The Fox and Dr. Shimamura

by Christine Wunnicke

  The student took photographs. They happily put up with that — they being Kiyo and her illness, which to the shame of all Japan was still known as fox possession, although it was surely hiding somewhere in Professor Griesinger’s manual, even if Shimamura couldn’t find it, since he was evidently not a good enough doctor and was perhaps suffering from heat stroke or possibly some folie à deux.

  The student must have shot one roll of film after the other using Professor Sakaki’s very modern English camera. Shimamura didn’t remember anything else about him, no superstitious acts, no fraternizing with the patient, not even Kiyo crying on his chest. Kiyo’s mania, her sheer existence had in one swoop turned the student from a fox exorcist back into the boy from Tokyo who for inexplicable reasons was following around a doctor of neurology.

  The bright room, the fish-pattern garment, the marvel of Kiyo’s anatomy: a photographic godsend. And on top of that she made conversation. Polite speech: about the weather, the flowers, the songbirds in the garden — what a consolation for the spirit — and the market risk of flatfish, horse mackerel, and monkfish. The girl’s bright young voice and Shimamura’s “indeed?” — and meanwhile the fox had carefully twisted Kiyo’s hands into an obscene gesture she could not undo, so that Shimamura could not possibly forget its presence despite all the polite chitchat.

  Now and then the fox called him “little uncle.” More often, though, it was “my dear colleague.” Even the occasional sexual proposition — like from some old whorish fox-woman. Then Kiyo would lower her head and excuse herself and clap her small white hands in front of her mouth to muffle her giggling, this bright, dumb little girl’s giggle.

  Shimamura pestered Kiyo’s mother and aunts and servants as to why they didn’t arrange for an exorcist. He combed the garden between Kiyo’s favorite little flowers and songbirds, scouting for anything that might help — priests, magic pennants, receptacles. That was something he remembered exactly, running up to the steep bank by himself to look for receptacles. And that he would have gladly used his own bare hands to stuff tofu into the toothless maw of a desperate, leprous receptacle, just so that the damned fox would take a bite. And almost certainly shouting all alone into the quiet sunlight, between the dragonflies and the plucked fur in the branches: A receptacle! Please! Over here! I need you!

  “She isn’t getting exorcized because there’s nothing to exorcize,” said the student, poking around in his pipe. “There isn’t any fox raging inside the girl. There’s nothing to drive out. A fox doesn’t live inside a fox. The fox is the girl’s soul. Better to leave it inside. Oh, Sensei, you’ve got it all wrong! In my family, four hundred years ago, people used to know about these things.”

  Shimamura was certain his memories of these speeches were all wrong. In which case was it really true that Kiyo had been allowed to play with the student in the garden, when she was doing better, with tops and shuttlecocks, and that they laughed and laughed?

  On the next to last evening in the fishmonger’s house a storm approached but did not erupt.

  “What a shame,” said Kiyo. “It would have cooled things down. Are you going back home to Tokyo soon, Sensei? Will you write me letters? Will you send me my photographs? Will you send me a new French magazine? The last one is so horribly chewed up . . .”

  Shimamura remembered everyone eating together in the evening, the student, the women, Kiyo and himself, at a spot on the veranda where there was a little more air. And that the sky was electric, black and electric, and someone — the student, one of the women, Shimamura — remarked “Ideal weather for ball lightning.”

  Dr. Shimamura hadn’t slept for two weeks, and that night was no exception. He lay down, sat up, lay back down, sat on the porch and fanned himself. There was no ball lightning. The moon was nearly full, clouds went drifting by, and Shimamura gazed up at the roof with the fish ornament standing on its head. Every night he looked at the fish. Its mouth was open, its tailfin spread wide, and against the moonlight it looked like a crooked fountain.

  Then he saw the girl crossing the roof on all fours, silently creeping along the ridge, hand over hand, toe over toe. In the middle of the roof, where the eaves widened, she stopped. And groomed herself, first licking her little paws before using them to wipe her face. The moon came and went, the broad fishtail and the girl both silhouetted against the light. Then she took off her clothes. She removed her nightgown, the bedsheet, whatever it was she wore when she went out on the roof at night. She took off her human skin as well, through a smooth opening on her stomach, and shook off her human hair, and after she had freed herself she groomed her ears. A whorl of fur above the collarbone. Around the jaws and down the sternum the color went from gold to white, and a linea alba ran down the entire golden tail all the way to the tip. Then Shimamura saw someone approach her. Someone who had been hanging on the eaves and now with painstaking effort scaled the ridge, a clumsy person who couldn’t control his hands and feet and who slipped when he tried to nuzzle her, then went rolling over the shingles like a wet sack.

  Who was it? The student? Shimamura himself? An animal?

  For a while she let the person dangle there. She laughed and barked. Then she helped him up. And the moon hid behind a cloud.

  The next morning Shun’ichi Shimamura woke up with a pharyngeal spasm and discovered that the student had disappeared. The spasm was quickly remedied with a cup of water; the student did not resurface. At first they thought he’d gone to the cliffs to enjoy the view or that he’d set off to Saiwa, but when the camera was found half disassembled in the anteroom of the kitchen, people began to wonder. The entire household knew how much the student loved his camera, why would he leave without taking it?

  Shun’ichi Shimamura couldn’t remember what efforts he made to track down the student. He only remembered the fever that set off the spasm and how the women were suddenly clinging to him like leeches, with complaints, requests, questions, confessions and offers.

  “And that’s how it’s been ever since,” Shimamura said to the housemaid when she once again brought the morning water bucket and furtively stared at the bedridden retiree, as though he were the most beautiful thing in the world. “That’s how it’s been, Luise, to this very day. My fever. My allure for women. And the student was never seen again.”

  After he’d decided for better or worse to return home by himself, Shimamura paid Kiyo one last visit. She had been moved from the bright room into a dark chamber, because she couldn’t stand the light. He found her emaciated, apathetic, with poor circulation and unclean skin. He tapped the facial nerve in front of the ear lobe. Kiyo cried. She, too, clung somewhat to Shimamura, but soon let him go. She whined after her stuffed monkey. She whined after tofu. Nothing satisfied her. Then she fell asleep. Shimamura told the women to mix egg and honey and feed it to the girl. Now her fox was gone as well.

  In the rickshaw, halfway to Tokyo, he wrote his last diagnosis for Professor Sakaki: hysteria.

  5

  For years Hanako Shimamura had been working on a biography of her son. She had been working on it for so many years that she was long past the point where everything seemed to spread out too far in length and breadth, and was gradually coming to the opinion that the entire enterprise was more worthy of thirty pages than three hundred, and that it had been overrated from the beginning.

  Of course Hanako wrote in secret. If she was pleased with a particular passage she would hide it in Shun’ichi’s cast-off plant press, which was wrapped in a bolt of green fabric and stashed beneath the floor in the north room. Passages that failed to meet her approval — which meant most of them — she tossed into the fire.

  At first she had planned a kind of festschrift on the occasion of Shun’ichi’s retirement. Perhaps they could have secretly let her coach one of the speakers, so that he would give a decent speech instead of jabbering on and on about the wall mats. But the festschrift degenerated into a kind of bildungsroman, which in tu
rn evolved into a family saga. And that got bogged down in a pile of lies. And suddenly what Hanako had were her own memoirs, in which her only son Shun’ichi was a marginal figure, even though he was clearly in the center of her life. Here and there she came up with sentences that might easily be mistaken for poetry and which reduced life in general and Shun’ichi’s life in particular to declarations in which the word “not” made a frequent appearance.

  Year after year Hanako Shimamura looked on as her son continued with his life and her hand continued with her writing. Because Shun’ichi didn’t speak with her — not in Tokyo, not in Kyoto, and not even in Kameoka — after all, what was he supposed to speak with her about, what was there to discuss with one’s mother? — Hanako had to speculate on both his life and its meaning.

  A life, she ascertained, particularly that of an educated man and especially that of her son, should follow a simple motto. And this motto, she determined after lengthy consideration and very many novels, ought to have some element of nobility and some element of desperation. Because nobility without desperation was uninteresting; it grew dusty and lost its allure.

  For nearly eight years Hanako Shimamura brooded over an appropriate motto for Shun’ichi’s life that would guide her brush and prevent so many pages from landing in the kitchen stove.

  For a long time she clung to Obligation and Inclination. That practically presented itself. Nearly everything was a matter of Obligation and Inclination, so why not Shun’ichi’s life? Unfortunately Hanako couldn’t find a single incidence of Inclination in this particular life. Even things Shun’ichi appeared inclined toward always came out of obligation. “Isn’t that the case?” she muttered, while her voice grew more and more shaky and her hand more and more gnarled, and her head sank onto the manuscript. Desperation, for certain. And nobility, too, of course: for example the beautiful wall mats in Kyoto that protected raving patients from hurting themselves. But she didn’t find any conflict between obligation and inclination, and without conflict a motto was worthless. For some time — three or four years — she thought of inclinations she might ascribe to her son — bad, irresponsible passions that contradicted all sense of duty, which took all his strength to keep in check, which explained why he succumbed to fever and was not as scientifically active as his colleagues — but Hanako didn’t understand anything about such things and she hoped Shun’ichi didn’t either. And so one day she decided to discard that motto.

  Then she came up with Genius and Insanity.

  At the end of February 1922, when the weather suddenly turned very beautiful, Hanako Shimamura sat every night beside her daughter-in-law’s mother Yukiko and, following this new maxim, cheerily penned her thoughts. Hanako wrote:

  After Dr. Shimamura had cured thirty-three patients in the Shimane Prefecture, all of whom believed they were possessed by the fox-demon, he returned to Tokyo a broken man. The reason for this was as follows: the young medical student Yoshiro Takaoka, who had accompanied him, had disappeared, (quite possibly by falling to his death from a high place, but his body was never recovered). Although Professor Hajime Sakaki, Dean of Neurology at the Imperial University in Tokyo and Dr. Shimamura’s honorable teacher, absolved him of any guilt and also took on the painful correspondence with the Takaoka family, a mania formed in Dr. Shimamura’s consciousness that he alone was responsible for the disappearance or death of the student. To wit: Dr. Shimamura’s constitution, which for some time had teetered precariously between genius and madness, had, during the course of treating all the patients, and especially the last one — a very difficult case — gradually tilted more and more toward madness, until he finally . . .

  Hanako scratched out genius and replaced it with genial talent. After all she was describing her own son, so she oughtn’t to brag that way.

  . . . until even he was no longer able to distance himself from the so-called fox, and consequently developed the idée fixe that he had personally swallowed every patient’s fox following each extraction, only to carry them home to Tokyo and bear them for the rest of his life at the cost of his mental and physical health. He believed that the disappearance of the student Takaoka was connected with the foxes, which absolutely no one could understand. In a feverish state he howled away at us for nights on end, spouting the same nonsense, and we were all very glad that the honorable Professor Sakaki never found out about it, because otherwise Dr. Shimamura’s career would have ended then and there.

  Hanako crossed out the last sentence. Then she took out “genial talent” and once again replaced it with “genius,” to better balance the matter, and tried a few other expressions for idée fixe.

  The fact was that Dr. Shimamura had not only brought us a form of madness from Shimane, but also something that could be called soft and beautiful. This was in truth very new for him. (Cf. chapter “Dr. Shimamura’s Childhood: a rawboned boy of rigid temperament.”) And it was this new, soft, and beautiful quality that he carried with him ever after. And even though his life came to naught, with no natural or scientific heirs, it was always infused with this beautiful, soft, sympathetic and almost feminine madness, which somewhat . . .

  Yukiko wheezed and stopped breathing for a moment. Then she began to snore. Hanako sighed and pulled the blanket off Yukiko’s face so she wouldn’t suffocate. Hanako always sat next to Yukiko’s futon whenever she wrote. She liked to keep an eye on Yukiko when she was sleeping, since after all most old people wound up dying in their sleep. Unlike Hanako, who preferred to brood over things, Yukiko liked to sleep. Every evening she warmed up her sake and swallowed her veronal. That’s why she never woke up, while Hanako sat close to her head, writing and keeping an eye on her.

  . . . which somewhat inhibited his genius but did his female patients much good, Hanako finished the sentence.

  “Damnation,” she whispered, when she suddenly realized that Genius and Insanity was also devoid of any conflict.

  Yukiko gasped. Then she stopped breathing again. Hanako waited a moment before giving her a light slap. She heard Shun’ichi’s clock strike four times in the walled-in room where he lived and contemplated.

  “Ach, Shun’ichi,” Hanako whispered.

  She set her brush in the little jade basin decorated with mallow leaves and a frog. Why did she always write? She looked at the ink bleeding into the water and wiped the bristles against the frog’s head. Because he deserves it, thought Hanako. Because he’s my son. Because everyone deserves it. Every life. “Exactly,” said Hanako. Yukiko made a rattling sound, first with her nose, then in her throat, then she passed gas under the blanket.

  Even Yukiko was deserving of a life history, thought Hanako. Even Sei, the little nurse from Kyoto everyone thought was a patient because her face looked a little imbecilic and her legs were crooked and her breasts so large. In fact Sei deserved an entire novel, Hanako thought all of a sudden — one containing love, misery, silence, and suicide. Every morning Sei tried to flatten her breasts beneath her sarashi, but they always popped out. That’s why Shun’ichi called her Anna or Luise. With breasts so utterly foreign, Sei didn’t have a chance. Perhaps East and West would make a good motto? Hanako Shimamura decided to give it a try, perhaps even tomorrow night. She gathered the pages she had written — in any case there were only five — and stacked them neatly before tossing them into the fire.

  6

  With instances of induced insanity (folie communiquée, folie à deux), according to Dr. Griesinger, the secondary cases are in the rule slow-witted people with very limited powers of psychic resistance, chiefly women.

  Shimamura was in the port of Alexandria sitting in a kind of roadside tea house that reminded him of a capsized sailboat, attempting to drink a cup of coffee. On his first try he wound up with nothing but the grounds in his mouth, which he spat out a little less inconspicuously than he would have wished. Then he stirred and waited. Once again he picked up the cup and peered inside. A metal demitasse with a metal
handle. Shimamura dabbed his spoon in the coffee, then lifted a bit of the liquid from the top and held it in the beam of sunlight coming from between two sails of a boat. The coffee was pale and he could see the grounds floating inside. He sank his spoon into the cup and stirred once more, halfway up so as not to muddle the bottom. Then he lit a cigarette and went on waiting.

  The Imperial Commission had granted him a stipend and now, four months after his return from Shimane, he was finally en route to Paris.

  In people with such weak dispositions, Dr. Griesinger continued, there is seldom any further autonomous processing of the delusional ideas. On the contrary, when such individuals are removed from the influence of the primary cases, they are generally soon back on the rails.

  Shimamura was unfamiliar with the phrase “back on the rails.” He pictured Dr. Griesinger, whose lithographic portrait adorned the frontispiece — a soft-eyed, baldish man with fluffy sideburns — riding in old trains on old tracks through the German Empire, intent on projecting great strength of character. And yet his beard hid a weak chin and his neck was certainly too long and his larynx too pointed, no matter how stiffly he strangled himself with his collars.

  Do you also remember, Sensei, when you were little, the screwneck ghost? The one that creeps up from behind and suddenly grabs you by the throat and then stares you right in the eye? Do you remember? Do you?

  “No,” said Shun’ichi Shimamura. He stuffed the Griesinger in his briefcase and the student in the bottommost compartment of his brain. Carefully he again picked up the little cup and slurped the cooling coffee, swallowing a lot of air as he did so, taking pains not to tilt the demitasse too much — that proved effective. Perhaps this was the moment when he forgot the name of the student, beyond all recall.