The Fox and Dr. Shimamura Read online

  “Oui, oui!” the patient shouted. “Prejudice!” Whereupon the Japanese man again lost consciousness.

  Shun’ichi Shimamura fled Paris like a thief in the night. He ached in every fiber of his body. In his trunk he was carrying every single volume of the German Charcot, which he had been pilfering from the Salpêtrière whenever and however he could.

  Le Temps ran an article that made brief mention of his appearance at the Tuesday lecture. The law students were so delighted they didn’t even notice their companion had moved out until much later. Each of them bought at least five copies of the newspaper to mail to Tokyo so the article could be circulated there. Since no name was listed, they wrote in the margin: The man in question is the psychiatrist Shun’ichi Shimamura, a student of Hajime Sakaki! The scandal was kept in bounds.

  As soon as he was on the train, Dr. Shimamura began reading Charcot. He lost track of time. It wasn’t easy for him to admit it, but judging from his writing, Jean-Martin Charcot was truly the best neurologist in the world.

  11

  “Berlin,” said Dr. Shimamura, “was ruled by nothing if not reason.”

  He stuffed his kimono sleeves up into his housecoat cuffs, which had acquired a new stain the day before: scopolamine and blood in the middle of a fleur-de-lis. It was April and icy cold. Good thing he had a warm robe, even if it was dirty and even if the women grumbled about it.

  “Everyone spoke German,” he went on. “I learned nothing but useful things. No one apart from me was suffering from hysteria. And I had an apartment all to myself, on Hannoversche Strasse, within walking distance to the Charité. Nothing but medical research and plain old reason. And now stay here, Fräulein Sei, together with your ridiculous bucket.”

  The housemaid lowered her eyes and covered her face with her hands.

  “Just sit down over there and keep me company.” Shimamura pointed to the rattan chair. The trick was to catch her off guard. Then she couldn’t refuse. Was she even capable of speaking?

  “Now,” said Shimamura.

  She planted herself in front of the chair and again shut her eyes.

  “Sit down,” said Shimamura. “Meaning: bend in the middle and press your bottom onto the cushion.”

  It took effort but she obeyed. Back in Kyoto she had sat in chairs all the time, in the nurses’ lounge. Or was that in the common room of the women’s chronic ward?

  “In Berlin,” said Shimamura, “where I spent an entire year or maybe even two, I wrote dozens of articles in my spare time, about why Japan is good for the nerves. Pungent squatting, old radish for breakfast, a language with no grammatical gender or plural forms, houses so light they can fly away, family trees, family bathtubs, eight million gods, earthquakes, tsunamis, et cetera. All of that steels the nerves, I argued, and managed to weave in a lot of medical knowledge. Those were fun articles. I toyed with the idea of sending them off to Kladderadatsch, which is a magazine in Berlin. In the end I wound up sending them to the stove. I was never funny, Luise. Funniness is not part of my constitution. I learned everything there was to know about neurological electrodiagnosis and stage four syphilis. I dissected many brains. I bought this housecoat and wore it and I put on my Egyptian fez and that was my thirtieth birthday. Now and then, when the fever rose, my disease curled up into a ball under the skin of my stomach so that it almost felt like a hernia. Only rarely did I feel the fox head. At times I even felt the distinctive features of Professor Charcot. I was sorry to learn he had died. I missed him, along with his fat kabuki-princess. Because you know — of course you don’t know: hysterics always seek out excess. Professor Mendel gave me a moment of hope: he used to ride on horseback alongside a streetcar, distributing alms from a basket. He also managed to establish a few asylums — all of them small — in Pankow. I thought I might find something for me, there with Mendel, but he just put me to work on brains. I warmed them in an incubator and injected Gerlach’s carmine mass into gelatin. Professor Mendel wanted to find out everything possible about blood supply to the pons and cerebral peduncles. So I incubated and stained, incubated and stained, incubated and stained. It was astounding how many brains the Charité had stowed away, and how generous they were with them. I’m certain that I went through more than would fill an entire lecture hall. My dreams were taken over by dancing, carmine-stained oculomotor nuclei. Professor Mendel was pleased with my work. He always seemed to wonder about me, as if he couldn’t quite get over the fact that someone who looked like me was actually a physician. But I was allowed to publish everything in the Neurologisches Zentralblatt. And I reported it all to the imperial commission. Because that was important for the future of Japan, wasn’t it? Where would we be today without Gerlach stains of the cerebral peduncles? How old-fashioned, superstitious, and crazy would we still be — especially you, Anna-Luise — if whole cohorts of us hadn’t gone out into the world and investigated for example how Professor Mendel of Berlin was staining his brains? Nothing but a tangle of scattered, earthquaking islands. Feel free to pull your legs up and sit on your little duck feet if that’s more comfortable — after all, no one can escape his own skin. If I wasn’t dissecting brains for Mendel, I was examining the laundress Jäger for Professor von Leyden — a laundress is someone who cleans and irons clothes for a living. Frau Jäger was a young woman whose right leg started tingling one day. I still think of it every now and then. She was the least insane person I’ve ever known, with the exception of my wife. She wound up in the neurological department of the Charité. She felt pins and needles in both the right leg and the left, then she could no longer get out of bed and could no longer hold her urine. She had gone walking on wet snow. Professor von Leyden handed her over to me. So I examined Frau Jäger. Every day I tested the faradic irritability of her muscles. And that went on for an entire year. For one whole year that ironing woman was dying of an ascending neuritis of the lower extremities, which developed into myelitis. Wet snow. One can only marvel. I documented everything meticulously. ‘Well done, well done, Shimamura,’ said Professor von Leyden. I kept coming in with my galvanic apparatus. Frau Jäger thought I was Chinese. And so every day I said ‘here comes the Chinaman with the electricity, Frau Jäger,’ and Frau Jäger would say ‘oh no, no.’ She didn’t say much else. She had two small children. To them she said: ‘Be good.’ Von Leyden kept bringing Frau Jäger to the lecture hall. A handful of students. No applause. Necrotic bedsores and pulmonary edema. A lost cause. Frau Jäger mouthed the words ‘oh no, no’ and that was her thirtieth birthday. I eagerly waited for her to die. Then I autopsied her. Hers is the only brain from Berlin I can still picture, the gray degeneration of the posterior funiculus and plaques in the dura spinalis. Martha Jäger. The spotty degeneration of her lateral corticospinal tract. Her delicate, ischemic pia. Professor von Leyden allowed me to publish the case in the Zeitschrift für klinische Medizin. And I also reported it to the imperial commission. As I said, Berlin was ruled by nothing if not reason.”

  At this point Shimamura gasped a little for breath. He sat on the edge of the bed and stared at his feet. The Japanese house shoes made a fork in the European socks. Two pitiful, gray, crumpled cloven hooves on an oriental rug. They looked like pigs’ trotters. Shimamura removed both slippers and socks and placed his feet in the bucket of water. As he did this he watched the housemaid. Had he finally guessed the purpose of her bucket? The girl kept a straight face. And why girl? She had to be at least thirty. For some time she’d been trying to tame her large breasts with the sash she used to tie back her sleeves. That didn’t look good. Also she was so short. When she sat in the rattan chair her feet barely touched the floor. Shimamura wondered what her brain might look like. Probably fresh and healthy, full of joie-de-vivre.

  “This is an impolite question,” said Shimamura, “but tell me one thing, Luise: what do you find so likeable in me?”

  It was simply impossible to call her Fräulein Sei. She continued to keep a straight face and di
dn’t answer. Shimamura could understand that.

  “Who are you anyway?” he asked. “Where do you come from? How did you wind up in the infirmary? Does my wife treat you well? And can you speak? Please say yes if you can.”

  A wrinkle formed between her eyes.

  “Do I actually speak Japanese,” Shimamura asked, “or do I speak German all the time?”

  Her forehead smoothed out. Then she said “half-half.” Her voice was strong and deep, almost like a man’s.

  “You sound different when you sing.” That came out in Japanese.

  She did not react.

  “Will you sing your song for me?”

  No answer. No song.

  “May I go on with my story?”

  Not a word. Perhaps she only spoke once a day, and now that was over.

  “Thank you,” said Shimamura. He lifted his feet out of the icy water, dried them on the bed cover and studied them. White and a little blue. What ugly feet. The housemaid had now lifted her own feet onto the chair and was sitting curled up like an animal. Shun’ichi Shimamura continued.

  “I attended lectures on pathological anatomy with Virchow and in Dalldorf I drew pictures of beds, in particular of the padded straps that could be used to immobilize patients and which could be quickly slid under the mattress when not in use, so that at first glance the place didn’t look so much like a madhouse. Professor Jully lectured on neurotic hypochondria at the Charité, while Professor Moeli lectured on crime and insanity at the Herzberge asylum. That was all very enlightening. But I preferred drawing the washrooms. I sketched the strangest things in Berlin, even sewers and a city rail signal tower. Unfortunately photography had been ruined for me. I believe I traveled as far as Halle, Jena, Dresden, Heidelberg in order to sketch everything there that was important, but I don’t remember, and the drawings are most likely lost. There are two things in particular, Luise, which I can’t remember: things that frighten me and things that bore me. In other words nearly everything. And what I forget faster than anything else is what’s supposed to go into my book on memory, because that scares and bores me at the same time. What I do remember from that period is the Berlin women on the roofs at night. They sat there and meowed, or whatever else one might call it. Perhaps their skin was a little darker because the brown coal spoiled everything, but otherwise it was just like at home. I always wanted to go up and visit them when I looked out of my window on Hannoversche Strasse and heard them barking, snarling, hissing. Fortunately I refrained from doing so. Am I speaking German again? On the subject of dreams and animals: did you know that after mating, foxes can’t separate for half an hour? That’s called ‘copulatory tying.’ The male has long since finished and is looking in the other direction, but he’s still stuck firmly in the vixen. Both flap their tails off to the side and act as if none of it mattered to them. For a whole half hour! I’m not surprised that this particular behavior hasn’t found its way into folklore. It’s simply unromantisch. Pardon the German adjective. It reminds one of water beetles and late summer dragonflies flying around stuck inside each other with the same indifference. Where did I leave off? Berlin? For a while I tried growing a Van Dyke beard, with a sad result. Feelings of inferiority. Pardon the technological term. My German colleagues on the other hand — now those were impressive beards! With my fuzzy bit of moustache I studied a case of myasthenia gravis and reported on that to the imperial — ”

  “That’s enough, dear,” said Sachiko.

  The housemaid jumped out of the chair and the retired professor was so startled he scurried into his bed, all the way under the covers. No one had heard Sachiko coming. Everyone knew she was able to appear out of thin air. But they always forgot.

  “You’re tiring yourself out, dear,” said Sachiko Shimamura. The housemaid knelt down then jumped back up on her feet and dashed out through the open door, strangely bent forward, almost like an ape.

  “Now you’ve made her completely mad,” Sachiko stated. “She’s even forgetting how to walk.”

  Shimamura slowly emerged from under the covers.

  “What is it you’re after with that bucket? Why does she have to bring it to you every day?”

  Shimamura thought for a moment. Then he said: “change of pace.”

  Sachiko smiled and touched the bucket with the tips of her toes. Outside, by the quince trees, the housemaid was singing her song, as though nothing had happened. “In the tall grass, in the short grass, in Uji and Kei . . .”

  “Like before,” said Sachiko. “Isn’t that so, dear?”

  12

  The daughter of the landlady who in the winter of 1893 rented a mezzanine room in the Hahngasse to Shun’ichi Shimamura had the idea of dressing him up as Molière’s Imaginary Invalid.

  It was the Fasching carnival season, and a Japanese painting student had invited Shimamura to an artist’s ball. He had shoved a ticket in Shimamura’s hand at the café where the stipend-holders regularly met. Shimamura had stuck the ticket on the shade of his desk lamp and that’s where the landlady’s daughter had discovered it. Her name was Barbara, she was studying acting, and often sat chitchatting on Shimamura’s bed for long periods.

  The Imaginary Invalid was not her first choice. She would have preferred to costume the Japanese man as a Japanese man, but she couldn’t find a single thread of Japanese attire in Dr. Shimamura’s luggage. So she pressed him to filch a large enema syringe from the hospital where he was now observing, to use as a prop for teasing the women, since that was the thing to do during Fasching. But no enema syringe was to be found at the Bründlfeld asylum, so Shimamura borrowed the bottom half of a device for measuring tremors. In spite of the beautiful case, Barbara wasn’t content, and she spent several evenings experimenting on Shimamura with different makeup — chalk-white and bluish and red around the eyes — to compensate for the missing enema, until she finally created a mask that met her approval. One of her grandmother’s sleeping caps, her deceased father’s Turkish slippers, and Shimamura’s own old-fashioned housecoat completed the costume. Shimamura was to keep his private thermometer jauntily tucked behind his ear, just like the carriage drivers kept their cigarettes. As she waited excitedly for the ball, Barbara put the finishing touches on her own elf costume. When the evening finally arrived, Shimamura let himself be made up and dressed, stuck the thermometer behind his ear and the tremograph under his arm, then pulled on a coat and disappeared into the night. Only hours later, when all the girls in the ballroom were whirring around him, did it occur to him he should have taken Barbara. But by then it was too late and their friendship never recovered.

  Unsurprisingly, Shimamura didn’t recognize anyone at the ball, not even the Japanese painter. The room was large, crowded, loud, and decorated with all sorts of ugly things — garishly colored tattered paper and old rubbish, including kitchen utensils and shoes — evidently an important part of the tradition. Shimamura started drinking — ever since Berlin he drank frequently, and on occasion quite a bit — and tried to recall where this particular holiday fit in the Christian calendar, so he might have a clue as to the sense of the evening — but he couldn’t remember.

  A number of women desired to make his acquaintance. Most of all they wanted to dance with him. The first waltz brought tears to his eyes, as it inevitably did in the opening measures, but the tears blended in well with the greasepaint and couldn’t be seen. He managed to subdue the urge to stick the thermometer in his mouth or under his arm, and anyway he lost the thermometer early on. He didn’t dance, because he didn’t know how, but he did clink many glasses with many women. He let himself be questioned and fingered — his sleeping cap, his robe, the faux snakeskin case. Shimamura didn’t want to unpack the actual device and risk damaging it. But at one point he did dance and at one point he did unpack the device and even tried to measure a female quiver, but all he had was the bottom half, which alone was useless. Shimamura felt ill and then he fe
lt better and better, the more he drank.

  The hours passed loudly. They had come to the closing polonaise. Now he could go home, thought Shimamura. Then he saw a girl who was costumed as a fish or a mermaid stumble during the polonaise. She collapsed and did not get back up. For a few measures she jerked around on her knees, and then tipped over onto her side. The dancers ruthlessly closed the gap. The girl put her head between her arms, then clutched her ears and began twitching. Large green scales started dropping from her costume and her crown of shells fell from her black hair. Someone bent over her and she kicked him. Then she started rolling over and over. And hitting and kicking. Shimamura entrusted the tremor half-device to his most drunken companion at the table, who was not in a position to make off with it, and crossed to the dance floor. He pushed through the dancers, observed the jerking fish for a while from above but couldn’t figure it out. The kicking was too systematic for an epileptic fit. Expressiveness too slight for hysteria, and the famous arch was completely absent. Whatever she was shouting, assuming she was shouting and not simply gasping for air, was drowned out by the polonaise. She needs water immediately, Shimamura thought, as he wiped the drunkenness out of his cerebrum — an exercise he had mastered well in Berlin. He shouted “I’m a doctor” and knelt down amid the scales and broken shells. At last the dancers ducked out of his way.

  For a solid half hour he couldn’t make head or tail of the twitching fish. Nothing medical came to mind. Water was knocked away, then greedily gulped down, then regurgitated and spat out. The third glass Shimamura poured on her face, which resulted in a nice left-facial paresis, although it really wasn’t. Tight, stumbling pulse. Perioral pallor as in a child with scarlet fever. The girl attempted to crawl with her hands like a seal on its flippers. And finally — a bleating, barking sound came from deep in her belly. Someone called out: “The family is here!”