The Fox and Dr. Shimamura Read online

  The Fox and Dr. Shimamura

  Copyright © 2015 by Berenberg Verlag

  Translation copyright © 2019 by Philip Boehm

  Originally published as Der Fuchs und Dr. Shimamura by Berenberg Verlag in 2015. Published by arrangement with Berenberg Verlag, Berlin.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut in the framework of the “Books First” program.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First published as a New Directions Paperbook Original (NDP1443) in 2019.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Wunnicke, Christine, 1966– author. | Boehm, Philip, translator.

  Title: The fox and Dr. Shimamura / by Christine Wunnicke ; translated by Philip Boehm.

  Other titles: Fuchs und Dr. Shimamura. English | Fox and Doctor Shimamura

  Description: New York : New Directions Publications, [2019] | Originally published as Der Fuchs und Dr. Shimamura by Berenberg Verlag in 2015.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018039751 (print) | LCCN 2018052091 (ebook) | ISBN 9780811226257 (ebook) | ISBN 9780811226240 (alk. paper)

  Classification: LCC PT2685.U56 (ebook) | LCC PT2685.U56 F8313 2019 (print) | DDC 833/.92 — dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018039751

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation

  80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

  Two days ago the amphitheater at the Salpêtrière was witness to an interesting performance during Professor Charcot’s characteristically crowded Tuesday Lecture. A young Japanese man, possibly a member of the folkloric troupe recently arrived in Paris, assisted the doctors with an experiment involving induced neurosis in a female patient. As soon as the woman was brought into the hypnotic state, one of Charcot’s assistants led the foreign guest out from behind a screen, and his appearance alone sufficed to suggest to the somnambulatory woman that she herself was an Oriental. She invented stories, sang, and shouted in a foreign language — Charcot explained that it was Japanese and that the phenomenon required further study — and then she danced around the foreigner, weeping, begging, enticing, lamenting, all the while displaying a wide range of pantomime, in which she seemed to employ fans, daggers and all manner of exotic props, before ultimately collapsing at his feet. The effect was as touching as it was terrifying. The Asiatic guest scarcely showed any reaction. Because Charcot’s assistant had led him onto the stage rather like a mannequin and shoved him back off after the experiment was over, the conjecture arose that he, too, might have been hypnotized. On account of his oriental features, which to us inevitably appear inanimate and blank, we were unable to resolve this question. We can only hope to see more of this interesting guest in the future.

  — G. Demachy, Le Temps, March 24, 1892

  The life of Dr. Shimamura was marked by tragedy. Following his return from Europe in 1894 he was scarcely active scientifically, neither in the Tokyo Medical Association nor at meetings of the neurological society. His studies on fox-possession — the first of their kind — were ignored by research. And then there was his illness. What was this illness? Despite extensive research, I have found no answer.

  — Yasuo Okada, “The life of Prof. Dr. Shun’ichi Shimamura (1862–1923). A distinguished psychiatrist of misfortune,” Nihon Ishigaku Zasshi (Journal of the Japanese Society for the History of Medicine), December, 1992

  Praise be to hysteria, and to its train of young, naked women sliding along the roofs.

  — André Breton, “Second Manifesto of Surrealism,” ١٩٣٠

  The Fox and Dr. Shimamura

  1

  The fever came right on time, toward the end of winter. And once again Shun’ichi Shimamura, Professor Emeritus for the Treatment of Nervous Disorders, contemplated the varied paths of life. For such reflection he preferred German, and inside his brain that language spun complicated webs which gradually turned into a tangle of increasingly agitated thoughts.

  Dr. Shimamura suffered from consumption. And perhaps from some additional affliction for which he could not find a suitable name in German or Japanese or Chinese or even in the gibberish of the medical professions. Inside his house in Kameoka he sat stock-still in the rattan chair between his desk and a fern set in a small metal urn with a faux patina, staring at the window, without his glasses. The late light of winter — it was the end of February, 1922 — mixed with the early light of spring, giving the window paper a yellowish tinge. Perhaps his fever would soon climb so high that his mind would become completely muddled. He’d better go to bed before that happened, he thought, but only just before, since lying down is hardly a reliable antidote to life.

  For a long time Shimamura had been working on a study or monograph or essay or article on the neurology or cognitive psychology or experimental psychology of memory. He had spent years arranging the chapters or paragraphs in his thoughts, and on rare occasions in a notebook, but he could never make up his mind as to the nature or scope of the text, which he had dubbed his Either/Or Project. Nor did he have a clear idea about the methodology. What he would have liked most of all was to take a galvanometric reading of the brainwaves presumably responsible for memory — ideally his own. Or at least devise some systematic classification. But he didn’t own a galvanometer, and galvanometers didn’t measure memory, and memory wasn’t at all systematic, at least not Shimamura’s. And when all was said and done he had no desire to memorize and then repeat monosyllabic gobbledygook and wind up basking in self-importance like the late Dr. Ebbinghaus in Halle. No, what Shimamura had in mind was a prodigious and profound text about a prodigious and profound problem. Nevertheless he was certain he would die long before anything came of it, and with every passing day this certainty gave him some measure of solace. Meanwhile the Either/Or Project served as a kind of justification for passing the time recalling this and that and quite often the very opposite.

  Shimamura felt a chill. With a well-practiced adjustment he shifted his body so the rattan chair wouldn’t creak once he started to shiver. Over his kimono he had pulled on a well-worn burgundy housecoat patterned with fleurs-de-lis — a warm, heavy robe that bunched the kimono fabric and twisted its sleeves around his skinny arms. The doctor regularly resolved to wear the kimono on top instead of underneath, which would have fixed this annoyance, but he never did.

  The housecoat was a hideous thing that Shimamura could not do without. He had bought it nearly forty years earlier in a fancy shop on Pariser Platz in Berlin, just after a storm at the height of summer, when the weather was hot and humid and not at all suited for such a plush piece of clothing. He had purchased it out of vanity: in his younger years he had liked to think of himself as mature and wise and therefore worthy of so old-fashioned a garment. Perhaps he also saw the robe as an incentive, spurring him on so that he might grow into it mentally. Above all it was an act of defiance, buying something he couldn’t afford on his imperial government stipend. As he revisited those days in Berlin, Shimamura remembered having had the fever even then.

  He tugged a corner of his kimono’s left sleeve to free it from the heavy fabric; the hemp cloth had a beige tone that matched the window paper. Shimamura recalled a Carnival party he had atte
nded in Vienna as Molière’s Imaginary Invalid, for which he wore the same fleur-de-lis robe — at that time still brand-new — along with a sleeping cap, which turned out to be a ladies’ model. He remembered becoming increasingly drunk as the night progressed, and constantly clutching a prop he had borrowed from the Bründlfeld asylum, a device for measuring tremors that was housed in an imitation snakeskin case. Girls who gave no indication if they were respectable or had just walked in off the street would finger first the case and then his robe and then the cap and then Shimamura himself. In this way he squandered an entire evening in a filthy room festooned with colored paper. Perhaps he wound up treating someone whose stomach or nerves had started to churn from all the waltzing, or maybe not. Who had invited him? Whoever it was, Shimamura now was certain that he’d been a bitter disappointment. Even as a young man on an imperial stipend, he could hardly have been described as fun-loving.

  Still, he was sure he had made the girls happy, as they pranced about in their short colorful clown-puppet costumes. He always made girls and women happy. They had a weakness for Shun’ichi Shimamura — that was a chapter of his memory all to itself. Although “weakness” wasn’t quite the right word and probably neither was “happy.”

  Shimamura took one of his nearly blank notebooks out of the desk drawer and stuck it in the pocket of his robe, alongside his handkerchiefs and the tiny vial of camphor.

  Dr. Shimamura had four nurses: Sachiko his wife, Yukiko her mother, Hanako his own mother, and a maidservant he sometimes called Anna but more often Luise. He had brought her along when he retired from the Kyoto asylum, as a kind of memento, and because no one there knew for sure whether she was a patient or one of the nurses. In fact no one could remember her name. That made Shimamura feel sorry. As the director of the clinic he had been known for his soft heart, his constant concern that no one would get hurt, that no one’s suffering would go unconsoled, and that all examinations were performed without causing undue aggravation. He arranged to have female nurses stationed in the men’s asylum, because they exuded calm, and he was unstinting in his use of hypnosis. On top of that he commissioned a mat weaver to make special padding for the walls of the more agitated patients’ rooms. These special mats, which Shimamura had invented, were mentioned at his retirement ceremony more than any other accomplishment — which was rather disappointing after an entire lifetime devoted to medicine.

  Tucked away in Kameoka, where he wasn’t a “bother” as he put it, to anyone, and where by now he had spent years waiting for his death, he had ordered similar padding for two walls he had had constructed out of plaster, wood and a little stone to isolate his room from the rest of the house. One of these walls contained a European door with a brass handle. According to the workers who had executed his design, the walls compromised the integrity of the entire building. They also failed to shield him from the four women, who clattered about at four separate places inside the house while he sat in his rattan chair next to the desk staring at the window, and now at any moment three of them would come striding through the door to check on him.

  By this time Hanako and Yukiko were both well over eighty. While Hanako was lanky and asthenic like her son, Yukiko was soft and round. She was also more relaxed, and took each day as it came. Through years of shared caring for the doctor their voices had grown so much alike that sometimes Shimamura couldn’t tell which ones were whispering behind the door. Frequently his dreams fused them into a single mother figure that expanded and contracted like some smoky apparition out of a fairy tale. Now and then Yukiko visited the temple where she made a small monetary offering, after which she would come back in a cheerful mood. Hanako read modern novels, mostly by female authors, which dealt discreetly with various family problems. What Yukiko and Hanako felt for each other, whether it might be hate, love, solidarity, competition or simply that dull, comfortable resentment that results from people living together for too long, Shimamura couldn’t say. His sickness was the sun they orbited around, and which provided them warmth. One of them had said as much to him once, and for that reason Shimamura hated them both.

  He had been married to Sachiko for thirty-one years. She hovered between the two mothers like a specter, unobtrusive and inconspicuous but nonetheless commanding. She wore nothing but light-colored clothes, even in winter, always perfectly creased in just the right places. When Shimamura looked for adjectives to describe his wife, the first words that inevitably sprang to mind were “prismatic” and “crystalline” — inorganic chemistry. Seemingly immune to Dr. Shimamura’s special attraction for women, she evidently possessed substantial, if not exactly pleasant, willpower.

  Hanako brought food and Yukiko brought tea. Sachiko made certain she was in the room before the mothers so she could observe their doings, after which she observed her husband, how he drank, ate, and coughed, as well as the way he prepared the scopolamine injection he was now permitting himself after three days of abstinence. Then Hanako and Yukiko cleaned up as Sachiko moved soundlessly through the room, while Anna or Luise lurked behind the door, taking whatever she was handed: teacups, plates and bowls, a handkerchief to be laundered. Although his meal had consisted of rice balls and pickled vegetables, Shimamura — who couldn’t think of anything else to say — repeated the doctors’ tired joke about restorative soups, that they should be just like a young girl, lean and wholesome. In Japanese the joke sounded absurd, even lewd, as though eating had somehow triggered the patient to babble about young women. Shimamura thought he saw Sachiko cast a concerned glance at the scopolamine injection he was holding.

  Scopolamine did indeed stimulate thoughts of a sexual nature, which might be detrimental in the treatment of nervous disorders, but this did not trouble Shimamura when it came to medicating himself. Besides, at this stage he no longer trusted his brain anyway, so it might as well focus on sex. What did trouble him were the four women. They seemed to him like pieces of a tile game — big triangle, little triangle, diamond, square — that were forever forming new combinations, a never-ending and pointless way of passing the time. “Go and amuse yourselves,” he told them. “See if it’s already spring outside. And please tear February off the calendar.”

  Then they were gone. Only Anna or Luise was still hovering by the door. Shimamura could hear her quiet, flat footsteps. She walked with the wide, outward-bearing gait indicative of deficient hip stabilization. The woman had many defects, but Shimamura couldn’t determine which one was primary. Every morning she brought a whole bucketful of water to his bed. Shimamura didn’t know who had told her to do that, or what he was supposed to do with all the water, or whether it was merely a misunderstanding and Luise actually meant to bring the inhaler when she came waddling in on her duck-like feet. He accepted the water with an annoyed smile, whereupon Anna-Luise gave an overly deep bow before scooting away. Now and then Shimamura was convinced she ran off every day to some safe place, perhaps to the toilet or else an open field, where she could relapse into insanity, into some disorder of unclear origin that had afflicted her at least since Kyoto and had never been treated, symptomized by loud, forceful and possibly obscene outbursts, after which she rested for ten minutes or maybe even a solid hour and then waddled back as though nothing had happened, with the gentlest hint of satisfaction on her farm girl’s face. If he had only caught her once while she was raving, Shimamura thought to himself, he might have been able to heal her, and she would be free to go and lead a healthy female life instead of vegetating here.

  I’d like to have these stupid walls torn back down, Shimamura thought, so I can die in a normal house. Then he injected the scopolamine into his thigh and went to bed.

  Not one single sexual thought came to entertain him that afternoon. His brain simply kept repeating: calendar, calendar, February, February, calendar, calendar... Then it started asking questions: where is the gramophone, where could the inhaler have disappeared to, what happened to the German Charcot and why is the bookcase filled with w
hole yards of Charcot in French even though no one here understands that language? And what had become of all his good clothes? The European as well as the Japanese? Did the women toss them in the oven because it’s clear I have no more use for them? And where are Father’s heirlooms, for instance the second-rate calligraphy with the large and simple characters and the life maxims no one could possibly live up to? All gone, said Shimamura to his brain, let it be. And suddenly he saw his father’s calligraphies and was unable to read them because he was only seven years old.

  “Als ich klein war,” he said, in German — “When I was little.” He sighed once and then again. The air went in and out. That was pleasant. The injection did him good. To calm his bronchia he was happy to look at the large characters with seven-year-old eyes and feel helpless in the face of their silent reprimand. Or sense his five-year-old ears being cleaned by his mother’s hands, in a golden hundred-year summer with a golden sun that caused his fingers to glow red when he held them up to his eyes. He happily accepted all the cicadas and the ghosts and the windmills, and the windmill ghosts and the outhouse ghosts who were after his bare bottom, which he showed publically everywhere because his country still lived in the Stone Age. Pff, said Shimamura, and he let the phantom of the bamboo ear pick awaken the old feelings lurking within, as if something were pushing into his head and cleaning it out because he was all muddled on the inside.

  Shimamura stared at the ceiling.

  The women. The women. The women?

  Not a single sexual thought came to his assistance.

  The women and myself. What happened?

  Kitsune-tsuki, he said — fox-demon possession.

  He laughed the little laugh reserved for this word. Then he fell asleep.