The Fox and Dr. Shimamura Read online

  Like her husband, Sachiko was inclined toward contemplation, though this wasn’t evident at first glance, as it was with him. Even romantic notions weren’t completely alien to her; as a girl she had dreamed of having long white wings instead of long white arms, of flying away and abandoning all reason, to find passionate love in the arms of some man who was not a doctor and had no doctors in the family. But that fantasy was long ago, and all that remained of it was a preference for light colors. She wore a light-colored headscarf and a light-colored shawl around her light-colored house dress. A bit of gray hair peeked out from under her headscarf. Sachiko hoped it would turn entirely white once she became a widow.

  Sachiko often ruminated for long periods and in great detail about her widowhood.

  “Another letter arrived about the woodcuts,” said Sachiko. “A German from Tokyo. He wants to take the train out here to have a look. Also a colleague wrote about the wall padding — but no one you know.”

  Shimamura furrowed his brow and surveyed the poorly yielding fields of Kameoka. Then he muttered a scarcely audible “hmm” and returned to his thoughts, as Sachiko knew without having to turn her head.

  “Abschmettern?” Sachiko asked in German if she should throw the letters out.

  This elicited another, slightly more spirited “hmm.”

  For years this abschmettern comprised one of Sachiko’s many duties in Kameoka. She opened her husband’s correspondence and if it wasn’t one of his three friends — all doctors, two in Kyoto and one in Heidelberg — she would read the letter from beginning to end and either ask pro forma or not at all, and then abschmettern into the waste basket. German had such ugly words. Sometimes, although more and more seldom, she imagined herself traveling to Germany as a tourist, perhaps to see the Starnberger See, and trying to converse with a local. Abschmettern. Schnupftuch. Intravenös. Türklinke. Psychopathologie. What a short and silly conversation that would be. And just then she felt such a flood of ennui as the world had never known. It took her breath away for a moment and threw her out of step. She stared blankly at the fields. Up at the sky. Over to her husband. Back to the sky. And down at her toes in their white stockings. Then she said “ach ja,” and counted out nine steps and three umbrella thrusts. And the ennui shrank from an earth-shattering phenomenon into ordinary boredom.

  “The German was very keen on seeing your woodcut collection,” Sachiko said.

  Shimamura didn’t react, and Sachiko did not persist. As it was, both letters were her own invention. Since fewer and fewer arrived, she invented some at regular intervals, to bolster Shimamura’s will to live. Sachiko believed that as long as one is receiving mail from someone who can be consigned to abschmettern, then one can still feel a sense of belonging to the world. And any mention of padding or woodcuts was bound to bother Shimamura. He was annoyed at being known solely for psychiatric wall padding and a collection of fox woodcuts. As long as a person gets annoyed, thought Sachiko, that person won’t die. And a nurse had a duty to delay the death of any person under her care. This seemed like a platitude, but one she needed to remind herself of now and then.

  “Ach ja,” said Shun’ichi Shimamura.

  “Shall we head back?”

  “After the curve.”

  As always they continued past the curve. Then they slowly made their way back home. A cloud passed in front of the sun. Shimamura’s breathing became more labored. Sachiko felt a twinge of conscience as she recalled the one letter she had never told her husband about. The one she kept hidden under the floor of the south room, inside a pharmacology manual that had belonged to her father. It was from someone wanting to purchase Shimamura’s entire woodcut collection — the man had even named a price, and a good one at that. Sachiko would write back after her husband had died, so that all those foxes wouldn’t be a millstone around her neck when she became a widow.

  Halfway to their house, by the quince trees, they saw someone out and about and they stopped. The Shimamuras greeted their neighbors only grudgingly. But it was just the maid­servant. She was standing among the bare quince trees, singing:

  In the tall grass, in the short grass

  In Uji and Kei

  My beloved insisted and he had his way

  Oh grandmother please oh won’t you soon die

  Or we’ll have no choice but to all starve away

  And then she began all over again.

  Shimamura stood still and listened. And he smiled, like he was hearing the first spring bird or some other beautiful thing. Sachiko didn’t look at her husband, he had actually stepped a bit behind her, as though seeking protection, but she could feel his smile nevertheless.

  The girl had a strong voice, yet her singing sounded constrained, as if her mouth was closed, and she was gripping the trunk of a quince tree with both hands. She hadn’t seen the Shimamuras. Her song was desperate, but also artful, with all kinds of tremolo. Sachiko kicked a little stone, but the stone was too small, as was Sachiko’s kick, and the girl began her song for the third time, with variations, as though she were all alone in the world. Shimamura kept smiling behind Sachiko’s shoulder. His breathing was easier now.

  “I remember that song,” he whispered. The girl gave a start and let go of the tree, restrained her stubborn voice with effort, said “grandmother” in a trembling voice, and ran off.

  “There is no such song,” said Sachiko. “There’s no song with ‘Uji and Kei’.”

  “She got scared and ran off,” said Shimamura. “My mother or your mother used to sing this song. Or someone else. I still know the words.”

  “By the way you shouldn’t call her Luise,” said Sachiko. “She can’t pronounce that. She runs around all day mumbling Luise, Luise, until she’s worn herself out. And your mother never sang a song with ‘Uji and Kei’ and my mother didn’t either. There’s no song in the world with ‘Uji and Kei’.” You aren’t remembering correctly. And her name isn’t Luise. Poor thing!”

  Sachiko had suddenly raised her voice. Shimamura took another step back and stared at her, flabbergasted. He looks so miserable, Sachiko thought, just standing around here. She reached for her headscarf and tucked her hair inside.

  “I mostly call her Anna . . .” Shimamura muttered.

  Back then, when she had simply taken the girl from the Kyoto asylum and brought her to Kameoka, so that her husband might show a little more desire to live, Sachiko had completely overlooked the fact that the girl was such a poor thing.

  “Shall we go home, dear?”

  “Hmm.”

  They took another moment to enjoy the weather, which really was very nice for February, and then made their way home.

  4

  Ever since he caught the housemaid — whose name he could no longer remember — ever since he caught her singing by the quince trees, Dr. Shimamura, or really Dr. Shimamura’s brain — as he occasionally said when he didn’t want to use the word “I” — was convinced that the song with Uji and Kei came from the Shimane fishmonger’s daughter Kiyo.

  There was nothing odd about that: Shimamura’s brain manufactured many memories he couldn’t place. These he attributed to Kiyo, and he was powerless against them. It was Kiyo who had inspired the Either/Or Project. She was the besetting issue for his psychology of memory, the pivotal point in his own medical history. She was also the reason he wound up in Vienna, where her case quickly became the gossip of unkind colleagues .

  Dr. Shimamura took his temperature. Afterwards he listened to make sure no one was coming, that the women were all well out of the way, and pulled a few volumes of the French Charcot off the shelf. He then reached further back and fished out the small bundle containing the evidence from Kiyo’s case. Little girl’s toys, a stuffed monkey on a bamboo stick, a shuttlecock, a spinning top, paper flowers. Occasionally Shimamura had the feeling that these odds and ends were all he remembered of Kiyo, and that the only reason he
could remember them was because he could hold them in his hands whenever he wanted. He fingered each object and then packed everything back away. The toys were bitten and chewed as though they had belonged to a dog.

  The fishmonger’s house lay in a shady mountain hollow high above the sea. It was a beautiful home, almost princely. Here the fish weren’t wares to be hawked but inventory that was managed in lucrative fashion, and the fishmonger, as it turned out, was a prince among fishmongers, although Shimamura and the student never learned how that had come about, or why fish and their management were so greatly valued there.

  The climb had been taxing, and the young student had repeatedly rendered yeoman service. He found natural footholds in the stone for the exhausted neurologist, and once even saved the older man from falling — out of fatigue and also from a kind of despair — off a cliff.

  No exorcists or receptacles were loitering beside the steep bank. No children followed them. It was very quiet, very hot. Here and there a plucked bit of white could be seen hanging in the branches — tufts or fur from something scampering by. Now and then they felt a light air, and Shimamura would take off his hat to cool his head, but it wasn’t a sea breeze, it was a waft of something sticky and stifling, almost like smoke from something burnt.

  “Do you remember when we were little,” the student asked, “how we always had to leave out the number four whenever we counted, because it summons death? One, two, three, five, six, seven? Do you remember, Sensei?”

  The student was wearing only a loincloth. The peasant tunic which the fox patients had been snatching at for two weeks was now completely in tatters, and the young man had wrapped it around his head, so that the sleeves flapped down over his ears onto his shoulders. Shimamura said nothing as he watched the man’s naked bottom dance through the scrub brush on top of the cliff. The student was now carrying Shimamura’s medicine bag in addition to the photographic apparatus. Shimamura took off his hat and put it on again. A dragonfly went purring by. Shimamura remembered the number four and the god of death. He felt himself succumbing to fear — to an old, ancient fear.

  The wealthy fishmonger did not live in his beautiful home. Perhaps he’d never lived there. Perhaps he’d only built it to house his possessed child along with her mother, a few aunts, and a number of maids and caretakers, and then run off somewhere. Shimamura and the student never found that out, either.

  Dr. Shimamura had set aside one hour for his final assessment. Instead it went on for two and a half weeks. And during all that time his calendar, where he kept a daily log for Professor Sakaki, showed not a single entry: for the days spent with the girl Kiyo it was completely blank.

  Her guardians made the doctor wait a long time before taking him to see the patient, who looked to be about sixteen. A blossoming beauty, with long hair done up in a pile of twists. She was sitting by herself at a small table in a large room flooded with sunlight, her legs crossed, playing with a tattered magazine called La Vie Parisienne.

  “Sensei!” she called out to Shimamura’s silence. “I beg your pardon!” The magazine slipped from her hands as she stepped in front of the table and sank to her knee in a deep bow.

  Because he didn’t know the most appropriate response, Shimamura, too, knelt down, keeping a far greater distance than called for. He regretted he’d been so ashamed of the naked student that he had confined him to the garden instead of bringing him inside. Still bowing deeply and without moving, Kiyo peered vaguely at Shimamura through her eyelashes and a loose strand of hair. Sakaki must have pulled her from some theater, he thought, she’s really the young diva of a highly modern female troupe from Tokyo, and Professor Sakaki sent her to Shimane just to irritate me. Half-bent and wholly cramped, he observed his new patient, while wondering whether he himself wasn’t displaying some paranoid tendencies he’d never noticed before.

  Kiyo’s back began to rise and fall. Her breathing grew deeper, then faster. And faster. Pumping like an insect. “Pardon us,” she said in a strained whisper, still bowing, and then shot her head straight up into the air, rolled back, and screamed. Howled. First a sharp yap then a throaty baying that wouldn’t stop. For such a small person her lungs could evidently hold an amazing amount of air. Still on her knees, she arched backwards, bending over in a kind of reverse bow, until her head was nearly touching the floor mat, only on the wrong side. The screaming did not let up.

  All the women closed their mouths and covered their noses and ran out.

  Shimamura had jumped to his feet. He stood there. And watched. With her backwards half somersault, Kiyo had exposed most of her upper body, and he could not help looking at the white skin stretched over her ribs, and at two tiny dark nipples that seemed to have slipped alarmingly close to her neck. Her whole body seemed to have slipped out of joint. Her shoulders and elbows had shifted into places that human anatomy could not foresee. And where were her hands? Were they clenched inside the hollows of her knees? Bent backwards at the knuckles? Was she now going to turn herself inside out, like a glove? Shimamura did not try to help her. Her face flushed a deep red, her neck was distended, and as she rolled over sideways, still screaming, her sash started coming unwound. Under her kimono — a beautiful, pale-colored girl’s kimono adorned with an appropriate fish pattern — he noticed several tightly wound bandages. The household probably expected her to lose her dress in the course of the day, and therefore made sure her underparts were well wrapped every morning.

  The throaty yapping tipped back into a shrill yip, then began to quiver and finally faded off in a deep wheeze. Kiyo stretched out her neck. Her eyes rolled back. For a hopeful moment Shimamura had the impression a classic tonic seizure was about to occur as part of a normal epileptic contortion, but instead Kiyo lay down on her side, pulled her feet neatly under the hem of her kimono, propped her cheek on her hand and looked Shimamura straight in the face, exhausted and a little reproachful, as if all this debilitating commotion were his fault.

  Dr. Shimamura heard himself exclaiming “Please come help your daughter.” But the words came out small and hoarse, and no one came.

  “Go on,” said Kiyo mildly, “have a look.”

  She rolled over on her back and took off more clothing. She went so far as to gather the bandages together a bit, just below her hips, to the beginning of her pubic hair, and pulled the fish pattern wide apart, exposing her thighs.

  And there came the fox.

  While at rest the animal evidently resided right below Kiyo’s underwraps — at least that was where he seemed to be working his way out. It was a small fox, two or three hand lengths, depending on whether he was stretched out or balled up, and in his cramped quarters just under Kiyo’s tender white skin he moved a bit like a caterpillar. Kiyo traced his movements with her finger: across her stomach slowly up into her chest, into her right armpit and then the left and then with a jerk into her left upper arm, where the creature pushed nearly all the way to her elbow, until this swelled and swelled to the point of bursting. Shimamura thought he heard teeth gnashing. He stood stone still. Kiyo panted. She seemed to be in great pain, her forehead broke out in a sweat and her eyes filled with tears, but she did not utter another cry. And all the time her reproachful look: I’m putting up with all of this for you, Sensei, just for you.

  Shun’ichi Shimamura kept one eye on himself as he witnessed the outline of a perfectly formed small fox appear, slanted, just below Kiyo’s collarbone. After a short rest the fox dodged to the side, then climbed into her neck and tried to force his way into her mouth. Kiyo pressed her lips together, then pressed her hands to her mouth to contain the fox. Her cheeks swelled up, and a few tiny bubbles of pink foam oozed out between her fingers. Was it the fox’s muzzle knocking against her teeth? Or had it turned around and was now pressing its strong tail against her lips? Kiyo was choking. Her body was shaking and twitching. Shimamura realized he had been muttering to himself the whole time — he hoped he hadn’t been saying a
prayer. Then the thing turned around and moved away from the mouth, down the throat, across the chest, and back into its lair under the white bandages. Kiyo stretched out and gave a gentle moan. Perhaps like a bear. Or a bear sow. A deeply satisfied moan or drone that sounded far too low to be her own came out of the girl’s bloody lips:

  “Paroxysm,” said the fox.

  The voice was gnarled, wise, ancient. He lay there in the form of a girl, all four legs stretched out, surrounded by the pale fish-patterned cloth and the tattered pages of a French magazine. Shun’ichi Shimamura peered into the elliptically shaped pupils encased in the dark, amber-colored eyes and met a gaze that was half interested, half bored.

  Shimamura spent the better part of two and a half weeks in that bright room — or at least so his brain reconstructed. He sat beside the women, kneeling in his stocking feet, sweating and fanning himself, waiting to be granted an audience. When the women covered their noses and mouths with their kerchiefs and ran outside as if on command — because as much as they may have loved the girl, they had no desire to take over her fox — Shimamura would stand up and move closer to the mats in the middle of the room, near to Kiyo’s little table.

  New clothes had been found for the student, who now assisted occasionally — or often — or always, depending on what Shimamura remembered. Which meant that the youth also stood by and watched. Because watching was all Shimamura did. Only one version of his memory, and not a very reliable one at that, showed him descending on the girl with percussion hammer and specula, when she once lost consciousness and was reliably human, so that he could examine her eagerly, excitedly, but without success.