When I hear people trying to explain sadomasochism to a curious beginner, it sometimes feels like someone describing Christianity by defining the aspects ratios of the cross. Sure, tarnished leather floggers and metal shackles are essential symbols of a subculture not much older than me, but it misses the heart and soul—the underlying reason why I play.
In each of the paradoxes describing sadomasochism you’ll find two contrasting elements that are related by their impossibility to coexist. However, in each you’ll also find that either they are not as different as they might first appear or that they ultimately merge into being one and the same. It might seem a challenge to plunge head-long into the philosophical side of this theme, but please bear with me. I will try to hold your hand through the first few chapters, so let me provide at least one solid definition to grasp onto.
Bondage is consciously and consensually giving up control by being physically restrained and psychologically dominated. It is a defined play of roles, often that of the dominant and the submissive, and constrained to the time of a session.
However sadomasochism can take on endless different shapes, and likely I’ll destroy the one I just created, and hopefully, by the end of the book, you’ll have made up your own definition. I fear by starting in any other way, I would have concealed a magical forest by trying to name all the botanical specimens. Just as I cannot tell you about my friend Steve, who edited this book with me, by showing you his MRI scans, I cannot respectfully reflect an essence of sadomasochism and esoteric eroticism by enumerating sets of practices, instruments and instructions.
It does not require a great degree of observation to notice how often the theme of Japan and that country’s aesthetics and specific approach to them comes up in this text. My primary sadomasochistic practice is Japanese-inspired rope bondage, sometimes called kinbaku or shibari; we will sort out these terms later. Maybe it’s by happenstance that I accepted a series of short-term working assignments in Tokyo at the same time as my interest in eros was about to bloom like cherry blossoms signalling the arrival of my long-awaited spring. And maybe it was by the same happenstance that I half-drunk and shit-scared in the early 2000s, discovered my first sadomasochistic show in Theatre DX in the Kabukichō red light district after a company dinner party.
I still remember the anonymous suits and sunglasses hiding behind folded newspapers to avoid the salty spray of bodily fluids raining down from the round rotating stage. At that stage, over several years, I watched some of the porn industry’s legendary rope masters display their technical skills and deviant creativity at work; this was the start of my research of what sadomasochism really could be. Most importantly, I witnessed a lot of intimacy and belonging in this highly taboo underground that I couldn’t possibly tell my colleagues about when I excused myself from the fancy restaurants to sneak down the neon-lit back alleys. Like the winding path of a roji which leads to a teahouse, we shall see how the abstract and philosophical start of the book eventually leads me back to Japan but from the totally different perspective of the Japanese garden.
