We were already sweating by the time we had made our way to Nishijin, and so we immediately headed for the Purariba department store in the station building just to cool off in its air conditioning. There, not having brought along a towel, I bought a terrycloth handkerchief. I saw that I had only three thousand yen in my purse. Nagoyan was assiduously mopping his brow with his own properly folded hankie. Whether from all our running or from sheer tension, we were both terribly thirsty. I suggested that we get something to drink in Hanajam down on the basement floor; breathing heavily, he nodded. Once we had gulped down the water set on the table before us, I ordered iced tea, while Nagoyan, for some reason, decided on orange juice jelly.
“Come on, take a bite. It’s good!”
I took him up on his offer and tasted the slushy stuff, but my mind was somewhere else. What were we to do? What were we to do? Nishijin was indeed something like my own home turf, but that made it dangerous. Someone I knew might see us. My heart was pounding as we quickly left Hanajam and got on the subway. I got the scary feeling that the people sitting across from us were carefully studying our features. Instead of going all the way to Hakata Station, we got off at Tenjin.
“First up, we gotta do some bankin’.”
“Why?”
“Escape stash… Better get to it now. Else they’ll be on our scent…”
“Scent? What are you talking about?”
“It’s like this. If we take out our dough when we’re already some way down the road, it’s a sure way to tell ’em where we are! Don’tcha get it, Nayoyan? Yer jus’ daft, that’s what.”
He sulked, but when we were again at the street level, he happily called out, “Ah, Tokyo Mitsubishi Bank!” and, crossing the street, headed for the trademark red overlapping circles. “When in Fukuoka…” I wanted to tell him, but with Nagoyan the fact that Fukuoka Bank had branches everywhere was secondary to the pleasure of using a cash card emblazoned with the name of the capital.
At the ATM I took out thirty thousand yen, Nagoyan a lot more. He casually stuffed the thick wad of bills into his pocket and said as soon as we had left the bank, “Let’s go back to the hospital after all.”
“No way! I’m not goin’ back!”
“But that’s where we can get cured!”
“If I hafta swallow any more of that Tetropin, I jus’ know I’ll end up a vegetable. I won’t have it!”
If getting cured meant taking that stuff, I’d rather remain ill. The doctor told me it would calm my excitable nerves, a manifestation of my mania and schizophrenia, but it wasn’t so simple a matter. All the patients on it say it “curdles” them. It’s true. After every dose, you feel just terrible, as though a dark fog had descended over your brain. A paralyzing listlessness sets in that makes it impossible to speak or even to think. You forget whatever you were looking at and lose all track of time. You take it, absent-mindedly pop a sweet into your mouth, and then lose consciousness just like that. When you come to, the goo of the melted candy is still in your mouth. But that isn’t to say you’ve been sleeping. You come to your senses and find that you’re itching all over. You scratch the inside of your arms or wherever there’s soft skin. And sometimes you get a rash. It’s really the pits. To get over it takes at least two hours, and what’s scary is that the longer you’re on it, the more recovery time you need.
An outpatient might give it a quick toss into the trashcan, but as an inpatient you have to queue up after every meal and before bedtime, cup in hand, with a nurse keeping a watchful eye until you’ve swallowed it. You can’t skip out, stash it, or throw it away. I once had the idea of keeping it under my tongue and spitting it into the toilet, but the nurse caught me. After that, there was an oral inspection to make sure that I had glugged it down.
If I go on being tormented with that Tetropin and wind up unable to return to normal life, I’ll be in a total pickle – a real invalid all right. The thought of myself at the end of my days, still confined phantom-like in a hospital, fills me with unbearable dread.
“I won’t be goin’ back, no matter what! If I take any more o’ that Tetropin, I’m done fer. Any more ’n I’ll never get back t’ normal!”
“Now, now, calm down! It’s all right!”
Nagoyan said this with his hands on his hips as we stood in front of the Iwataya department store.
“Tenjin’s not safe. Whit’ll happen if we’re caught?… We hafta go somewhere! What’re we t’ do, Nagoyan?”
“Don’t get excited! Let’s just think about it!”
“Awright then…”
“Well,” said Nagoyan, with the air of having thrown in the towel, “shall we go to my place?”
Not knowing what to say, I simply nodded. I just wanted to be anywhere that was safe.
We took a train on the Nishitetsu Line. I looked out of the window and saw the Red Cross Hospital in the distance. At Nagoyan’s wordless signal, we got off at Takamiya. We walked past the fountain and out to the boulevard, where we caught sight of uniformed middle-school girls from Futaba or Chikushi, apparently on their way home at the end of classes. They all looked so happy. And yet, at their age I too had been the same; in fact, until just recently, I’d been spending my days quite contentedly.
“The Nishitetsu Line’s quite sumptin’. All those schools fer proper young ladies.”
“So you went straight through state schools?”
“Aye, ’cept fer college.”
“Oh! Is Fukuoka University private?”
“’Course it is… I wouldn’a been clever enough fer Kyushu Uni.”
Nagoyan’s place was in a white-tiled apartment building along a neatly paved road running from the front of the station. When I complimented him on it, he modestly replied that it was only a rental provided by his company.
The only male’s room I’d ever known was Tsuyoshi’s. He lived with his parents in Sawara Ward. I hadn’t seen him in a long time. Most of the kids I hung around with at college commuted either from the city or from around Kurume. One of my girlfriends came from Isahaya and lived in Ropponmatsu. I often went to visit her in her room. I wondered what had become of her. When I was hospitalized, I underwent a baggage check and had my cell phone taken away and locked up out of reach. Without it, I had no way of knowing anyone’s number. So here I was at the ripe old age of twenty-one, venturing for the first time into bachelor quarters.
Nagoyan’s one-room flat was austere but tidy. Had he undertaken a massive cleanup prior to his hospitalization? Or was he simply neat by nature? A navy-blue suit wrapped in dry cleaner’s plastic was still hanging on a wall hook, which made me marvel at the obvious: that he had previously been going off to a company in appropriately formal attire.
When by Nagoyan’s leave I went to the toilet, the seat was up, a reminder of another plain fact: that there was only one person – a male – who had been using the facility. Back in the room, I poked my nose about for a bit, until Nagoya yelled at me to sit down.
In the bay window was a telephone, but, except for my immediate family, the only number I knew off the top of my head was Tsuyoshi’s. I thought of calling him but then remembered the icy tone of our last altercation and decided not to. Nagoyan made instant coffee, which we drank with lots of sugar.
“How about some spicy rice crackers?”
“No, ta.”
I didn’t know why anyone would have rice crackers with coffee, but then Nagoyan said he wouldn’t have any either. As he spoke, I sensed that I was still on edge.
Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat.
“I say we wait until you’ve calmed down a bit and then go back to the hospital. All right?”
“I’ll not be goin’ back. I’m gonna keep on runnin’.”
“That’s no good. Come on. Be reasonable!”
Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat.
There was no way I was going to be reasonable.
“Yer sayin’ ye don’t care if I die?”
“Manic people don’t wind up dead.”
“Ah, but they do, they do! It’s jus’ that ye’ve no idea!”
The more I talked, the more tense and agitated I became, and I began to shake. I could feel the blood vessels in my head pounding wildly.
Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat.
“What do you want me to do?” shouted Nagoyan.
“I’m tellin’ yer! There’s no sayin’ what I’ll do if you leave me alone.”
“So what should we do?”
Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat.
I lowered my voice.
“Th’ hospital’s bound t’ be out lookin’ fer us already.”
“Yes, indeed. And we’re sure to come in for it!”
“They’ll ’ave us put into private rooms, wit’ barred windows.”
We referred quite routinely to rooms locked from the outside as “private.” We even joked that there was no extra charge for such accommodations.
“There’s one where the only window looks out on the corridor, across from the nurse station. Now that’s a place I wouldn’t like one bit!”
“An’ that’s why we gotta keep on runnin’!”
Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat.
Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat.
Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat.
I was already on the verge of tears, not understanding why I was being tormented by that voice. I had a constant sense of unease, as though instead of a hat, I were wearing a wok on my head, with someone banging on it. The one ounce of sanity I still had was urging escape, though I wasn’t entirely sure that even that portion of my brain was still in order. At the same time, I was also aware that at any moment someone from the hospital might be ringing the bell. (We mustn’t be here. We must find a place where nobody knows us. Now! Now!) I had the feeling of being driven by some invisible being.
“Nagoyan, ye’ve got a car, haven’t ye?”
“Yes…”
“Let’s make a bolt fer it together. We got no choice.”
“I’ll take you as far as home, then return the car and go back to the hospital.”
“No way!”
“Don’t talk like a child!”
But when I stared hard at him, he lowered his eyes. For some time he sat cross-legged, his hands on his knees, but finally he sighed deeply and said, “Really make a clean break of it?”
“Really…”
“I suppose there’s no other way.”
Assuming that Nagoyan had now made up his mind, I disclosed a concern of mine.
“I got no medicine.”
“Would you like to see mine?”
Nagoyan opened a closet and took down a shoebox from the top shelf. It was filled with various drugs.
“If you took the lot of it, would you be dead?” he asked in a silly tone.
“No way ye can kill yerself even with all that! Anyway, there’s not the right sort ’ere.”
“Oh, now really?”
What I needed a lot more than that sort of scary talk was some effective medicine.
“Have ye got any levomepromazine?”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“It’s got, ye know, Hirunamin. All the same stuff.”
“Oh, the sleeping aid.”
“What else d’ye take?”
“Rohypnol.”
“I need some too. Gotta lot?”
“One sheet’s worth.”
The rest he had weren’t the kind that would work for me. Nagoyan was already a pretty pathetic character, and even the drugs he had weren’t up to snuff. I was now strongly on the manic side, so I didn’t need any antidepressants, but I still wanted some Limas.
I also wanted to get hold of some Mellaril. Without it, I’d have no way to cope when my hallucinations came on, the visual variety being immeasurably more frightening than the auditory. All sorts of people, multitudes of people, would gather inside me, sleeping or rising as they wished, regardless of my own state – weeping, raging, despairing. The conclusion was always the same: they would all try to kill me. I would tell myself that it was just a delusion, but my voice was so faint as to be drowned out. The delusory had a greater sense of reality, so that the real and the unreal became indistinguishable. I couldn’t help worrying that I would spew out whatever the hallucinatory voices were saying. It was all quite absurd.
“Haven’t you got any medicine at your parents’ house?” asked Nagoyan, as he stuffed his own into a checkout bag.
“I had some awright, but after my attempt, th’ lot of it was thrown away.”
“You really ‘attempted’ it?” he said in a stunned whisper.
Yes, I really had attempted it.
I had been in outpatient treatment for depression as a high school girl and had had no idea that I’d flipped over to manic. Having gone through a year and a half without getting horribly down, I had assumed that I was cured. I’d go to the hospital once a month to pick up my medicine, but I only took the barbiturates and put aside the rest. Basically, I’m not the gloomy sort.
I had no reason to try to kill myself, and that’s what makes manic suicide so terrifying. At the time, there wasn’t a day I didn’t enjoy. I went swimming with friends along the beaches of Itoshima Peninsula, drank a lot, blew the money I earned from my part-time job on clothes and cosmetics, and snogged – and occasionally also fought – with my then boyfriend Tsuyoshi, who described me as “high strung.” But I was on such a roll that it never occurred to me that this was a symptom of my illness. I think I must have had a jolly good time of it, but now my memory is quite blurred.
I can’t remember any of it.
Suddenly, I had a day that was a total blank. It was the first time I heard the voice.
Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat.
Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat.
It was a deep male voice. At first I thought it came from the radio. Sometimes there was static mixed in, but, in fact, I didn’t have any radio turned on – except for a broken one in my head.
Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat.
“Today is the day,” I said to myself, “that I’m going to die.”
The idea was as terribly matter-of-fact as if I’d thought of going off on a jaunt to the Canal City entertainment complex, as though in a flash everything had been laid open before my eyes.
At a convenience store I bought two liters of water and then started downing all of the medicine I’d been hoarding. I knew that the sleeping medicine they give out these days alone wouldn’t do the trick. The Vegetamin A that I was taking contained phenobarbital, but only a small amount. I wondered whether lithium carbonate would work. I didn’t know what a lethal dose might be. And I’m not sure exactly what I took or in what amounts, but eventually I lost consciousness.
When I awoke, I found myself bound hand and foot to the four corners of a bed in a hospital ward. I couldn’t immediately remember what had happened. I felt something rough and stiff in my groin and realized that I was wearing nappies. I had also been equipped with a drip feed and a nasal tube. I had that the feeling that my nose and throat were clogged up.
Well now, ye’ve got yerself into quite some pickle, I thought.
My father was sitting beside the bed, a ferocious look on his face. “Havin’ a tough time of it then, with yer stomach pumped ’n all?” he asked, his expression unchanging.
“Don’t remember.”
He fell silent again.
“How long was I out?”
“Two days.”
“Where is it then, this place?”
“The Red Cross Hospital. In Hirao.”
“I hafta make a phone call.”
I had immediately thought of Tsuyoshi.
When the nurse arrived, my father went out of the room. She removed the nasal tube and freed my arms and legs. When I asked her whether I’d been that out of control, she nodded with an embarrassed laugh. Then, to my far greater shame, she took off my nappies and cleaned up for me. I was then allowed to go to the toilet by myself, rolling the drip feed apparatus along as I went.
I had badgered my father into getting my cell phone back and then used it to call Tsuyoshi from the toilet. I apologized to him for not having been in touch, but it seemed that my mother had already told him what had happened. Even though I knew I was in the wrong, I couldn’t help feeling resentment toward her.
Tsuyoshi was silent for a moment, then said, “I’d no idea ye were mental.”
There was a harsh tone in his voice that I had never heard before.
“What? It’s got nothin’ to do wit’ us or anythin’!”
“Ye’ve fankled me jus’ fine!” he muttered, whatever that meant. I knew it wasn’t anything nice.
“No!” I shouted frantically.
“Anyway, it’s over. I don’t care fer ye.” I heard the phone click.
After that, my calls to him were blocked. Hoping that he would have a change of heart and end hostilities, I kept trying to get through, and when that didn’t work, I called his home, only to be told that he was out. Not wanting to be taken for a stalker, I finally gave up, as much as that hurt. But I still loved him.
Tsuyoshi had reached adulthood without growing out of that king-of-the-little-ruffians mode. He was dark complexioned and seemed to be a bit of a noodle, but, in fact, he was a terribly lonely bloke who sulked whenever I went off to have fun with other friends. He was awfully kind and gentle, so that I somehow assumed he would protect me from whatever grim encounters life might bring. When I was with him, I also became more fond of myself. I loved him simply because he loved me.
But that was all over now.
My only salvation was the timing, as first-term exams were already behind me. My state of frenzy continued. I easily became emotional, flying into rages and kicking the wall. I couldn’t concentrate, read, or get a good night’s sleep. My parents were trying to keep me cooped up in the house, and I quarreled constantly with them. It was particularly hard, as the confinement only made my rampages worse. They themselves didn’t understand the nature of my illness. I would tell them that if they didn’t believe me, they could ask the doctors, but when they met them for consultation, all they said was “yes, Doctor, yes,” without comprehending a word that was being said.
I once escaped by squeezing through a ground-level dust outlet, realizing only too late that I was in what had become my nightwear: high-school PE clothes and a tattered T-shirt. Thus attired, wearing my father’s flip-flops, I made my way in great embarrassment to Tenjin, where, without realizing what I was doing, I bought this and that and wound up with shopping bags in both hands: a stuffed animal, sandals, eating utensils… My fretfulness and compulsiveness had become too much even for me.
In the meantime, the paperwork for my admission to Momochi Hospital had been done. I put up no resistance. I thought at the time that having committed the grave crime of attempted suicide, I had no choice.
Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat.