified.

I didn’t want to be anyone’s possession. In the first place, my desire was not some paltry affair that could easily be protected by some man. But that day Karl was different. He bad-mouthed my father.

“My brother isn’t what he says he is. He’s lousy at keeping the accounts. When I pointed this out he got angry. To make it worse, the way he treats his wife is unforgivable. He acts like she’s just his housekeeper.”

Karl wouldn’t understand if I explained that it was Mother who wanted to be a maid. After Mother came to Switzerland, she became self-conscious about being Japanese. Every day she made Japanese dishes out of really expensive foods, and when no one could eat all she’d made she’d stash it away in the freezer. It wasn’t long before the freezer was crammed with Tupperware containers filled with boiled hijiki or nikujaga stew or sliced burdock root. Those containers spoke to me of my mother’s gloom and left me with an ominous feeling.

“Uncle Karl, do you hate my father?”

“I despise him. You mustn’t tell anyone else, but he has a Turkish mistress. I know all about it, you see. He has a soft spot for black hair and dark eyes.”

The woman was an immigrant laborer who’d come over from Germany. Unable to keep their passion for each other a secret, my father and his mistress spent their days exchanging warm glances.

“What do you suppose Mother would do if she found out?”

Karl looked pained by my question. Undoubtedly he was equally concerned with what she’d do if she found out about us. Karl and me; my father and his Turkish mistress…. It seemed we had a lot of secrets to hide from Mother. But there was no one here who would tell her. She’d lost all her friends when she came to Switzerland, and she was unable to learn the new language. So she retreated deeper and deeper into her shell, refusing to come out.

“I certainly don’t want her to know,” Karl said.

“But it’s okay for me to know?”

Karl looked at me in surprise. I averted my eyes and gazed up at the dark ceiling of the mountain cabin.

My mother hated me. Giving birth to a child who looked so unlike herself threw my mother into a tailspin from which she never recovered. She was still living in shock. After I reached maturity it became worse, and when it was decided that we would move to Switzerland, my mother became the only Asian person in the family. As a consequence, my mother began to feel closer to my older sister, who was still in Japan and who was more Asian than I was, or so my mother thought. My sister’s well-being weighed on my mother. She was constantly saying over and again, “I worry about that child. Do you suppose she thinks I abandoned her?”

My sister did not think anything of the sort. If my mother had abandoned anyone, it was me. I didn’t look like anyone in the family. I’d been left to my own devices. The only people who paid me any attention were the men who desired me. As a child I first became aware that my existence had a purpose when I realized men lusted after me. And that’s why I will lust forever after men. Before I even began to worry about homework or any of those school things, I began having secret liaisons with men. And it is men who give me the proof I need now to feel I’m alive.

One night I was late coming home. Karl had dropped me off in the back streets, afraid he’d be spotted if he stopped the car in front of our apartment building. I trudged home alone in the darkness. When I got to our apartment, I opened the door and went straight to my room. It was already after ten but the apartment was pitch-black, which I found very strange. When I peered in the kitchen, I saw no evidence of any meal. Not a day had gone by that Mother didn’t make some kind of Japanese food. Thinking it odd, I went to her room and peeked in through the door. I could see Mother in the dim light. She looked like she was sleeping, so I quietly pulled the door closed without calling out to her.

Thirty minutes later when my father returned, I was in the bath, scrubbing myself clean from my evening with Karl. There was a fierce knocking on the bathroom door. Karl and I had been found out! That was the first thought that shot through my head. But that wasn’t it. Father had come to tell me that Mother looked strange. He was terribly upset. As I ran to the bedroom, I already knew in my heart that Mother was dead.

When we lived in Japan, Mother had never once allied herself with my sister against our father’s bad moods. But once we got to Switzerland, she thought only of my sister. I despised my mother’s spinelessness. I hated her negligence.

This is what happened once. I invited a number of my classmates over to our apartment to hang out. My mother refused to leave the kitchen.

“I’d like to introduce you,” I pleaded, as I pulled her out by the hand. But she shook me off and turned her back on me.

“Just tell them I’m the maid. I don’t look like you, and trying to explain will be a hassle.”

A hassle. That was Mother’s favorite word. Trying to learn German was a hassle. Doing something new was a hassle. My mother remained so unaccustomed to Bern that she easily got turned around whenever she ventured out into the city. It was not long, therefore, until her personality began to undergo some kind of collapse. But I still do not understand what drove her to want to die. By then she was in such a desperate state that even a tiny event would have been enough to push her over the edge. Was it the steamed rice that she didn’t prepare well the other day? The high cost of natt, fermented soybeans? Or was it my father’s Turkish mistress? Perhaps my affair with Karl? I really didn’t care. By then my curiosity about my own mother had already dwindled.

But this much is certain. Both Father and Karl experienced a brief moment of relief with Mother’s death. And then they each began to worry that perhaps it was knowledge of their crime that led her to her suicide. They had to live out the rest of their lives in a battle with their own feelings of guilt.

That wasn’t the case for me. What her death brought me was a clear understanding of the consequences of adult selfishness. It wasn’t my fault that my mother and father had produced such a beautiful child, such a miracle as myself. And yet I was the one who was forced to shoulder the burden. I’d had just about enough of it. I certainly did not want to get saddled with the responsibility for my mother’s death. So when my father brought his Turkish mistress into the apartment, I was relieved because it gave me an excuse to demand that I be allowed to return to Japan. I didn’t care if I didn’t see my elder sister. She hated me anyway. Besides, Johnson had finished his business in Hong Kong and he was waiting for me. Why couldn’t I stay with him? I was no longer a virgin, and I wanted to see what sex would be like with Johnson. I wanted it so badly I could hardly stand it.