A penis that can be shown to anyone and a penis that cannot be shown to anyone.

When I was showing my penis to my mom, one day she saw it and said, “You must not expose yourself,” as she slammed a cup of sake onto the table. I loved touching myself, but as I looked at her cup of sake, I stopped moving my hand. “Your father also loved touching himself,” she said. “So when I see you doing that, it irritates me. Don’t touch yourself in front of me.” As she opened another cup of sake, she said it again. Don’t touch yourself in front of me. Don’t touch yourself in front of me. Her voice from that day still echoes in my head. My father was gone before I was born, that’s what I was told. I grew up in a house with only my mother. Sometimes she drank sake and cried. Some nights she shouted into the phone. I never knew what kind of man my father was. But my mother said that sometimes, when she looked at me, she remembered him. Sometimes she hit me. I thought that if I became my father’s replacement, if I worked hard and became a proper man, maybe my mother could live in peace, maybe she would smile more. Her drinking increased. She even drank cooking sake. She lost her convenience store job after being caught drinking the store’s alcohol while stocking shelves. Later, I learned she had been having an affair with the store manager. His wife found out. “Just because you don’t have a husband, you think you can take someone else’s?” “That’s why your husband left you!” After that, even her desperate drinking wasn’t enough. I had to work. I had to buy her alcohol. If I became a proper man like my father, then surely she would stop drinking. But her drinking only got worse. She was always drunk. When she wasn’t drunk, she insulted me. Some nights she crouched in the corner, afraid of me. “Don’t hit me, don’t hit me,” she cried. When I gave her alcohol, she drank it like someone in a desert finding water, holding the cup with both hands, savoring it deeply. Even then, when I touched myself, she would change expression, the same face she had when I was a small child, “Don’t touch yourself in front of me.” “Don’t touch yourself in front of me.” Eventually, her tremors got so bad she couldn’t even hold a cup of sake. So I brought it to her lips. “You’re such a kind child,” she said. Then she began to speak of the past. She said she didn’t know who my father was. She had been abused by her own father, and had lived a chaotic life, sleeping with many men. “If a man was gentle and didn’t hit me, I would sleep with anyone. But the moment I told them I was pregnant, they stopped being kind. Men are only kind because they want sex. If you hadn’t been born, they would have stayed kind.” Soon after that, she died of acute alcohol poisoning. After my mother was gone, I realized that the self I thought I once was had already been broken. She was gone. And on that day, on a clear, slightly warm Tuesday morning, near my workplace, at a convenience store, I exposed myself to a woman without her consent. Indecent exposure (Article 174 of the Penal Code) is the crime of committing obscene acts— such as exposing one’s genitals— in a way that can be perceived by an unspecified or large number of people, violating their sense of sexual modesty. Mother gone, afterwards I exposed myself— what I lacked was only a father.