By: Persephone

It was 1975 and I was a young and very naïve English teacher from Rochester NY, working at a girls’ junior college in Nagasaki Japan. I was emotionally rash and impulsive and sexually green as grass. It was a hot and steamy summer night in Nagasaki, when my friends, fellow English teachers from Canada and the UK, invited me to go dancing down by the waterfront, at a club called “Neguro” - the word “Negro” telegraphing to many Japanese “sexy,” “cool,” and of course, “Black.” 

Club Neguro, which worked hard to duplicate the setting of Saturday Night Fever, glitter balls and all, normally featured two types of young Japanese men and women, the naïve and geeky, and the cool, suave, and possibly predatory, all looking to hook up with exotic and fabulous foreigners. That particular night, Neguro scored a coup. A very exciting group of foreign visitors had arrived - Italian sailors off the ship Ischia. The Italians were in Nagasaki for just three days; they were young, handsome, loud, merry, ebullient even - and very happy to see young foreign women. They were completely free of the Japanese-style inhibitions about proper comportment in public which we teacher ladies had had perforce to learn. Sailors and teachers- it was a match made in heaven.

Shrewdly, the Italians heated up the party quickly by procuring bottles of whiskey to replace our demure little containers of sake. They set to getting us as drunk as possible as quickly as possible, utilizing a Japanese custom by aggressively pouring booze for yourself and your neighbor and then drinking up at the same time before shouting “Kampai!” The party did indeed heat up fast. When we English teachers joined the Italian sailors on the dance floor, it quickly became a (very half-hearted) wrestling match for us to keep them from publicly stroking, groping, playing with us, and generally heating us up to the boiling point. It was embarrassing, exciting, and - on top of the lashings of Suntory whiskey -absolutely intoxicating. After all, we teachers were lonely and tired of the rather Victorian mores of Nagasaki Junior College of Foreign Languages; and although we would never have acknowledged it, we were intensely horny—and these Italian studs were irresistible.

My date, Enzo, short for Vincenzo, was a case in point. Enzo was charming, funny, and very appealing. He was a tall, handsome blond with blue eyes  (a Northern Italian from Naples, go figure) and for some wonderful reason he seized on me as his new partner. Enzo liked to laugh and play and dance so close that we were soon bumping and grinding in a fairly primitive fashion, heedless of the rhythm of the raucous soundtrack.  Bumps and grinds gave way to swaying gently from side to side while Enzo made his tender, insistent, increasingly urgent moves. He kissed me deeply and intensely, tongue darting in and out.  He fondled my breasts gently, then firmly, focusing insistently on my nipples - which I discovered were extremely sensitive, surprise! - and he slipped his hands between my thighs, stroking me so intensely that I nearly came on the spot. I had never before experienced this kind of powerful sexual attention.  Inexpert fumblings at Quaker college clearly didn’t count, and the last comparable session I’d had, fueled by vodka, on the floor of a tiny cabin on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, had never gotten past the many layers of clothing needed to deal with the chill.

Enzo’s technique was both practiced and highly effective. I was thrilled but feebly protested - “on the dance floor, in public, in Nagasaki ! Enzo! Not here! Not in Nagasaki ! Not in Japan ! I’m an English teacher!” His response - “Peri! Peri! Peri! Why? Why? Why you say so? Why you say no! You no like me?” Well, there was no good answer for that.  I was intensely aroused and had never felt like this before - I was sure I was in love! And of course, I was sure that he loved me too. I could deny him nothing.  Well, at the very least it was a powerful case of mutual arousal; and Enzo could not quite understand why there was no place we could go to immediately deal with it. He did, however, agree to join a group heading for another club, this time high in the hills of Nagasaki.  Our destination was a traditional Japanese nightspot, which, on the surface, was very sedate, and that might possibly offer us some privacy. 

The club was in a beautiful traditional setting and featured geisha performing Nagasaki country dances, singing plaintive suggestive folk songs and making music with rice bowls, held in each hand and played like castanets so that the fragile porcelain chimed like bells. Whether or not this was a genteel whorehouse and these geisha were actually available for the night, this place was certainly not a nightclub as Enzo understood the word. Seeing no private rooms inside the club, or correctly realizing that provisions for privacy must be way out of his price bracket, Enzo urged me to join him outside the club where we could lie on the closely cropped grass, in the hills, beside a large pond filled with beautiful huge bright-orange koi fish - and behind some exotic, trimmed topiary - so that we could get it on. I couldn't say no. And so we did.

I blush to recall the abandon with which we rolled around, writhing, giggling and gasping, right out there in the open as other customers came up and down the entrance-way.  But it was tremendous fun. It was utterly shameless, and I loved it.

Still, there was the issue of consummation. After all this hot bumping and grinding Enzo had a bad case of blue balls. He tried several times to convey to me the terrible pains he was suffering and the need for me to help him relieve it on the spot, but I simply did not understand how to do it. I had never brought a guy to climax before. Nor could I quite figure out how it could be done while fully clothed. And so I agreed to bring him back to my rickety, tiny Japanese apartment for the night - where all these constraints would no longer apply and we could be together. We whistled up a taxi and set off through the hills to Yanagidani - machi.

I was so besotted with sake, whiskey and newly awakened sexual desire, and also so very sexually ignorant, that it never occurred to me that this could be a dangerous move.  Nor did I consider that I ought to be using what was then euphemistically called “protection.” It would have been so easy for Enzo to become angry or even violent if I had not satisfied him; and I wouldn’t even have known how to summon aid as my Japanese, which centered upon restaurant and taxi lingo, and abrupt comments designed to subdue my exuberant Japanese lady students, was far from adequate to the task.  Even more embarrassing to admit thirty years later - I knew nothing about condoms.  But it was just the beginning of the age of AIDS and the word had not really spread to Nagasaki yet.  Furthermore, I knew nothing about other STDs, a very real potential occupational hazard with a sailor. I was not even accustomed to worrying about the perils of pregnancy. But I thanked all the gods I could summon up - afterward. Enzo proved to be just what he seemed to be - sweet, funny, affectionate, sexy, insistent as hell, even more impulsive than I, and ready to rock. Clearly someone up there – Amaterasu-o-Mikami, perhaps, Japanese goddess of creation, who was capable of doing a very sensual bump and grind herself, was looking after me.

In fact, it was an encounter as comical as it was sexy. We did have some technical difficulties to resolve. I had never had intercourse before – in any orifice.  As such, I was very tight and did not know how I might loosen up. Enzo didn’t either. He simply couldn’t get all the way in - nothing worked. Undaunted, he set about applying the methods of his small island of Ischia to ensure that nubile Ischian maidens could have sex without technically losing their virginity - he tried my back passage. It hurt like hell. I shrieked indignantly. He thought that was extremely funny, but withdrew. He even attempted some oral sex.  But I was a total virgin in this area also and was frankly so shocked at the whole idea that Enzo abandoned that venture. Luckily, we were both drunk enough, and tired enough, that eventually we simply played around kissing and licking and stroking (and eventually relieving Enzo’s erection) before drifting off to sleep.

Come morning - it was time to take a bath before heading off to work. Enzo had never been inside a Japanese home before and was not so much impatient as oblivious about proper Japanese bath conduct. I tried to explain how you bathed—washing with a little bowl and a little rag *outside* the tub, dumping the dirty water carefully down a little hole in the bathroom floor, and slipping, well scrubbed, into the tub for the final hot soak. I was met with sheer incredulity. With a lusty yell Enzo leapt into the tub. He was larger by a factor of three than most potential denizens of a Japanese ofuro (tub) and he displaced most of the water in an instant.  It heaved and surged over the edge and roiled down through the cracks in the bathroom floor, then outside the bathroom, to the wooden floors, to the apartment below. Howls of shock came from the downstairs tenants. Fortunately they were fellow foreign teachers - tolerant, amused, good friends to me - and also so very eager to find out who I had brought home and what had transpired.  They forgave me instantly - as long as I agreed to share the story.

Bath consummated, both of us weeping, I kissed Enzo passionately and packed him off in a cab to the harbor to find his ship. I spent the next day scarcely able to talk, let alone teach English to my little band of Japanese lady students.  I alternated between a daze of sensual happiness and sadness as I realized that I was probably never going to see him again. I even tried to call him aboard his ship, which was quite a trick since I spoke no Italian and the Italians aboard ship spoke very little English. “Enzo, Enzo!” I wailed—and the kindly guy who answered my call shouted, “yes, lady! Enzo! Enzo! I bring you Enzo!” He did, too. Romance was alive on the Ischia that day. Enzo picked up the phone, we made a date, and we saw each other one more time that evening.  It was a luxurious time of playing, kissing, stroking, and exploring. And, at length, success. It hurt, quite a lot! And it bled quite a lot - but I was exultant. In another time and place I would gladly have hung the blood-soaked sheets outside the windows in celebration.

A month later, after our tear-soaked farewell, I got a postcard from Enzo which I have never forgotten. Simple but sweet, he said, “When I see the face of Melanie [70’s female pop star whom I did not remotely begin to resemble] I think of you. I could not stop thinking about you for whole trip!!!” Aaahhhh! I thought of him too, constantly.  I was almost ready to track down Ischia on the map to find him and say “let me be your bride! Let us be together! I’ll leave Nagasaki Junior College of Foreign Languages! I’ll go anywhere and do anything - cook coniglio all’ischitana! Have many beautiful blond bambini! Learn to get along with your mother!” I can still see him in my mind - a huge, blond, beautiful hunk of a guy, lying naked on my new grass-green tatami mats, laughing and smiling and reaching for me - like Michelango’s Adam.  Oh, he was gorgeous! Oh, the pain! The sweet agony! They say you never forget your first time and they are right.