Reason 11 – they don’t always like to give as they receive

I was living in Tokyo, working for an IT company, and like most gaijins who don’t speak Japanese, didn’t meet very many Japanese men. Being six foot one and an African-American didn’t really help my plight with the less height-enhanced members of the Japanese male community. I would often find myself longing for even one sideways glance on the subway, instead of the furtive shuffling followed by the intense study of the stitching in their shoes, which is what I invariably received. On top of this, was the added slap to my ego that a large percentage of the foreign men living in Japan were chasing the petite, coy Japanese women – an understandable pastime but not necessarily a forgivable one.

One day, I was walking through Roppongi, when I met an Australian man – Reason 11, John. He seemed nice enough (although in hindsight perhaps I was so desperate to have any male attention at all – that despite his abruptness and often quite distant behaviour) we became lovers. We didn’t spend much time together, maybe only one or at the most two night a week, but we continued sleeping together for quite a while – meeting up in bars, having a few drinks and then returning to my apartment for sex. John would never stay the night, and I was never too concerned, assuming it was because of the distance he had to cover to make it home, rather than anything else untoward. We were fulfilling each other’s base needs.

At first, everything was okay, and I was under no delusions that our relationship was anything other than one based on lust and sex – really only to satisfy a physical desire we both had, probably because neither of us were getting any action elsewhere. The problem from my end, however, was that the sex just wasn’t that good. A few minutes of John’s frantic gasping as though he were in pain, a prod and a poke here and there and it was virtually all over. He was very fond of receiving oral sex but wasn’t exactly forthcoming in returning any favours I indulged him with.

One day, John and I were lying in bed, sharing a kiss before we were about to make love. We were both naked, and Reason 11 was lying on top of me, between my legs, kissing my neck. I thought it was an apt time to ask if he might perhaps give me a bit of oral pleasure and so whispered my request as seductively as I could.

I don’t know if I would have got a worse reaction if I had asked Reason John to sacrifice his first-born child. He stopped kissing me, got out of bed and pulled on his clothes while looking at me with a look of absolute loathing and disgust. I was so shocked (appalled?) by his actions that the only thing I could do was pull the bed-sheet up to my chin and stare amazedly at him, as he hurriedly searched for strewn shoes and socks. As he rushed to slam the door shut behind him, the last thing he called back to me over his shoulder was, “You are disgusting. What the hell do you think this is?”

When I recovered from the shock, all I could do was laugh.

(*It was only later that I discovered that for the duration of our affair, John had been married. I guess I wasn’t too shocked by this until I found out the reason for his divorce. John’s wife had discovered the equivalent of thousands and thousands of dollars missing from their bank accounts. It turned out that our boy had a severe addiction to prostitutes. Funnily enough, I didn’t date any other men for the rest of my stint in Japan.)