A note from the author:

“I don’t like macho, put it away;
doesn’t appeal to me, straight or gay.
But I know a boy who catches my eye;
he don’t act tough, why should he try?”
— Fem in a Black Leather Jacket,
Pansy Division (1993)

What erotica has to offer, be it a single impulse or a life-long fetish, is the desire to go “beyond” what the limits of our culture allows us. In this manner erotica is no different from many other visionary genres (think: science fiction, fantasy, horror, etc) in that all narrative is an attempt to go beyond our immediate boundaries. Be it space operas, fairy tales, ghost stories, magic or cyberpunk, we create metaphors and allegories for the things we hope for, the things we dream about. What I like about erotica is that the things we dream about almost always end in pleasure and pain, cum and kisses, a laugh and a scream. Today I am thinking about the bodies of two people I passed on my way to work. Random strangers, but in that passing, in that eye contact, in that second — whole worlds were born.

In the same way that butch bikers with tattoos who teach community college Women Studies classes have remained a long time fantasy; effeminate and androgynous boys have also been and always will be a big turn on. In Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 samurai-epic Ran, the hottest character out of the whole movie was Kyoami, played by androgynous pop star Shinnosuke Ikehata. It was Ikehata, if memory serves, whom I was thinking about when I passed someone, let’s call him the cutest boy in West Michigan, and so I came up with Memeshi.

The character of Ankoku is an Onna bugeisha, a female samurai, who used a weapon called a naginata; a long pike with a curved blade at the top. It resembles a halberd (think of what the Swiss Guard use while protecting the Pope in Rome). The naginata plays no part in this story other than a passing nod. Still, it’s always good to broaden our vocabulary. There is also mention of Nakano Takeko, who was a historical character, an actual Onna bugeisha and died in battle while leading a charge against troops of the Ogaki Rebellion. About two blocks beyond where I saw the cute fey thing I was almost was run over by a lycra-clad amazon. I am 6 feet tall and she was a good three inches taller, with shoulders that could carry the world and a waterfall of black hair that simply amazed.

Of course, both these individuals came and went in moments, they only existed on an erotic continuum in that when I got home I put them into this story. Still, isn’t this what pushing boundaries is all about? Creating worlds where it isn’t just eye contact for a moment but something else; other genres might have names for it but for me what that impulse to go beyond is called is desire.

* * *

It was dark when Ankoku drew close to the Nioi Swamp; already the white vapors were riding across the sunken wetland like October wraiths in a graveyard. Though her lover’s message had set her out in a mood of sensual delight, she had sobered considerably during the lonely ride across the hills. She was now uneasily alert; and, as her horse jerked down the grassy slope that fell away into the jaws of the fetid bog, she could see thin streams of fog rising slowly above the long rushes. As she watched they turned, gradually become more solid, blowing heavily away across the swamp.

The swamp itself was depressed, like a bowl. The appearance of the place, at this desolate hour, so remote from all proper society, struck her with a certain wonder that he should have chosen this spot for their meeting. Memeshi had been a familiar sight wandering the hills. It was there that she had invariably encountered him, the queer spirit boy with a girl’s name; but it was just like his arrogant nature to, on a whim, test her devotion by deciding upon some dreary meeting place. It’s hard to fuck when quicksand is sucking you down, she glumly reflected. The wide, horrid prospect having to sleep somewhere out there, in all that stench, depressed her beyond reason. Finally, tethering her horse upon the verge of the bog, she soon discovered a path that would allow her to cross it. For a moment she stood quiet on the brink of entering the forbidden world, thinking.

“The things I do for a good orgasm,” she sighed. Then, upon passing over the sacred boundary, she struck out boldly into the dark. The track was little used, obviously, for the reeds, which stood high above the level of her eyes upon either side, straggled everywhere overhead in curious arches, causing her to bow her head at times as she walked. She had left her armor and her naginata back at the inn, entrusting their care to the blind nun Momoku no Tojiru. A full half hour she was wandered alone in that wilderness when, at last, a sound other than her own footsteps broke the silence behind her.

Ankoku was moving very slowly at the time, with a mind half disposed to turn from the melancholy expedition altogether, damn all orgasms. It was then that she paused, for it seemed to her now that Memeshi must surely be playing a cruel joke on her. While some such reluctance held her silent, she was suddenly startled by a horrid, croaking noise, as if from some demonic bull toad, which broke out upon her right, somewhere from within the reeds in the foul mire. Walking a little further on it came again, now much closer at hand. When she had passed on a few more steps in confusion she heard it for the third time; just as horrid as before. She stopped to listen, but the swamp was silent. Taking the noise for, perhaps, a rare breed of spring peepers she resumed on her way. But in a little the croaking was repeated, coming quickly to a point only a hand’s width away. Ankoku pushed the reeds aside, peered into the darkness. She could see nothing, but now she thought she detected the sound of another body behind her, trailing through the rushes. Her distaste for the mystery grew, had it not been for her delirious infatuation with Memeshi she would have turned back, found her horse, and made her way back to the nun; a follower of some sort of distant, peculiar Western religion who only took women as her lovers. Ankoku couldn’t understand a person who clung exclusively to men or women, as if the world was black and white. The world was full of interesting choices and Ankoku wanted to taste them all.

The ghastly sound pursued her, though, at intervals along the path, until at last, irritated by such a rude, persistent, invisible companion, she broke into a run. This, it seemed, the creature could not achieve, for she heard a great splash in the mire and then no more. Finally, chuckling to herself, she continued her way slowly in peace. Her path ran out among the reeds into the smooth bowl that Memeshi had spoken of how to find him. Here her heart quickened, her gloom lifted. At the further end she fancied she could see some kind of hut looming up; but the fog, which had been gathering ever since her entrance into this forbidden world, wafted down upon her at that very moment, hiding all shapes from her eyes. As she stood, waiting for the mist to pass, a voice called to her. A voice she knew as intimately as her own heart. One that made her weak in the knees. She: the Manslayer! She saw him approach with circles of mist swirling about his body, slowly walking to her from out of the darkness.

Memeshi was unlike any male she had ever known; none among the Shogun’s concubine were as willow-like, as soft-spoken, as well-hung, as her lover. He put his long arms about her, drawing her muscular body close. They were polar opposites, physically. Ankoku’s body was scarred and tattooed; a lifetime of war had burned away everything that might once have been called feminine from her. Her short hair, towering physic, her boy-like hips, her muscled arms that, in wrestling, could crush the strongest of men in her grasp. Memeshi did not even come up to her shoulder, though she liked the way he would curl his lithe body around hers, enter her from the side, one of her massive legs thrown around his shoulder. Despite Memeshi’s fey appearance, not only could he easily carry her weight but he was possessed of a libido even the Shinto gods didn’t have a name for.

She looked down into his deep, up turned eyes. Far within them, it seemed to her, she could discern an orphic laughter, an alien god dancing in those wells of light. It was more than just an ecstatic hint — a spirit of fire — it was an otherworldly passion she noticed even at their first contact.

“At last,” he said in his musical voice. “At last, my beloved!”

He wore a furisode, a long sleeved kimono. Ankoku reached inside and caressed him, slipping her hand down into his fundoshi, a thong-like length of cotton passing as underwear, and finding that already his veins were pumping blood into what was his semi-erect nine, soon to be ten inches. He wasn’t surprised by her boldness, let a silvery moan from deep within his throat. She continued working with his monster cock, now fully erect and pulsating, thick as her arm. His breathing became more and more aroused, even for a spirit of the dark he enjoyed both tender and anal destructive fucking. She slowly raised his testicles in the palm of her hand, letting them shiver under her breath, making his cock look enraged and eager for release.

“Don’t hold it back, lover,” Ankoku whispered to him in his ear. “I know you want to cum; go ahead and enjoy this. Shoot everything you had been holding on to while I was away.”

Ankoku increased her pace, using both hands to fondle and stroke and caress; making him moan in his morning glory voice. She could see his chest and legs contracting; he was close.

“I’ve been waiting for th–”

Without warning, he mewed loudly, his hips buckling. The first spray of cum flew fast and furious, hitting her old uwagi jacket. His cock, though, was not done; it continued to explode away, spray after spray of ectoplasmic cum, making a trail that began at the tip of his cock and ended down at in the bog mud. She stroked him over and over until nothing more came out and finally, a beast in submission, his massive cock fell limp.

The world swam in front of her eyes. Even though it had been his orgasm, his cum that was dripping from her page-boy hair cut, when she looked down at him she found that he was crouching in front of her, her kimono suddenly parted at the hips. She wore nothing underneath. The mound of her pubic hair was massive, the pride of the Tsumibukaki nunnery when she last was there. He leaned forward, flicked his tongue quickly over her protruding clit, making a jolt of bliss run through her body.

“Look what you do to me, you gorgeous boy,” she moaned.

She took her fingers, wet them in her own cum and rubbed each all over his soft lips and up turned chin, turning them over and over, trailing her wetness all over his strange face. She could crush his head with her thighs if she wanted, she thought. Thighs that had ridden horses into battle; men and women to the point of orgasm; blocks of granite when she had been enslaved by the Tokugawa shogunate. They called her a freak; taller than most men, unstoppable when the blood-lust took her.

“Find yourself a demon, an Oni; only a creature possessing a supernatural libido can satisfy you,” the old shaman in her village had told her.

Memeshi inhaled, breathing in the sweet scent of her cunt. She stuck two of her cum-coated fingers in his mouth and he sucked each dry as her half hooded eyes stared into his, smoldering with lust. Her other hand was sliding fingers in and out of her ass, her tight, round O, bringing those fingers to his lips as well, letting him taste everything she had to offer.

“Why?” she finally asked, tingling at the nerves while he licked her fingers clean. “Why have you brought me out to this lachrymose location when my bedroom at the inn would have been so much more divine?”

He uttered his silver laugh, nestled against her, slipping his hand into her uwagi jacket. Her very tight jacket. The sort that clung to her small, perky breasts. He traced one of her erect nipples; her gorgeous long, brown nipples.

“Darling,” he answered as she shivered and pressed him closer. “This is my home. I swore to you that I would show you where I lived after you let me cum in you.”

“Yes, let’s do that again,” Ankoku giggled, glancing around herself. It was, perhaps, the first time she had made that noise in the presence of another person in all of her 43 lonely years. “But not here, fuck bunny. I have come and I’ve seen. I know where you live. But this swamp chokes up my lust. I want Buddha’s blessings when you fill me with your cum. Come with me.”

“You are in haste?” he asked. “There is yet much to see. Ah, my lover,” he said, waving at the bog all around, “you know what I am. This is my ancestors, I have inherited the swamp’s traits. Would you take a swamp demon with you as your mate?”

For an answer Ankoku pulled him to her, her warm lips driving out the horrid moods of the night from his cold touch; but suddenly deep within his eyes a flickering scoffing glowed, like clouds over the moon, and an odd worry struck her. She pulled away and the night grew chill again.

“I have the swamp in my veins,” he explained. “You are a fountain of the sun’s light. I am a willow’s shadow in the marsh. You make my shabbiness all silken.”

He was a lithe, lovely creature, she thought, a tangible taste of warm flesh. He lifted his magic face to Ankoku’s own. The dew of nightfall hung in his hair. His otherworldly beauty seemed to plead with her scars and missing finger on her left hand for her forlorn, solitary love.

“I love you!” she cried, “Oni or fey demon of this swamp, I do not care. You shall come with me; I have known you on the hills when you entered me from behind. I love your roving phantasma of male beauty. Nothing more do I know about you, nothing more will I ask. I do not care what your dismal haunt means. You have powers beyond what I can understand, your swamp is as queer and incomprehensible to me as your beauty. But this,” she said, grasping his already hardening cock, “is mine.”

He moved his head nearer to Ankoku with a surprisingly monstrous gesture, his gleaming eyes piercing hers with a sudden flash, the likeness of a winter owl striking prey. Startled, she fell back; as tall and broad shouldered as she was, but at that moment he turned his face toward the fog that came rolling in, a terrible thick bulk spreading itself all over the bowl. Noiselessly the great cloud crept down upon them. She was aware of him watching it progress in sudden silence. It was as if he awaited some omen she could not understand. Despite her years and training, Ankoku too trembled in fear of its coming.

Then suddenly out of the night issued the same hoarse, hideous croaking she had heard before; a noise the sort that Ankoku had only heard before on the battlefield when men made their death rattle. She reached out her arm to take her lover’s hand, but in an instant the mists broke over them like a wave, she was all at once groping about, blind, crying like a child in the emptiness. Something like a panic, a feeling she had only known once before when she had lost her maidenhead, took hold of her. She was the embodiment of the female samurai, a fighting Onna bugeisha by trade; and here she was, rushing over the bog, up to her thighs in ooze, calling upon her elfin love. A little the swirl passed by, like eddies in a river. Then, turning, she perceived him, standing silhouetted in the gray, his arms raised as in imperious command. She ran to him, but stopped, amazed, shaken by a fearful sight. Down by the dripping wet reeds crouched a diminutive, dumpy creature; a sort of monstrous toad. As she stared, the thing rose upon its back legs, disclosing to her view a horrid human ribcage and ghastly face: pasty as the bloated gaijin, Admiral Perry; cadaverous, with stringy black hair; its body gnarled, twisted as with chills and fever. Shaking, it whined in a breathless voice, pointing an emaciated finger at the fey boy by her side.

“Your lust was my guide,” it quavered. “Do you think that after all these years I have no knowledge of your lust? This is the hell that you designed for me. Now, love, would you leave me all by myself?”

The three stared at each other. For a long while no one said anything.

“Hear me out!” it finally cried, turning to Ankoku, panting, leaned upon a bush. “Listen to the tale of this foul Oni so that you may know him as he really is. He is the Bones and Marrow of Nioi Swamp. He is neither human nor devil, but simply the accursed bog brought to life, a spirit that has crept into a dead boy’s body. What you see before you lives, yes; grows more and more beautiful day by day, yes; but only thanks to this swamp. Take him away and who knows what would happen? And I, who was once a man as beautiful as he was, knows only far too well the fate of all the lovers he has cast off over the century. For six hundred years have I lived here. I ask you, whose bones lie deep in this blasted bog? Who can answer that except the one who clutches your arm? O mortal woman, O giant warrior; he has drained the living of their youth and virginity, he has sucked upon the gods and robbed them of their souls. He made me a lesser devil, a root on a decayed stump, he is the cause of this putrid husk you see before you! Lost forever in this hell! Now he would leave me to my lonely anguish. Ha, yes, go off with another victim, you boy toy, you male whore. Victim that you are, woman! I warn you now so that he might not rob you too!” — it hissed through its chattering teeth — “My hell shall be his forever!”

Ankoku’s untroubled eyes finally left the creature’s great repulsive face, turning back to Memeshi who stood by her side. He put out his arms, swaying towards her. So great was the light that glowed in his face that she took him into her embrace, their lips meeting.

“Human or Oni,” Ankoku finally said, after a long, wet pause. “I will go with you. I was once called Hitokiri, the Manslayer. I fear neither man nor demon, woman nor witch. I was Nakano Takeko’s lover; now I shall be yours.”

He laughed, leaning down toward the pathetic, wide-eyed creature flopping around in the muck.

“Dear, dear Fuzen-chan,” he said. “We both know what you just said is not true. You were a little green swamp frog once, one whom I taught the dark arts too so long ago that you have now grown sassy.”

“Really?” Ankoku asked, somewhat amazed at this revelation.

Memeshi grinned and rolled his beautiful eyes. “Believe me, the Kenmu Restoration was really, really boring. I had a lot of time on my hands.”

“But– but,” spluttered the unhappy thing.

“Well then, lover, let us be gone,” Ankoku laughed, spreading out her arms as if she could will the swamp and all its fugly denizens away.

Memeshi laughed again, his silver-ringing voice making a joyful noise inside her. He moved, clinging to her massive arm, as they slowly made their across the bog to where the trail head started.

But at the edge of the bog they were startled by a shrill, hoarse scream. Turning they beheld the pathetic creature rising up, winding its long, bony arms around Memeshi’s body, all the while shrieking out its grief.

“You stupid cock tease! Six hundred years wasted for this? You taught me language and my profit from it is that I’ve read about fellatio but would you ever go down on me? No! What’s the point of keeping naughty parchments under your tatami mat in the hut if you have no intention of getting laid?”

Stooping, Ankoku pushed the regrettable thing the author created out of their path and into a foul smelling quagmire where it quickly sank out of sight with a gurgle. With slip of his hip Memeshi guided Ankoku across the bog and onto Terra firma. Slipping her hand down inside his furisode robe she thought, “ah yes, the firmer the better.” At her touch blood rushed to fill his cock’s girth once more, its head twitching as she stroked it and ran her fingers up and down its length. Of all the ways to reclaim her lover from his swamp, perhaps sucking out the poison that kept him trapped here would work, she pondered.

She adjusted her position, sinking to her knees in the murk so she could lick the side of his cock and his curious balls; by that time she took the head of his straining cock in her mouth and sucked it in. She sucked, slurped and gagged while Memeshi did nothing save give out his odd, little cat moans, twisting her nipple gently between his finger and thumb until he pulled his cock from her mouth, letting her gum his testicles before returning to face fuck her.

“Will you love me, darling mortal?” he asked, looking down at her scars and broad shoulders.

She stopped her assault on his cock long enough to grin up at him, all ten inches still mysteriously hidden down her throat. She made a noise, it could have been yes, it could have been anything, but they both knew that Hitokiri, the Manslayer, was giving herself to her lover.

He cried out in joy, gripping her skull while the swamp faded away and he exploded within her mouth, filling her throat with desire and agony.