Guy Lancaster is the editor of the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture and a Ph.D. candidate in the Heritage Studies program at Arkansas State University. He has published one novel, as well as a variety of short stories, academic articles, personal essays, book reviews, and interviews. Both of these essays originally appeared in the Little Rock Free Press.

Swedish Literotica

The first pornographic movie I ever saw was subtitled. That’s me, elitist to the core.

I was in the eighth grade, and it was some early volume of Swedish Erotica, with film and sound quality speaking to an origin in the 1970s. I don’t know whether it was actually Swedish or rather just some American film with the dialogue muted out and appropriate subtitles put in (“Oh, Greta, lick me harder!”), with the Nordic appellation thrown on because Sweden sounds so much more exotic than Alabama or Nebraska. But at the time, I simply took it for granted that this was some import, a record of the sexual proclivities of a people halfway across the world.

The movie was composed of several unrelated lascivious vignettes. In the first, two lesbians were going at each other in their bedroom when a man walked by the window and peered in at them. He started to smile, as if he’d found a freshly baked pie resting on the windowsill. He strode around to the entrance of the house and walked on in, shedding his clothes on the way to the bedroom. The lesbians seemed to have been waiting for him and made room for him in their blonde frolic.

In the second, a man and woman were having sex on the floor of their living room. Another man walked by and peered through the window. This man had a thick mustache, like a broom. It was the sort of mustache that might fit a Chicago cop, but it looked silly on him. Soon, he was in their living room, a naked and uninvited guest. The man of the house did have the wherewithal to ask, “Who is this?” before the mustachioed stranger entered one of his wife’s orifices, but he soon just accepted the stranger’s presence there as perfectly natural.

The other little vignettes followed a similar pattern, but my eighth-grade eyes were fine with that.

This was my first exposure to Swedish culture, and it taught me a lot:

1) The Swedes don’t lock their doors. At all.
2) Most major pedestrian thoroughfares go right in front of people’s houses.
3) Sex in Sweden is a bit like street basketball in American cities. You can be walking by, see some other people playing, and jump in the game, not having to know anybody there.
4) As a consequence of this, Swedish men travel everywhere on foot.

This was much better than my social studies class, where we just memorized major exports and types of government. For some reason, our schoolbook didn’t say anything about the Swedish video industry. I think it said Sweden exported herring and iron ore and imported cotton and had a constitutional monarchy.

“It’s a lot like England,” our teacher proclaimed knowledgably, “except that they speak funny.”

My next exposure to Swedish culture occurred several years later. One rainy day while I was in college, my friend Tim and I drove from Jonesboro to Blytheville because Books Plus, this tremendous, two-story, used book and comic shop, was going out of business. Not that the business had proved unprofitable, but the owner had killed his girlfriend and fled to Arizona. Whoever was overseeing it was selling the complete stock at 400 items for fifty dollars. When Tim and I arrived amid an already ravenous crowd, we basically grabbed several boxes and started pouring stuff into them—books that looked old, books that had interesting titles, books we’d never heard of, because eight cents an item isn’t so drastic an investment that you’ll curse yourself if you come away with something you don’t like or five copies of the same comic book, as it so happened.

The car rode noticeably lower to the ground on the way back. We had filled up the trunk and the back seat and even the passenger floorboard and yet managed to talk the guy in charge down to thirty-five dollars for our load.

“C’mon, look at it,” I said. “It’s a really small car.”

A few weeks later, sifting through my take piled up like a squirrel’s store of nuts, I pulled out an old hardcover volume titled The Miracles of the Antichrist by one Selma Lagerlöf. The title was interesting enough, but what really caught my eye was the phrase “Translated from the Swedish” on the title page and an American publication date that preceded World War I. I don’t think I’d ever held in my hands any book this old and certainly wouldn’t have spent what it was probably actually worth. That automatically made it worth reading.

I finished the book later in the week. It was a marvel of style and story and sheer literary ambition that seemed to revealed the mysteries of God to me—and the fact that I’d found this volume at random in a used bookstore meant that chances were I could never again visit that seventh heaven of delights, that I would be cursed to roam this earth like Cain, searching fruitlessly for volumes by this unknown Swedish author. Even finding out that she was in fact the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature did me little good since next to nothing of hers was in print.

So I obsessed fairly continually.

A few years later, I earned a scholarship to study at Jochi Daigaku (Sophia University) in Japan. My first week there, sitting down for dinner at the men’s dormitory, a veritable counterpart for myself sat down across from me—tall, blonde, and fairly pasty. He introduced himself as Henrik, and we shook hands.

“Where are you from?” I asked him.

“I am from Uppsala in Sweden,” he said. “I am studying engineering there.”

On the off chance that an engineer might know something about know something of my literary obsession, I asked him, “Have you ever heard of Selma Lageröf?”

“Of course!” he said. “My parents live very near where her house is. It’s now a museum.”

I leaned closer to him, my eyes wide and my shirt dipping into my miso soup. “You’ve actually heard of Selma Lageröf?”

“Yes,” he said quizzically. “She is on the twenty kronor note, after all. Everyone knows her.”

I was suddenly in love with this country which had put the object of my literary obsession on its currency, where schoolchildren grew up hearing her name and didn’t have to scour the book collections of murderers to uncover her writings by utter chance on miserable, rainy days. I think I said as much to him, and he replied, “Well, if you ever come to Sweden, I will take you to her house.”

As it happened, I got to go. My dad worked on offshore oil rigs in Africa and had racked up more frequent flier miles than he could ever hope to use in his lifetime, so when my year at Jochi was done with, he sent me tickets on Air France to Stockholm, letting me have a two-week stay there before I returned home. Henrik and I had become very good friends by that point and arranged to meet there with his family a few days after I landed. I enjoyed my days wondering about the city, having American tourists come up to me and say, “Excuse me, do you speak English? Oh, could you take a picture of me and my family?” I played the part of the helpful Swede, and invariably they complemented me on my English—it was fun, getting niceties thrown my way for speaking the language I grew up with.

And then I met up with Henrik and his parents, and they drove us to their home in the smaller town of Karlstad. We spent the next day there, just bumming about town, me breathing in the Swedish air and eating the Swedish cheese and just feeling so privileged to be here in this magical land where people threw together improvised lunches by tossing large sides of salmon on the grill, where breakfast consisted of yogurt and pate and cheese, where time seemed to move slowly.

The next day, Henrik’s mother drove the two of us and Henrik’s girlfriend, Jenny, out to Mårbacka, the birthplace of Selma Lageröf, the place where she lived most of her life. The drive there went through lush, green country, and after living my year in Tokyo, I just stared and stared and stared, as if I’d never seen trees or their color. Before arriving at her house, we stopped at a tiny churchyard and visited Selma’s grave. I stood there before her tombstone and pondered the mystery behind the eight-cent book which brought me to Sweden, that I arrived here via Japan, that a man murdered his girlfriend and so here I stood. Deep thoughts, all of them.

And we went to her house and got the grand tour with others visiting at that hour and saw the peacocks she liked so much wondering about and saw the Nobel medal she sent to Finland to help them raise money for the effort in World War II, only to have it sent back because they were so moved they raised the needed money by means other than selling her mark on history. We saw the sitting room in which she would meet with journalists and the library in which all of her books were still kept behind glass cases.

For the moment, I felt at home.

That evening, back in Karlstad, Henrik, his sister, Cecilia, and Jenny took me to a dance club. We arrived their early, before the music had started, though the bar was open. A number of young people sat around quietly, as if in a library, nursing their drinks. Then the music started, a wordless techno beat, and the place darkened as pink laser lighting shot across the room, accompanied, strangely enough, by a disco ball. But no one moved out to the dance floor.

“Why isn’t anyone dancing?” I yelled to my friends above the industrial din.

“No one dances at the beginning,” Jenny yelled back.

This made little sense to me, and I went and ordered a another beer for myself. Soon enough, a few people wandered out to the floor, making some tentative movements that slightly resembled dancing, as if this were a part of a physical therapy regimen for them and they didn’t want to push it. And suddenly I realized that here was an entire race of people whiter than I was, that I actually stood a chance looking comparatively cool among a whole lot of women. I polished off my fourth or maybe sixth beer with a smile.

“I’m going to the restroom,” I yelled to Henrik, “and when I get back, I’m going to fucking tear this place up!” I let out a whoop. This was what being an American abroad should feel like.

I plowed into the men’s room rather dizzily, into a room as white as heaven and insane asylums are in the movies. A man leaning against the wall at the far end was receiving a blow job from a girl on her knees. At the sound of my intrusion into this white, tile paradise, she ceased her ministrations and looked my way. They both did, their eyes the quintessence of nonchalance, exhibiting only innocence, without the slightest trace of shame.

“Sorry to bother you,” I said as I went to the nearest urinal to do my business. “I mean, pardonnez moi, or sumimasen.” My beer fuzzy brain was finding everything but Swedish.

When I finished and turned back around, they were still there, staring at me with an expectant gleam in their eyes, watching me in their same exposed positions, as if waiting for me to do something that was clearly expected of me, that anyone would know what to do. I sifted furiously through my knowledge of Swedish culture, but funny enough, Selma Lageröf had never broached this subject. So instead, sparking obvious confusion among the couple, I just smiled and waved and made my way back to the dance floor, like the American I was. Like the American I am.

______________________________________________________________________________________

Fuji-no-Takane (“The High Peak of Fuji”)
By Guy Lancaster

There’s a saying that a wise man climbs Mount Fuji only once in his lifetime, while a fool climbs it twice. I climbed Mount Fuji hungover.

It was the waning days of our lives as exchange students there, and we were determined to drink all the liquor in the country during that final week. As more and more of our number took their sad flights back to whatever countries they called home, those last days became the sort of serial drunk for which students and generals are renowned.

This evening, we decided to do karaoke for one last time. Karaoke bars in Japan are not the dens of public embarrassment we have here but rather consist of multiple small closets that might fit ten people and a karaoke machine, as well as a phone for calling in drink orders from the bar. Drinks at a karaoke bar are a species unto themselves, being strangely neon in color and nondescript in taste, so that it’s left only to your imagination to match color with what you may have ordered. Every fifteen minutes or so, we would call for a new tray of blue and green and orange as we rifled through the songbook for something in English, which too often was Madonna or The Beatles.

After karaoke, I went with Old Bryan and Rocky to our favorite little izakaya (pub). We called him Old Bryan because he was a returning student, forty and balding, and we had another Bryan in our number. At some point, I went to the bathroom not feeling too good and lost a chunk of time, ending up with Old Bryan hammering on the stall door, yelling, “You okay in there?”

“I don’t feel too good,” I eventually said.

“Probably all those goddamn shochu drinks,” he said.

“Huh?”

“Yeah, that karaoke place mixes their drinks with shochu, the cheap bastards.”

Shochu was like sake, one of those Japanese fermentations that turned my digestive tract into a reign of terror each time—and I had had no idea. Perched there over the toilet as if I were trying to read my future in the floating pieces of squid I’d just vomited up, I saw myself back at that bar, knocking back those glassfuls of neon blue with alacrity, imagining them to be filled with nourishing vodka or gin—not cheap shochu.

That night, I tried to do everything right, knowing I was going up Mount Fuji the following evening. I drank lots of water and choked down some vitamin C and some aspirin, but despite it all, I woke up in hell, my stomach already tightening down on another heave before my eyes could even open. I threw everything up and then drank some water and then went and threw that up, too.

I got a can of Nude and tried that. Nude is a lot like Sprite, except that the company apparently hired some American consultant to come up with a hip, English-language name for their sodas. That man has the best job on the planet: I’m pretty sure he’s the genius behind Sparkling Beatnik and Plussy brand sodas, too. However, I was soon running back to that bathroom stall.

While hunched over the western-style toilet once more, there was a knock on the stall door. “Hey, Guy, that you?” It was Young Bryan.

“Yeah,” I groaned. Young Bryan was our age. He was from Texas and, no matter how hard he tried, couldn’t erase his drawl when speaking Japanese, a language which doesn’t really accommodate that kind of Texan bigness. He had the shape of an old-fashioned cowhand but worked hard to come off as sophisticated.

“So I hear you’re goin’ up Fuji-san with us,” he said.

I threw up again in reply. After clearing out my throat and nose, I managed to say, “Yeah.”

“Yeah, I’m looking forward to it,” he said. “It’s going to be cool.” He was as oblivious as ever and wandered off, leaving me to stare in the toilet and think: Wow, I’ve never thrown up anything that was still carbonated—look at the bubbles.

That was pretty much the pattern for the day. I tried a bit of sandwich and threw it up. Drank a glass of water and threw it up. I was pretty much despairing of ever having anything in my stomach ever again until around 6:00 that evening, when I managed to get down a can of vending machine chocolate milk—it was like a bit of heaven for only 100 yen. I drank two more immediately.

At about 8:00, I was packed to meet my climbing buddies, still dastardly hungover but determined to fill my next-to-last day with something quintessentially Japanese. Young Bryan was there, along with Michael, a studious German guy, and some of the Japanese guys from the dorm whom I didn’t know that well. There was also Vincent, who was the sort of Catholic who would always feel guilty about not having been a priest, if he ever managed to get married. He tended to drone on about the difficulties of chastity to anyone who would listen, and I was pretty sure he was learning Japanese just to be able to do it in two languages.

The bus ride to Fuji in the dark stirred my gut a bit, but nothing came up. At around 10:00, we were at the fifth station, the highest station vehicles can reach. In the darkness, it was a lonely outpost of asphalt and a few inactive buildings huddling under bright streetlamps. The reason for starting out so late is to reach the top by sunrise, supposedly a beautiful sight.

So up we went.

It was exactly the sort of miserable trek my body expected—why exactly was I here? Upward and onward and every atom of my being protesting that mountain climbing isn’t what you should be doing when you’ve had only three cans of chocolate milk that day, while the rest of me stumbled on in some sort of autopilot, determined to have a good story to tell folks back home.

After about an hour into it, stopping to catch my breath while old ladies and children passed me by, I asked Vincent, “Hey, will this get me out of time in Purgatory?”

“If you offer up your suffering to God, then yes,” he said, sincere as ever.

At the seventh station, I suddenly found my appetite returned and ordered an overpriced bowl of soba noodles and slurped them happily. It was at about this height that people who had unthinkingly packed bags of potato chips or cans of soda were having their stuff explode in the lessening air pressure. The air resounded with the melody of a gang war.

Soon, we pierced the near-perpetual cloud cover that surrounds Mount Fuji and makes its peak a rare sight. The stars broke out in bright wonder above us, as bright as I had ever seen them from the fields and back roads back in Arkansas. I heard a gasp behind me, and there were our Japanese companions staring up as if at a new creation. It suddenly occurred to me that, living in Tokyo perhaps most of their lives, they had never seen stars like this, had never known there were so many. I went to them and started pointing out what constellations I knew. I soon had a crowd.

The bright lights of the next few stations shone up the slope of the mountain like lanterns hanging in the darkness. We pressed onward. At some point, our group had fractured into the fast and the slow, and I ended up walking with Young Bryan the rest of the way up, and within a blur of hours, during which the darkness was slowly watered down as the morning hours grew longer, we were at the top, through the torii gate that marked off the peak as a sacred place. I had made it.

And just in time. We turned east just as the sun popped from behind the distant horizon. While the rest of the crowd atop Mt. Fuji oooohed and ahhhhhed at the beautiful sight, I wanted to shriek like some girly Nosferatu as the rays of the morning sun pierced the back of my still addled brain.

Then I saw Vincent coming up the path. The man who went to the gym as often as I went for a drink looked rather the worse for wear, arm draped over some poor Japanese sap much shorter than he so that it looked like he was using the guy as a crutch, stumbling about in exhausted disarray. But he had a smile on his face. He looked up at me and proclaimed in breathless cheer, “I made it! I made it to the top of Mount Fuji! Anything is possible! Even celibacy is possible!”

Okay—not what I was thinking at that time.

Young Bryan and I bummed around the peak a bit, grabbing another bowl of noodles at the tenth station (where there was a vending machine selling sodas, no doubt specially pressurized, for only 1,000 yen, or about ten bucks) and walking all the way around the crater. I was miserable—my motivation, finally satisfied, waved goodbye when I hit the peak and left me only with my battered self, which wanted to be back in bed but was stuck on a goddamn mountain. I was so supremely tired.

We ran into some U.S. Marines doing exercises on the mountain and chatted a bit. One offered me a cigarette.

“Fuck you,” I said. Like I wasn’t having enough trouble with oxygen. He seemed taken aback.

“My dad’s a Marine,” I added, trying to be helpful.

After circling the crater and seeing what we could, Young Bryan was a bit bored. “I think the others are staying,” he said. “Ready to head down?”

The path we took down the mountain was a quick one, covered in volcanic ash so that, with each step, you slid downward about four steps. I fell down a lot, and the heel of my boot started to come loose, but I didn’t care—all I knew was that blessed gravity would carry me to some point where I could lay my head down and close my eyes. I was so tired that I even started crying once when we rounded a corner only to find the continuing ashen trail where I was convinced would be the fifth station. I stumbled downward like a mad ghost in search of rest, like Sisyphus’s boulder rolling away for the very last time.

When I had almost given up hope, there it appeared out of the mist—alive now, all those buildings open and selling food to the hungry and supplies to the unprepared while crowds milled about and buses dropped off even more bright-faced people. Young Bryan went to check the bus schedule while I stood in line for a hamburger.

“Next bus leaves in an hour,” he said when he came back.

“Good,” I said, chewing on a very bad burger. “Wake me up when it gets here.”

“What?” he said, smiling in confusion. “Where are you gonna sleep?”

“Right there.” I pointed to some spot of grass at the edge of the lot. And sure enough, after throwing away my burger wrapper, I went there and plopped myself down, folding up my coat for a pillow and not giving a damn about all the people around.

Young Bryan stood by, looking down at me for a moment, and said, “You know, you don’t look too good. You feeling okay?” I didn’t answer.

As I lied down on my patch of grass to catch a rough hour’s sleep, I thought to myself: I climbed Mount Fuji hungover. I can do anything. Anything is possible. Probably not celibacy, but anything else.