The Fox and Dr. Shimamura

by Christine Wunnicke

  During four months of tediously concealed insanity in Kyoto, he had managed to accept his constitutional weakness. Dr. Griesinger’s portrait, as embarrassing as this was, had been of great help. Even weak-chinned, long-necked, suggestible neurologists could do a lot of good, Dr. Shimamura sermonized to himself for four months, as he put off seeing his patients — especially the female ones — with a thousand excuses, while cobbling together articles based on earlier research findings so that Professor Sakaki and the commission wouldn’t notice he had contracted something dreadful in Shimane.

  So, now let Europe infect me, he thought, with all its European correctness. He lit another cigarette and leafed through the French dictionary he had acquired earlier, along with the good cigarettes, a fez, and postcards of the pyramids.

  For days he had been waiting for the passage to Genoa. He had found lodgings in a guest house located in a loud neighborhood far from the harbor, just because some child who was evidently responsible for such matters had led him there, with lots of shouting. The guest house was infested with fleas. Shimamura was happy that he wasn’t as concerned with hygiene as so many of his colleagues, that he didn’t have to worry about foreign fleas, and that he didn’t have to bother Robert Koch in Berlin. Viewed from Tokyo it appeared that entire swarms of young Japanese hygienists were buzzing around Professor Koch, in the hope he might teach them something about bacteria. Shimamura was grateful that among all those who had received a stipend, he was the only one in his particular field, and therefore had no need of joining any swarm.

  These days Shun’ichi Shimamura was frequently happy or thankful. If he had permitted himself, he would have wept tears of joy or thankfulness or even from being suddenly moved by small, everyday things, like puddles or fallen leaves. He felt like an old man with arteriosclerosis or a woman in menopause. And just as he carried his fever, which never dipped below 100°, he would also carry this particular flaw wherever he went — to Genoa and on to France and then to Germany.

  Strictly speaking, Dr. Shimamura was the only neurologist in Japan. Professor Sakaki did place a great value on a multidisciplinary mastery of all subjects, especially gynecology. And he had studied with Robert Koch and visited all the other important places abroad very long ago. Professor Sakaki had been the first to experience and master everything. He could also afford to insert some Japanese folklore into the field of neurology, so unshakable was his disposition. “Here, Shimamura,” Sakaki had said, “is a nice English portfolio you can put a few woodcuts in. Buy a few dirty prints when you’re in Nagasaki. You’re a medical man, after all. And see that you get some with a bit of foxy hanky-panky — that’s bound to be a hit. Play the oriental when you’re in Europe. Then all your colleagues will be at your feet, and the women as well, especially the women.” After that Sakaki had laughed hard and Shimamura had laughed along; after all, Professor Sakaki was his teacher.

  Now laughter came to him nearly as easily as crying. His elevated temperature was accompanied by a constant throbbing in his neck, a constriction, as if some alien giggling were trying to free itself; this complaint was lessened by genuine laughter. So he was grateful whenever Professor Sakaki actually gave him cause to laugh, with advice that proved funny or that dealt with women. And he laughed when Sakaki forced him to write a study on “the influence of repression of the sexual drive on the nerves and psyche” — first when he started collecting data and then when nothing came of it.

  Shimamura stubbed out his third cigarette, then left the sailboat-teahouse and walked over to the information booth. “Genoa, Genoa” he begged, and was given an answer he did not understand. Then he went to the checkroom to look after his bags. But he didn’t go inside. Instead Shun’ichi Shimamura stood in the sunlight in front of the shack where his two trunks were probably stored, staring out in silence. In his trunks were an English portfolio with fifteen utterly filthy woodcuts, a bundle with a chewed-up toy, and a photograph of a fish ornament on the ridge of a roof. The ridge was long, straight and generally uninteresting. All the other photos from Shimane had come out black. Evidently the student had no idea how to operate Professor Sakaki’s wonderful English camera.

  Dr. Shimamura stood quietly in front of the port of Alexandria’s transcontinental luggage checkroom, imagining his luggage. For a moment he wondered whether he couldn’t simply stay where he was and imagine Europe — Paris and Berlin, Heidelberg, Munich, and Vienna, with their respective universities and insane asylums — without actually travelling there, and then whether he might imagine the rest of his life without actually living it. A laugh or a cry rose in his throat and sank on command back into his chest. He set off for his lodgings. At least ten screaming boys who earned their pittance here knew all about the Japanese man and Genoa. When the ship arrived they would come for him. They would come fetch him with a lot of clamor and commotion and escort him through the streets the same way. Shimamura felt he could rely on that.

  He found his lodgings, took his temperature, put on his fez and smoked and brooded. Then a boy showed up shouting that the ship to Genoa was already there.

  By the time he left the Suez canal, which had confounded his sense of geography, Shimamura had already given up counting the days. From early to late, under an eternally blue sky, over an eternally blue sea in which nothing seemed to live — no fish, no whales, not even seaweed or algae — he once again took pains to distract himself, from himself, from his actual life, even as it was taking place, without taking much notice of it or of his tribulations . . . and now this entire life was being transported around the globe, courtesy of the Imperial House. Shimamura took pains to avoid thinking about that as well.

  The Egyptian cigarettes had all been smoked. The two Japanese novels that the unfriendly stranger he was married to had given him to take on the journey — without so much as a smile — had been read, forgotten, and lost, and were now likely jammed behind the bunk of a middle class cabin floating back and forth on the Suez canal. The days were too warm, the nights too cold. The starry sky also demanded so much attention he had no desire to venture on deck at night. There was too much eating. Now and then the orchestra would play. Both the food and the music gave him the shudders, but Shimamura tried to come to terms with that, since it was undoubtedly a question of acclimatization. Soon however the shudders gave way to a great indifference, which he could not overcome despite the best will in the world.

  There was a German on board who did business in Egypt. Shimamura conversed with the man day in and day out, as it was impossible to talk with anyone else. The German complimented Shimamura so profusely on his command of the language that Shimamura began to suspect his German was less good than he had thought. The German was no longer young; the right half of his face seemed somewhat rigid and drooping. In addition, his left hand had a light tremor. Taken together it made little sense. Shimamura began to avoid him, and then suddenly the German started avoiding Shimamura, as if he had only waited to avoid him until he himself was avoided, so as not to be impolite. Shimamura discovered a budding sympathy for Viennese waltzes in his heart. He now spent much time with the orchestra, fighting urges to laugh or cry or sway in time to the music. Then came Italy, Genoa, and the train.

  By an accident that bordered on a miracle, immediately upon his arrival in Paris he found the two Tokyo law students whom he had telegraphed about his coming. The two Japanese faces were staring directly into the window of his compartment. Shimamura simply had to step out of the train to greet his compatriots.

  The Gare du Nord was large, the buildings were large, the city was large, and everything was made of stone and looked Christian — nothing but churches that screamed to high heaven. That’s more or less what Shimamura’s brain rambled on about while he sat in the carriage with the two law students. “The buildings strike you as large and everything looks like it’s made of stone, doesn’t it?” said one. The students were young men who probably hadn’t been living there long either,
and they were all aflutter to have a newcomer under their wing. Shimamura found out that he would be sharing lodgings with them. He couldn’t remember who had arranged that, but he pretended not to be taken aback. Nor did he let himself be taken aback by the large buildings. Finally he said “Oh, oh” just to be polite.

  Inside the apartment near the Sorbonne that Shimamura was destined to share with the law students, and specifically inside the room where he was supposed to sleep, there was a bidet. It was a porcelain basin mounted inside a chair and covered with a lid, in which one washed one’s bottom. The bidet was near and dear to the law students, who showed it to Shimamura before he even had a chance to take off his coat. Whoever wanted to wash his bottom at night, they said, would have to do so in Shimamura’s bedroom. Then they laughed so hard they cried. They were silly boys. Perhaps the utter ridiculousness of this French creation, with its turned legs and daintily tapered basin, boosted their Japanese pride. Or maybe they were drunk. Shimamura laughed along for a moment, then praised the hygiene of the fixture. He thought it might come in useful to position himself right away as a wet blanket. Afterward he excused himself, as he wanted to unpack and rest up a bit. Nor did he let himself be lured out of his room later on, when the law students wanted to go to a nightclub called the Cabaret of Hell, which was decorated with stone and papier-mâché devils hung from the ceiling, among other things. Shimamura stayed behind, sitting at his window, eating Genoa cheese, and staring at the bidet, not without emotion.

  §

  “Reaction times, Luise,” Shimamura said to the water bucket, which he had grown used to looking at instead of the maidservant, when she entered the room. “Reaction times, guinea pigs, and chess. For a very long time that was the only research I was pursuing in Paris, and I was convinced that Japan had no need of it and that my stipend was an utter waste.”

  She tied her sleeves back with a narrow sash and began stirring the water with both hands. Lately she had been doing that every morning. Shimamura suspected that she did it to show him that the water was pleasant and not too hot and good to use for whatever purpose he wished.

  “Reaction times, Luise,” said Shimamura, “are data collected for use in psychometrics, chess is a game like shogi, and guinea pigs are mindless, tailless rats.”

  Luise shuddered. Perhaps she was horrified. Perhaps the water was ice cold. Perhaps she didn’t understand. Perhaps she had long ago contracted consumption.

  “But then again it isn’t all that bad,” said Shimamura.

  7

  Dr. Shimamura had lost no time finding his countrymen at the Gare du Nord; what he didn’t find in Paris even after days and weeks was neurology.

  After an astoundingly long sleep, he woke up feeling somewhat cheery, and the first thing he did was walk to the Sorbonne as Professor Sakaki had instructed. In his briefcase he was carrying two letters to the medical faculty, and safely tucked under his arm — because they didn’t quite fit in the briefcase — the collection of dirty woodcuts from Nagasaki, as a possible last resort for winning over his French colleagues.

  The Sorbonne looked like a church and seemed a great waste of stone, but by now that barely elicited a smile from Shimamura. The French language was another matter. It bothered him. In fact it bothered him more and more and ultimately proved to be an insurmountable barrier. The letters of recommendation were in German, Shimamura spoke German, and no one at the Sorbonne understood that language. And when he finally located the Faculty of Medicine — after much traipsing around during which he was observed by many people old and young and undoubtedly also thoroughly discussed — it turned out that even there no one understood a word of German. As a result on his very first day — and many subsequent ones — he had to resort to broken Latin, which went so badly on all sides that Shimamura was on the verge of tossing his fox pornography on the table and shouting for help in Japanese. Instead he bowed politely and left.

  He bought some cigarettes, a city map called Paris Monumental, and some bread and cheese. The bread and cheese did him good; it purified his spirit like some cleansing self-mortification. He headed to the Jardin du Luxembourg, smoked, ate, and pondered. He couldn’t recall whether the misconception that German was the worldwide lingua franca of neurology came from his own imagining or from Professor Sakaki. Shimamura observed the thickly beveled basin of the fountain and wondered how hygienic all this stone might be, and whether the quarries that presumably riddled the French countryside were secure, profitable, and strategically planned, or if instead they represented anarchy and the beginning of the end. Someone said “chinois” to him and Shimamura answered “merci” because he didn’t know anything better. Then he went home and engaged Sato, the younger of the two jurists, as an interpreter.

  Even with Sato’s help Dr. Shimamura couldn’t find anything that resembled neurology. He did find a lecture, which judging from the various brains on display at the front of the hall was designed for neophytes, and he also found a convivial group of professors who wanted to talk about Japanese theater, which they knew from the Exposition Universelle. Noticing that Shimamura was growing increasingly mistrustful of his French, Sato started sniggering at Shimamura’s inept planning and his lack of language and about neurology in general. Why does Japan need all this neurology, Sato asked in a roundabout manner, and Shimamura answered in an equally roundabout manner that French jurisprudence would surely provide the answer. After that Shimamura and Sato no longer got along and had an unfriendly parting of ways.

  Then Dr. Shimamura discovered a neuropathological laboratory. There they were decapitating dogs. Then they decapitated chickens. Finally someone brought a sack of guinea pigs — this is where Shimamura first met that animal — and cut off the heads of those, too. Three dainty guillotines, true mechanical wonders, stood on three pedestals and dispatched the heads, leaving the bodies to become the focus of analysis; the heart and the vagus nerve were of special interest. The laboratory was not in good condition, it smelled bad and the overall atmosphere — attracting more visitors than scientists — was generally unsettling. There were even women among the guests, and men who seemed dressed from another era, probably poets, thought Shimamura. He couldn’t understand why they would choose to dawdle about here, together with their concubines, in this awful room. He beheaded a guinea pig and checked the reflexes of head and body, which wasn’t easy with the small furred animal. He also couldn’t understand why they let him do this, why no one noticed that some completely unknown Oriental was playing with a guillotine. Once more someone called out “chinois!” but it didn’t sound like a reproach. Shimamura replied “excusez-moi.” Then he added “folie.” How quickly could he learn this language, and was it even worth the effort? On the wall, just above the dog-sized guillotine, was a photograph in a cloth frame showing a bearded melancholic; the picture was adorned with black ribbon. Probably the founding father of this enterprise. The walls were spattered with blood. This day, too, ended in the Jardin du Luxembourg, with meditation and cheese.

  Dr. Shimamura refused to give up on the Sorbonne. Far away from the department of decapitation, in a completely separate building, he discovered a facility still under construction that didn’t appear to belong to any particular faculty but was evidently assigned to physiological psychology. This subject felt new, having just been invented the previous year in Germany, which is why the two researchers in charge spoke a little bit of German. When Shimamura appeared out of nowhere — he had left both the recommendation letters and the woodcuts at home, so the only strategy left was to simply show up — he was well received. Apparently the physiological psychologists had no staff apart from a single lab technician who would occasionally sidle in and then disappear for long periods. So the researchers took what they could get, even if that meant a Japanese neurologist.

  Each of the physiological psychologists — Shimamura repeated this tongue-twister over and over until it rolled elegantly off his lips — sported a
beard and a pince-nez, and each seemed self-assured despite their empty, sad, partially unplastered rooms. Their names were Dr. Beaunis and Dr. Bidet, which Shimamura took in with an iron countenance. Then he locked himself in the toilet and burst into laughter that verged on the hysterical. And then he was moved to feel compassion and respect for this man fated to spend a lifetime in France with such a surname. Perhaps the name was not uncommon. Perhaps it even came from an old medical family, one of whose scions had devoted himself to rectal hygiene and now another to physiological psychology. For an excessively long period, constantly in danger of breaking into burbling, tear-inducing laughter, Dr. Shimamura thought about Dr. Bidet’s name while at the same time attempting to make himself useful in the laboratory.

  The work consisted of measuring reaction times, which, as the name suggested, was the time it took for someone to react to something. To keep refining the measuring technique and the evaluation of the data, both stimulus and reaction were kept simple: the stimulus was for instance a little ball, which upon command was dropped into a pipe, and the reaction was pushing a button. The laboratory housed a host of small machines generating stimuli and collecting reactions. Some looked like telegraphs, others like gramophones, a few like small pianos. The ones that spit out the little balls looked like guillotines; Shimamura almost had to return to the toilet for another good laugh.

  Doctors Beaunis and Bidet recorded Shun’ichi Shimamura’s reaction times fifty times each on ten separate devices. They gave him his own sheet of data, to which a little box had been added noting his Japanese origin. According to Dr. Beaunis, until at least twenty more Japanese (or at least Asians) were tested, Shimamura’s reaction times would be completely unusable, unless they simply erased the little box with “Japanese.” After thus giving Shimamura a guilty conscience, Dr. Beaunis induced him to recruit other test subjects, so that he might at least contribute something to the success of the project as a whole, and without any fuss sent him to canvass the halls of the Sorbonne. “Anyone will do,” said Dr. Beaunis, and Bidet agreed. They wrote out a sentence in French for their guest, which he could to use to entice the others, and left him to his fate.