The Fox and Dr. Shimamura Page 10

  “I’ve got you,” whispered Shimamura. A group of people were now standing behind him, not wearing costumes, upper-class, a young man with a square beard, a pale older man with a goatee, an angry matron in gray. They were all shouting “Franziska!” Franziska was barking desperately. “I beg your pardon,” Shimamura said to the goatee, who was the closest, and his German came out a little oddly, “I humbly beseech you, this is not what it might seem, Herr Father of Franziska, not at all, I am a doctor,” and then he started doing something with the girl that he feared looked like an open-mouth kiss.

  Shimamura awoke on the floor in a neighboring room, having been stably laid on his side, with the sleeping cap between his teeth. He spat it out and sat up. Muted dance music in the ballroom, all decorations taken down, two flushed waitresses in the distance, and the man with the goatee sitting on a chair. “Where is your daughter?” asked Shun’ichi Shimamura. “And where is my tremograph?”

  “Her mother took her home. Your what?” The man was bending over him. “I am not her father.” That sounded relieved. “I am the family physician. Are you feeling better?”

  “She has made a fine convalescence, I trust?” Shimamura’s German was still hitting a snag.

  “Your what, please?” the bearded man repeated. Then he started to explain about epilepsy and apologize rather clumsily for the sleeping cap gag. Shimamura asked the waitresses to search the ballroom for the tremor device. He noticed his left hand was twitching. Actually it was not so much a twitch as a waving and wagging he couldn’t control. He tried to hold the one hand in check with the other, but it swiftly worked itself free.

  “Is the girl convalesced?” asked Shimamura. “Shimamura. Pleased to meet you.”

  “Breuer,” said the doctor. “She recovered, as soon as you . . .” He pointed to his lips, with some embarrassment.

  “So what was wrong with her?” asked Shimamura.

  “Blood pressure.”

  “Blood pressure?”

  “Yes. No. Neurosis. By now she is back home in bed. She had snuck off to the ball. She is sixteen years old, the family . . .”

  The waitresses came scurrying over with the tremograph. Shimamura took it, relieved, and sat down on the case without further ado, since there was no other chair in sight.

  “I am not epileptic, Herr Doktor Breuer,” said Shimamura. “Now I am going to head home in peace, and I thank you for your help and hope that in my unconscious state I did not somehow hit you.”

  “Can you stop doing that?” Half reproachfully, half fascinated, Breuer pointed to Shimamura’s hand, which in the meantime was flapping up and down on his knee.

  “Not at the moment. But in time without doubt.”

  “And you are . . .”

  “Also a physician.”

  Shimamura stood up, but he felt dizzy and had to sit down again. He would have happily gone home, to examine the fish hand on his own. As a test he tried putting it inside the sleeping cap, but that was immediately tossed off. “Neurologist,” said Shimamura. “Currently at Bründlfeld.”

  “I completely misconstrued the earlier scene,” Dr. Breuer began, slowly. “Since I arrived, since your . . . since you . . . since Fräulein Franziska . . . I don’t know how to put it, Herr . . .”

  “Shimamura,” said Shimamura. “From Tokyo.”

  “Tokyo,” Dr. Breuer repeated, dumbfounded. All the riddles of the night seemed to come together in this one word. He went so far as to tug at his beard. Shimamura had to smile. Unfortunately, however, his entire left arm was now waving in the air.

  “What kind of neurosis?” he asked.

  “A convergence of multiple stimuli,” mumbled Dr. Breuer. “Fish, dance . . . running away from home . . .”

  “Fish?”

  “There was an incident with an aquarium . . . Tokyo?”

  “If I hadn’t covered my face with carnival makeup,” Shimamura said softly, “I’m certain you would have immediately noticed my far eastern background and not have been so taken aback. Aquarium?”

  “It’s complicated,” said Breuer. “An aquarium and her first menstruation. They became mixed up and lodged inside her head that way. I can’t really tell you the entire case history. Earlier . . . when you . . . when I approached . . .”

  Gradually Shimamura’s shoulder began to hurt, and his drunkenness slowly started to return. He swallowed, then burped, then swallowed again.

  “It was not a kiss,” said Shimamura. “It’s complicated, and you wouldn’t believe me in any case. It’s a trick, an old Japanese trick, a kind of purification — a medical one, of course, a neurological one, an oral, so to speak . . .” — and he burped again horribly.

  “My god,” said Dr. Breuer. He helped Shimamura to his feet. “My surgery is right around the corner. Let’s go there, and I’ll give you something to calm your spasms.” He tried to lock Shimamura’s dancing arm under his own, and when that didn’t work, he held tightly onto the other. With his remaining hand he clutched the tremograph. Shimamura burped, gasped, “not necessary” and panted “many thanks.” And so off they set. The streets were covered with gray snow that had frozen over. Here and there stray carnival revelers staggered through the night. It was icy cold. And slippery. And Dr. Breuer’s surgery was not exactly around the corner. What a good man, thought Shimamura. He clung tightly to Dr. Breuer’s elbow.

  Warmed up, treated to English tea and cakes, and thanks to a dose of chloral hydrate freed from all afflictions, he sat cross-legged on Dr. Breuer’s chaise longue and told him a long story, in which the words “I don’t remember” made frequent appearances.

  13

  After the ordeal with Fräulein Pappenheim, which though ten years back continued to plague him almost nightly in his dreams and with jumbled memories that appeared out of nowhere, Josef Breuer attempted to keep all patient consultations to a bare minimum, though without much success. He also attempted to steer clear of neurology, the medical school, and all types of hypnosis even if it just consisted of a monotone bedside patting of hands, as well as Dr. Freud. For better or worse, Breuer had finally given in to Freud’s constant yammering — which had a hypnotic tinge of its own — that it was time to “shed light on the Pappenheim darkness” and enrich science with a book that would take the case as a point of departure and publically shed light on Freud’s own exuberant ideas, which grew wilder and wilder every year. Now Pappenheim’s hysteria not only appeared to Breuer in dreams but also on paper, and it had become impossible to avoid Freud, as long as this damned book wasn’t ready.

  Apart from his flourishing private practice on the Brandstätte, fulfilling his duties as house physician to several good families abundantly blessed with daughters, and coping with Freud who kept dropping in to sit and smoke and talk, Dr. Breuer enjoyed his work with animals. Every time he thought he’d completely lost his faith in science, they helped him rediscover it. He had set up one room of his practice as a laboratory and spent hours there inducing rotary vertigo in tadpoles and crawfish with a centrifuge, or severing the vestibulocochlear nerve of cats, so that they could sit calmly on spinning discs free of nystagmus. “You are interested in vertigo,” Freud concluded. Breuer’s only reply was to hand him a basket of deaf kittens for his daughter Mathilde.

  Dr. Breuer didn’t know why, but all his good resolutions about not talking with patients simply dissolved when faced with the crazy Japanese who had blown into his house one Fasching night. Nor did it stop at the first recitation. The Japanese man kept coming back, practically pestered by Breuer to continue his account. At first glance the diagnosis seemed easy (psychosis, demonamania), but then proved impossible. The Japanese sat on the chaise longue, drinking tea with scarcely concealed revulsion, and talked. His German was perfect and at the same time sounded completely Japanese, which puzzled Breuer. Fascinated by his new acquaintance, who wasn’t so much a patient as an odd sort of guest who seemed
burdened by fate, Josef Breuer began to neglect cats, crawfish and the Pappenheim book. He left Franziska von W. to her parents and her neurosis, and let on he wasn’t home whenever Freud stopped by. He did however begin to visit the Court Library. But no matter how long and hard he searched the shelves devoted to Oriental Studies, he found nothing about Japan, as if the country did not exist. With some trepidation he invited the Japanese to dinner; after all, no matter what might be wrong with him, he was also a colleague. Breuer’s wife and two little daughters were very taken with the guest and soon fell into feverish frivolity. The Japanese spoke briefly about myelitis, then about Viennese architecture and Clemens Brentano. After that Breuer preferred to confine their meetings to his practice, where he tried to sort out the matter systematically:

  Shun’ichi Shimamura or Shimamura Shun’ichi, thirty-two years old, of youthful, asthenic appearance, left arm displaying spasmodic chorea which subsided promptly after 0.5 g chloral hydrate administered p.o., with no neurological or internistic findings. Subject seemed at all times slightly heated, with the bright, shiny eyes and excited, frequent pulse of a consumptive; the thermometer however did not indicate fever, nor did pulmonary auscultation reveal any abnormalities. With the exception of a cretinous aunt he comes from a sound family, to wit from the city of Takasaki located in the Kozuke province, which following the land reform is part of the Gunma prefecture. To his own amazement Josef Breuer had no trouble memorizing all these words right away, whereas the names of his patients had always caused him difficulty.

  Following a quiet, diligent childhood, the young man was sent to Tokyo to study something he understood fit the definition of “medicine.” It is clear from his report, however, that either in place of such study or perhaps to augment it, he became apprenticed to an exorcist, who according to oriental custom cured the sick by casting out beings that cannot be adequately described with Christian terms such as demon or even devil. In this capacity, and with a copy of Griesinger’s Mental Pathology in his trunk, which further confused the entire matter, Shimamura was sent personally by the emperor, who evidently took a lively interest in the activities of physician-exorcists, to a remote province in order to “cure the fox.” This “fox” — and here it was clearly “fox” that was meant and not for instance “pox” — refers to a disorder that is difficult to grasp. Rooted in the Shinto cult, it predominantly affects women, above all in summer. A woman “possessed by the fox” –or more precisely “bitten by the fox” as the Japanese let me know with great amusement — displayed symptoms Shimamura described fully in the manner of an occidental physician. Beyond this, however, she would be overcome by all manner of vulpine manifestations up to and including complete transformation into a vixen. The Japanese described this using language that was alternatively sparse and flowery but which was always sexually tinged, until all at once he claimed not to remember a thing. Whereupon he resumed the description using Charcotian concepts (arch, clownism).

  Charcot’s abrupt appearance in the far-eastern fairy tale threw Dr. Breuer off track. Suddenly he had a hard time concentrating and struggled to suppress mental pictures with particular associations — the kittens from his laboratory, Fräulein Pappenheim, as well as the three little maids from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado. Shimamura, who for an Oriental displayed amazing empathy, then surprised Breuer with German copies of his medical exams and asked the Viennese doctor to inspect them carefully. The papers appeared legitimate. They did not drive away the mental pictures, but from then on Dr. Breuer referred to Shimamura as “Herr Doktor” to stress he was a colleague. He also observed shame manifestations in his own person.

  A fox exorcist, Josef Breuer understood, was often referred to by the shamanistic concept of “receptacle” due to the fact that he received the foxes that were coaxed out of the possessed individual. Here again Breuer’s thoughts became muddled: the word “receptacle,” with its nasty, passive connotations, provoked strong feelings of disgust, which were immediately transferred onto his Japanese guest, as if someone dirty were sitting there on his chaise longue, with a bucket full of the excretions of diseased women. The combination of Charcotian terms and that damned Griesinger, whom the Japanese kept mentioning, only served to heighten this disgust, as though Breuer himself might be harboring foxes which in the course of his medical activities he had absorbed inadvertently or even with healing intent. To crown it all it occurred to him that in Baroque German such as Grimmelshausen the word “fox” colloquially referred to something regurgitated. For a moment Dr. Breuer was on the verge of asking his guest to leave. “I do not believe,” the Japanese explained, “that I have a fox or foxes in my body — de facto, in natura, in persona, or in animale. But ever since that time I have the feeling that my inner self is not entirely my own.” He then trained his physician’s eye on Dr. Breuer, since the Viennese colleague was perspiring, and also his speech likely sounded constrained. Josef Breuer stood up to open the window. “I’d just like to let in a little air,” he said, “it’s stuffy, I’ll open this up a bit to let some in.” Shimamura’s gaze became even more diagnostic.

  The fox per se was not the central problem. Rather it seemed as though the Japanese viewed his fox — because that’s how he put it, the longer the conversations went on, the more distinctly he referred to “my fox” as though it were a kind of pet, unmanageable but halfway loved — not merely as a burden, but also as an instrument for sharpening his diagnostic sensibilities and healing talent. He seemed more bothered by a different moment he remembered only vaguely or Breuer imagined perhaps not at all — and suspected this was the underlying root of the trauma. He was able to detect two protagonists: a young fox patient who was very pretty and at the same time very trying, who Shimamura referred to as K., and Shimamura’s own assistant, a youthful shaman who had been assigned to him back in Tokyo. This assistant, who constantly talked and smoked and who seemed carefree and assertive in his sexual affect, elicited such a strong defensive reaction in Shimamura’s subconscious that the latter could not even recall his name.

  It seemed this assistant had easily outperformed Shimamura in many areas: he performed the exorcisms faster and the possessed individuals and their families often preferred him over his master. He could better withstand the heat and squalor, could cope better with the terrain, and was generally more robust and cheerful. Eventually the nameless youth — the mention of whom caused the Japanese to wrinkle his forehead and lose some of his command of German — won the upper hand in the case of the patient K., with whom he journeyed into a cultlike, childish, and probably also amorous dream world that Shimamura was not allowed to enter, perhaps because he was clinging to his Griesinger — however Griesinger got drawn into the matter — and because he was not as respected as an exorcist. Apparently things came to a scandalous head on top of a roof. “The student disappeared and was never found again,” said Shimamura with a wrinkled brow. “May I now tell you about Professor Charcot?”

  Here Dr. Breuer emphatically declined. He was after reminiscence, and when instead of reminiscing Shimamura volunteered an anecdote about Jean-Martin Charcot, Dr. Breuer took a Helmholtz ophthalmoscope from his vest pocket and asked if he might hypnotize his colleague. At that point the Japanese stood up and found an excuse to escape.

  Nevertheless he showed up punctually for their next session. This time he was carrying a notebook. The emperor’s mandarins or bigwigs who had supported his trip abroad were clearly interested in methods of traumatic suggestion, including the phenomenon of hysterical counter-will. In the meantime he had read Breuer’s contributions published in the Viennese medical journals and now saw things somewhat more clearly. He asked Josef Breuer to convey his deep-felt greetings to his coauthor Freud, for having translated Charcot into such beautiful German, and thereby sparing himself, i.e. Shimamura, serious shame. With these words he eagerly opened his notebook.

  At that point Dr. Breuer was somewhat speechless. He found the situation repellent. H
e was overcome by a curious, practically infantile exhilaration that Freud was going to enter the annals of Japanese history as some highly esteemed emancipator of shame or some other ridiculous title; at the same time he himself felt gripped by shame the moment the Japanese uttered the word “shame,” which brought to mind the repulsive fox-transfer. Shun’ichi Shimamura or Shimamura Shun’ichi — the name refused to stick in Breuer’s mind — was by no means troublesome. In fact for an insane person he was extremely well-bred and retiring, but Breuer found him more taxing than any patient he had had in years. In addition, Shimamura’s notebook had prompted an unsettling role reversal, as though the Japanese were examining him and not the other way around — as though he, Josef Breuer, had been sitting on a roof in Japan, amorously confused and jealously angry, together with a fox-possessed half-naked geisha named K. and an overly assertive and talented younger colleague, and had thrust everything out of his memory so as to protect his own sense of self. Meanwhile this roof, which Shimamura had only mentioned in passing, had developed in Breuer’s fantasy into a highly picturesque oriental scene, with tiles, chrysanthemums, and Moorish arches under a full moon. The mood was by its very nature erotic, and at the same time conducive to bloodlust. Dr. Breuer asked the Japanese to kindly pick up the story where he had left off, at the roof, and put aside the notebook for the time being. Shimamura obediently closed his notebook and said “I don’t remember.” At that point Josef Breuer insisted. And insisted. And insisted. And hypnotized to the best of his ability, as far as this was possible, surreptitiously and without accessories. The Japanese smiled, then stopped smiling, finally his hand began to twitch, this time his right hand, and tears streamed down his stubborn face.