And so the truth came to light. A crime had indeed been committed. The young assistant had fallen first from the roof, then from the cliffs into the sea — still talking and flushed from a sexual encounter with K. — and this was not an accident. In fact it was the worst possible outcome that the cathartic method might reveal, for right there on Breuer’s chaise longue a murderer was sitting, amid tears of horror and relief, having reproduced the terrible scene of his deed, and this confession had brought about his recovery. Shimamura’s hand was twitching less and less. His tears were drying up. He let out an enormous sigh. Once again Breuer stood up to open the window and stuck his head far outside. What was he bound to do? What was his moral, legal, medical duty? He felt an overwhelming desire to shout out the window, “Police, police,” like the grandmother from a fairground puppet show. But he forced himself to remain calm. What did one know about Japan? What did one know about shamans? What law did they understand? Was it possible that the pupil actually belonged to the master, just like some tool or magic potion, and that he was permitted or even duty-bound to commit suicide if he surpassed his master? Had the deed induced trauma only because the Japanese had traveled to Europe, where he was confronted with European customs and European law, with Griesinger, Charcot, and Breuer? Really what did one know about Japan? Dr. Breuer, cooled by the fresh winter air, decided to sleep on the matter, perhaps try his luck in the Court Library one more time, before undertaking possible further steps. He closed the window and walked over to Shimamura, who was sitting on the chaise longue looking rather petrified, and gave his colleague a long and heartfelt handshake.
Josef Breuer did not undertake any steps. Nor did he visit the Court Library. Instead he ran to see Freud. Now he was finally ready to embark on the joint book that had become such an annoyance. Freud noticed that his erstwhile mentor was astoundingly convivial and full of creative energy. Freud asked if Breuer had received some good news, or perhaps had a breakthrough with his kittens. Breuer didn’t answer, and inquired after Freud’s health and the health of the entire family, as though he were the family physician. Amazed, Freud assured him that all were well. Then Breuer burst out laughing. Freud laughed along, since Josef Breuer had once been his teacher and he still felt some obligation. So they laughed for a while. Then Breuer said, “I recently cast out a fox spirit, and this wasn’t a dream but actual therapy,” and related the case of Shimamura. He left out quite a bit, actually everything — everything except Japan and the animal in Shimamura’s body.
Dr. Shimamura stayed at Bründlfeld, observing. But because Dr. Freud was a gossip monger, Shimamura kept hearing the words “fox spirit” more and more often at the asylum. Students, orderlies, and even Professor Julius Wagner Ritter von Jauregg, whom Shimamura accompanied on his rounds and who was hardly known for his sense of humor, teased him about it. Shimamura didn’t have much in the way of a response. “The analytic conversation as a healing method for traumatic hysteria,” he wrote to the imperial commission, “is of little use for Japan, as it contradicts our sense of politeness, and besides it takes too long.” He returned home to Tokyo in the fall of 1894.
14
Shortly after his return from Europe, Dr. Shimamura was transferred to Kyoto, which was undoubtedly an honor. He was certified to teach neurology and psychiatry at the Prefectural Medical College and soon was appointed director of the new University Neurological Clinic. He found he was well equipped for all these tasks. He continued to run a fever. He continued to feel the occasional protuberance in his abdomen, just under the skin, which resembled a hernia or perhaps not. He didn’t see that this ought to pose any impediment to his career.
He was well-liked by his students, who particularly enjoyed his course on forensics, even though he had never studied that subject himself. To illustrate the methods and findings of forensic medicine he resorted to visual aids and long, gruesome stories which he related in great detail, and often with a smile so tiny it did not raise his moustache in the slightest. For hours, days, months and years on end he lectured on stab wounds and strangulation, on water in lungs and blood in brains, on toxicology and defensive lesions, on hair and skin under fingernails. In that course he only touched on psychiatry tangentially. When the court asked him for competency evaluations, after a quick perusal of the case he would invariably declare the person insane, while shaking his head as if to say: one never knows.
Since Professor Sakaki was no longer pressing him, his scientific work receded further and further into the background. For a while he tried to continue staining brains with carmine, but cadavers were always hard to come by in Kyoto, because family members never lost any time securing the bodies, and besides there wasn’t any carmine. Only in rare, very interesting cases would he acquire the cadaver in question, but then the brain proved boring the minute the diener opened the skull, and so Shimamura would leave the autopsy to his students.
Shimamura was also hesitant to use the animal laboratory, where a bizarre phenomenon could be observed. Cats, rats, guinea pigs, and even reptiles showed such attachment toward Shimamura that experimenting on them was nearly impossible. Even in their anesthetized, poisoned, electrocuted or dissected states the lab animals still courted his favor — they rubbed against him, nibbled at his fingers, clung to his white coat. Once a few students managed to take a photograph of the professor when he was wholly and helplessly covered with frogs. This photo resulted in a number of nicknames, but none of them stuck.
Shimamura displayed thoughtfulness as well as sensitivity in arranging appropriate care and treatment of neurological disorders. Competition was sprouting up everywhere — private asylums (frequently installed near temples and shrines) offered all sorts of strange cures for cash, as though there’d never been a medical reform. They were a thorn in his side and Shimamura railed against them, but even then his little smile got in the way.
The wall mats for which he would become famous originated in 1898. A young mother suffering from delirium as a result of lead poisoning had banged her head against a sharp edge and lost an eye. Medical residents — and not handymen — measured the walls so that everything would be correct, and they also supervised the installation. Shimamura studied the sketches and organized everything. His mind is always with his patients, the students said, but his body prefers to stay at his desk. Nevertheless, after what was arguably his most daring innovation, the introduction of mixed-sex nursing stations, he resumed his bedside visits with some frequency. Now the women were no longer clustered together but well dispersed, and they looked less and less like the lovesick frogs in the animal laboratory.
For nearly two decades Dr. Shimamura spent a great deal of energy concealing the fact that he elicited unusual reactions from his female patients. As a rule he avoided them. He surrounded himself with assistants and stayed in their middle whenever he made his rounds. For examinations he made sure to bring along some distraction: a nurse, family members, children, animals, or he would have a generous dose of narcotics administered in advance.
Only about once a year, and always in summer, would he take a patient into his consulting room and cure her. This he did at night, once everyone was asleep and well past the hour of scheduled treatments, when any noise would be taken for someone shouting in their sleep or for the cries of the insane, and not for the director’s howling. Because he inevitably howled — or on occasion, bayed — after he had healed a patient. These nighttime patients did not appear in the health statistics. Shun’ichi Shimamura never recovered.
He had no children and very little interest in public life or amusements, and he spent his free time on numerous interesting pursuits. He studied agrarian science, military affairs, urban planning and traffic control, Noh theater, Nietzsche, the Upanishads, and Italian Baroque painting. After the turn of the century, which caused him a surprising degree of fright, to the point of setting off a fever that kept him chained to his bed for weeks, he began to focus on the ancient Japanese motif of
the fox, ultimately acquiring no small expertise.
He studied all the printed material and manuscripts he lugged home from a poorly organized library, and foisted them on his wife to review and copy. Shimamura was convinced that Sachiko was terribly bored, and that drafting abstracts in the service of science suited her better than charity work with insane people. With an austere face Sachiko dutifully catalogued all the representations of the goddess Inari as she appeared in the old manuscripts, and every time she completed a dozen listings she brought them to her husband. As a fox, Inari was as white as snow and had manifold tails. Long ago she had begun her divine life with four tails, and with each century she added a hundred more, so that today, in this sad, late epoch, she sported more tails than human numbers could count. At the same time she always had exactly nine. And at the same time she was also a snake and a spider. She often accompanied herself as her own servant — a winged, single-tailed fox. And at the same time she was a bodhisattva, or even seven, and also water, grain, and land. She was a he as well as an it. “That’s going to be a lot of lists, dear,” said Sachiko, after she had filled the first fifty pages. Then she lugged the whole pile of documents back to the library all by herself and began a correspondence with the abbot of the Fushimi shrine. He didn’t want to hear about foxes so much as donations, and wished someone would send a photographer to take pictures of the shrine for postcards, and at that point Sachiko withdrew from all fox research. She stuck twigs in balls of moss and hung them from the ceiling on invisible threads so that they cast gentle shadows as they dangled.
In 1903 Dr. Shimamura founded a Society for the Study of Myths, which undertook to collect country folk tales about foxes, patterned after the brothers Grimm. Many of his assistants, actually all of them, joined this society, but there was no real enthusiasm. And although it was the last thing he wanted to do, Shimamura wound up traveling across the country, listening to grandmothers tell their fox stories. Even the most ancient women were strangely affected by Shimamura, but nonetheless he managed to collect all kinds of accounts, which he organized by theme, by region, and by the quality of the report. Now and then he told stories himself: about foxes crowned with duckweed who paid homage to the seven stars of the north. About vixens combing their tails against the grain until they sprayed golden sparks. About foxes transformed into will-o-wisps, cedar trees, cotton balls, thresholds. About how ten thousand gods sprang out of a single fox eye. About how Kannon, mother of mercy, one day lost patience with them. Shimamura’s favorites were those where a vixen took a human husband, kept his household, bore him children, wove sandals for him, toiled in the rice field and then, once her secret was out, died. He sometimes related that entire protracted tale, and not without emotion. Nicknames again started making the rounds in the Prefectural Medical College, but none of these stuck either.
Over the years he managed to accumulate a handsome collection of woodcuts with fox motifs. Most were depictions of Inari and her court; very few were obscene. No one seemed to care about the collection of tales, which vanished without a trace, but many people were interested in the woodcuts, and especially the Europeans in Kyoto, the so-called honorable foreign guests whose job was to promote modernization. They constantly inquired about the collection. Shimamura hated their visits. Whenever a foreigner came by Shimamura affected a terrible German, excused himself incessantly, and refused to show any print for more than a second. Word soon went around that Professor Shimamura wasn’t very nice, and that he was unwilling to sell even the most unremarkable fox print as a souvenir. Ultimately the visits tapered off.
In 1916, for reasons of health, Shun’ichi Shimamura retired from all positions. At the celebrations of his life’s work, the tributes, the ceremonies, and the unveiling of his portrait, he mostly let himself be represented by his wife, mother, and mother-in-law, who sat in front like a triumvirate and thanked everyone in his stead.
15
At the beginning of May 1922, when the summer warmth had already set in, Dr. Shimamura received a letter from Tokyo from his old friend and colleague Yoshiro Takaoka, who was coming to Kyoto on business and wanted to visit the doctor in Kameoka.
Shimamura was surprised his wife had simply handed the letter to him instead of tossing it into the waste basket, but this seemed excusable because the letter made no mention of woodcuts or psychiatric mats, and because this Takaoka was an old friend and colleague. Sachiko also gave the impression she was looking forward to the man’s visit, so Shimamura wrote back and suggested a date to meet. He had never heard the name Yoshiro Takaoka in his life.
The idea of the visit put him in a foul humor. He was recently feeling a little better, so he decided not to receive Takaoka as a dying man in bed, but rather for afternoon tea. This was a new routine that Sachiko and Hanako had introduced, where everyone sat at a table and chewed odd little cakes Sachiko produced from a prepackaged mix to which she added water to form a kind of dough. Since he had absolutely no recollection who this Takaoka might be, Shimamura decided to wear proper Japanese clothes for the meeting. That would lend a certain formality to the affair, which could in turn shorten it, and besides, it occurred to Shimamura that when it came to receiving old friends, traditional dress could underscore the fact that one was retired and that death was imminent. So he asked the women to search under the floor until they found his good clothes.
Everything had been mothballed and needed to be aired. Shimamura hadn’t worn the clothes in years. Sachiko even claimed that it was his wedding garment, but surely she was mistaken. On the day of the visit, long before the afternoon tea, Shimamura locked himself in his room: turning the key inside the lock gave him a deeply satisfying feeling which he resolved to indulge more often in the future. Then he put on his clothes. He did well tying the fine waist knot and also fashioning the jacket cords into a sideways eight, but then everything got tangled. He put both legs in one leg of the hakama, and somehow stuck the jacket inside that. His kimono started coming out of the slits on the side. Then everything hiked up, the long ties slipped down and the hakama became too short, with the cords looped around Shimamura’s ankles. Reluctantly he turned the key and called for his wife. Sachiko easily put everything in the right place and tied it off, athough that did not improve Shimamura’s mood. But when he examined different parts of himself in his shaving mirror, he approved of what his brain pieced together: he looked like the ghost of a tubercular samurai. In the house of someone like that no one drank tea longer than absolutely necessary. Shimamura had to laugh. Even Sachiko had to laugh. Shimamura paced up and down inside the house, constantly emitting the cool, coarse rustle that a good thick silk hakama makes with every step. “Oh, oh!” said Yukiko. Sachiko started mixing her dough and sent the housemaid on some errands so she wouldn’t be singing in the garden later on. After that there was nothing to do but wait.
Yoshiro Takaoka and his wife arrived in a petrol-blue Chevrolet, which lumbered and rattled down the poor street, pursued by all the children in Kameoka. Shimamura and his wife stood in the entrance to their house and watched as Takaoka parked the car behind the quince trees and cautioned the children not to damage it in any way. In the meantime his wife took off a series of scarves that had kept her hat in place during the trip. Yoshiro Takaoka wore a leather cap like the pilot of an aeroplane. He seemed to be fighting the desire to clean the dust from the trip off his Chevrolet, ideally for hours. Then he took off his cap and with his wife walked up the pathway. Both were at least fifty but were dressed like a young couple out of an American magazine.
The Shimamuras greeted the Takaokas and the Takaokas greeted the Shimamuras. They exchanged polite talk, about the weather, the quinces, the Chevrolet, and the passage of time. Then the guests went inside the house. Dr. Shimamura rustled. Sachiko made compliments. Hanako and Yukiko were introduced but quickly and regretfully excused themselves — Shimamura had explained in advance that his nerves couldn’t withstand four women at the table simultaneous
ly. The Takaokas were given water to wash their hands. They talked about sunlight, dust, automobiles and this beautiful house. Then Sachiko invited the guests to tea. Takaoka’s wife was also familiar with the magical mixture that produced the little cakes. She had large toes, no longer young, possibly rheumatic, which could be seen clearly through her silk stockings, she showed beautiful teeth when she laughed, and one strand of hair that dangled from under her hat had been curled into a spiral. With a solemn rustle Shimamura pulled back his hakama so he could spread out comfortably as he sat down. And then there was tea. Shun’ichi Shimamura had never seen Yoshiro Takaoka before in his entire life.
Takaoka held a high position in the Tokyo municipal administration. His hobby was an automobile magazine called Speed, for which he wrote reports and technical notes and frequently also took pictures. This was the reason for the Chevrolet and the couple’s youthful get-up, for which they both somewhat apologized. Naturally they continued to talk about time — how long it had been, how fleeting and fast-paced life was, how relentlessly it went by. The Shimamuras learned that the idea of establishing June 10th as a national holiday honoring time stemmed from Takaoka himself. This Time Day, which was observed with sweets and paper decorations in the form of clocks and was above all a celebration of punctuality in professional life, had existed officially for two years, but in their seclusion it had escaped the Shimamuras. Takaoka seemed very proud of his holiday. He started to launch into a longer description, but his wife, with a gentle mocking, interrupted him. Then Takaoka felt obliged to joke about everything that had gone wrong in his life. Evidently they had a wayward son who was trying his luck in motion pictures, and then there was Takaoka’s study of medicine. “You taught me so much,” said he said to Shimamura, “but I was too dumb and too muddleheaded for this honorable profession, so I became an economist.”
The Fox and Dr. Shimamura Page 11