In Pursuit of Lavender

In this novel-length road story, the female protagonist, who is haunted by an audio hallucination twenty ells of linen are worth a coat that plays over and over in her mind, escapes from a mental hospital with a young man. This is the story of their journey together. [NP] The hallucinatory words come from a passage in Marx's Das Kapital, but the protagonist knows nothing of that; nor does she understand what they literally mean. After she starts to hear them, she attempts suicide and is then diagnosed as manic and placed in a mental hospital. Unable to stand life in the prison-like hospital, she makes a daring escape with Nagoyan, another patient. [NP] She is 21 and fluent in the Hakata dialect of northern Kyushu. Nagoyan is a 24-year-old company employee suffering from depression who insists that he is a native of Tokyo, though he is actually from Nagoya. This strange pair, just escaped from their Hakata hospital, struggle with the mental crises that...