Inside my head a lot of people have suddenly arisen. The ambience is nothing like the calm that reigned on mornings in the hospital ward. I am seized with cold shakes, a loathsome sensation. Some have already been up for some while, and others are following suit. They are always the same persons, but though I recognize their faces and their voices, I do not know their names, and so I call them A, B, and so on.
E is a slight lass, clutching a doll and sobbing, throwing a massive tantrum. F, an older female about 30, is trying to soothe her. The scariest for me is B, a short, muscular male.
“That’s one we just have to kill,” he says.
“But if you do that, what’ll become of us?” asks C, a middle-aged weakling in a suit.
I’m the one to whom B is referring. They’re having a discussion about killing me.
“If we drive her to suicide,” B replies, “we’ll be in the clear. Can’t have it be an accident or anything like that.”
H, acting as the secretary, peers through his glasses as he takes notes of the meeting.
“Doesn’t deserve to live! Hurry up with it!” F is screaming hysterically.
E has stopped crying. A is sound asleep. D says nothing.
“Anyway, we just need to keep pushing,” says B. “We’ve been doing well so far. We can’t afford to make a mess of it as we did last time.”
Now G pipes up, “The more she runs, the closer we get to ’er.” I never actually see him; I can only hear his voice.
I want it to stop. I want it to disappear. I’m being hijacked. It’s all inside of me, but I’m not there. I look for my own voice, but it’s no good. I can’t find it.
I have the premonition that when this powerful delusion eases, I’ll still find it terribly irksome to go on living. And that’s just what those blokes are aiming for.
Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat.
Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat.
The only thing I have realized is that the voice is the same as G’s.
Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat.
Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat.
Already from some time before, G had, in fact, clearly emerged into the surface of my consciousness, like a worm breaking out of an apple.
A long day, an endless afternoon…
The car was heading along a broad bypass toward Takamori.
“It’s no good. I’m feelin’ creepy.”
“Symptoms of mania?”
“Uh-huh… Hard t’explain.”
“Were you able to sleep last night?”
“Fer about three hours. I woke up right away.”
“If you’re sleepy, take a nap. You can lean the seat back.”
Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat.
“Uh. When I get worked up, I can’t sleep. An’ once I’m in a rage ower nothin’, I wish I still had a cell phone, as there’re a lot o’ people I’d call up ’n let fly at, even some I’ve not seen fer a long time. An’ I’d tell ’em, I want no more t’ do wit’ ye!”
“Yes, but once over your mania, you’d regret it. Just as well you don’t have that cell phone.”
Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat.
Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat.
“‘Get it out!’ it says.”
“Says who?”
“My brain matter. So that it can’t get into my head.”
“Yeah. I don’t understand it, but I can see that it’s really bad. I would have thought mania would be fun, but I was dead wrong.”
“Mania too is grim awright.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s so intense. Whit t’ do? I feel all at sea!”
“Well, for the time being, since we’re on the run, we’ll be all right where we are.”
“Where are we?”
“In the car. For now, this is home.”
His words were kind, but they didn’t get through to me.
Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat.
“Oh! Would ye mind if I screamed?”
“I’ll grant you a triple indulgence.”
Nagoyan elegantly smiled, again only with his mouth.
“It’s like bein’ in a railway carriage that’s gone careenin’ outa control. There’s nothin’ ye can do t’ brake, so I’m afraid it’s bound t’ go down the slope ’n derail.”
“Like in the Mitaka Incident.”
“Whit’s that?”
“It was during the Occupation. An unmanned train derailed in the small hours. It’s all a mystery, like the Shimoyama and Matsukawa incidents, which occurred about the same time. There are a lot of theories, but none of it’s ever been proved…”
The wings of Nagoyan’s nose, I could see, were twitching. But I could not get into such ancient lore, being primarily concerned with my own immediate problems.
“Am I a friggin’ pain in th’ arse?”
Nagoyan did not reply. I suppose no matter what he’d said, I would have become all the more confrontational – truly a pain, not just irritating. Perhaps he was being silent because he didn’t know what I was talking about. Or perhaps he thought that I’d pretty well described myself. There was no end to the turmoil inside my head, and trying to put the best face on it wouldn’t do any good. I simply had to take my medicine and wait for the storm to pass. My doctor had warned me that medication would not alone cure me, but I had no strength left to go on fighting on my own, without cover. Yet I had no Limas available. And even if I had had some, it would, unlike stomach medicine, take a while to kick in. I was losing all sense of proportion and felt like a rubber band stretched to its limit. A single sarcastic remark might have been enough to send me into a rage.
Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat.
Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat.
“I’m worried about me meds.”
“We only have three doses of Rohypnol left.”
“I want some Mellaril too.”
“Here in the middle of the mountains, there’s nothing we can do about that.”
Nagoyan stopped the car at a large drugstore along the bypass. Not feeling in the mood to go into a pharmacy that didn’t sell what I wanted, I lowered the car seat and rested, wrestling with the refrain of “Twenty yards of linen”…in my head.
Nagoyan did not return for quite a long time, but when he did, he happily showed off his purchases.
“Look! I’ve bought a picnic cooler. Ice, scissors, rope, a utility knife, mayonnaise, shampoo, body soap… And here – fireworks.”
Except for the shampoo and soap, these items were all forbidden in the hospital.
I was suspicious.
“What’re ye goin’ t’ do wit’ all that?”
“It’ll come in useful when we steal vegetables… Besides, I really want to do some laundry.”
“Whit do ye want wit’ fireworks?”
“We can have some fun with them at night. In any case, we’re both bored.”
I hadn’t eaten any of the dumplings at Kusasenri, so by now I was feeling hungry. We lost no time in seeking out a field where no one was in sight. There we nobbled some tomatoes and cucumbers, washing them down with the spring water we had kept in plastic bottles. Our stomachs were gurgling. What we had left over we put into the cooler.
At the town office in Takamori, I used the restroom. As we came out again from the parking lot, we spotted a strange sign and exchanged glances: Nekoyama Mental Clinic. A strange name, evoking feline-haunted hills. Pondering whether it was for real, we followed the sign ever further along a cedar-lined road, until we eventually found ourselves standing in front of a white, Western-style building that looked as though it had been plucked from the late nineteenth century and neatly plunked down in the middle of this cedar forest. Inside the dome-topped wooden door there was only a red velvet sofa set against the white wall of the hall, across from which was a frosted glass panel. A young woman opened it with a grating sound and greeted us. As the window was small, all we could see was her fox-like eyes. I wondered whether she too was a member of the cat clan.
She asked for a health insurance certificate, and when Nagoyan said in loud voice that we’d forgotten it, she gave him an indifferent look and then had him write down our names and address. He falsely stated us to be Daisuke and Kiyomi Shimada. Sure enough, the first name that popped out of his head was hers. I wished he had used a bit of imagination and come up with something more elegant. For an address, he put down Akasaka in the Chuo Ward of Fukuoka, no doubt with the location of his company in mind.
Other than ourselves, there was no one in the waiting room. After a while, we were summoned by a deep, low voice into the examination room. We went in and were met by a large figure dressed in white. His tousled hair gave him the appearance of Beethoven. I had thought I would laugh if it turned out that he had a feline appearance to match his name; in fact, he resembled rather the largest member of the species.
Nagoyan offered salutations, and then we sat down in adjacent chairs that appeared quite small in comparison with the one in which the doctor was seated.
Dr Lion gave us both, first me, then Nagoyan, a sharp glance, his bushy eyebrows twice moving up and down.
“Deserters, eh?” he thundered. I had the feeling that were he to talk atop a mountain, his voice would be so loud that one would hear the echo forever.
“No, no, we’ve just moved and haven’t taken care of our papers… This is my younger sister…”
The more Nagoyan spoke, the fishier his story sounded. Anyone would have been able to see through it all.
“I once thought about deserting, myself… It was during that war awhile back.”
He laughed heartily, so that we could not help giggling ourselves.
“Did you succeed…?” Nagoyan asked him.
“I wouldn’t be alive today if I had succeeded. I went to where I’d been sent to deliver a dispatch and then tried to take off, but after agonizing about it, I wound up returning. Trouble was that I got back to the barracks after curfew, and that cost me a beating and two hard nights in the brig.
“Oh…”
“Well, that was the army for you. Of course, if I’d actually gone through with my plan to desert and then been caught, I suppose they would’ve put me up in front of a firing squad. Fortunately, I didn’t get sent off to battle. The transport ship didn’t arrive. Probably torpedoed and sunk in the South Seas. And while we were waiting, the war ended. And even after that, times were tough…”
We still hadn’t got down to business.
As the doctor was telling us the story of his life, I wondered whether we’d be able to go on living. Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat. Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat. Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat. Sweat had broken out and was running down my neck and into my T-shirt. Suddenly, I found myself talking.
“Doctor, I suffer from an auditory hallucination when I’m manic. And then it gets worse. I don’t know what I’m doing. Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat. I hear it each and every day, and I don’t understand what the meaning of it all is.”
“What is it you hear?”
“Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat.”
“Oh,” he replied, running his hand through his sparrow’s-nest hair. “That’s a line from Shihonron. It used to be rendered a bit differently. Of course, I didn’t read it myself until long after… In the postwar era. And now that I think about it, I suppose the translation has changed…”
He reminisced, oblivious of his audience.
“Doctor, I’m really disturbed by it. I’m even more terrified by the hallucinations. I can’t express just how terrified… Doctor, please give me some Mellaril.”
“What are the symptoms of those hallucinations?”
“There are all kinds. I have a lot of people jabbering away in my head. It’s scary. It seems that if I say anything, I’ll get even more. That makes it all the worse.”
“Does Mellaril stop the hallucinations?”
“The visual ones, yes; the auditory ones, no.”
For mania, Dr Lion told me, he would prescribe Limas, to be taken after breakfast, lunch and dinner, and then again before bedtime. I was very relieved that he made no mention of Tetropin; I sensed that he knew it to be a bad drug.
“What sleeping remedy works for you?”
“Rohypnol and Levotomin. But I suffer from early morning awakening.”
“Have you ever taken Vegetamin?”
“I used to take Vegetamin A, and it really worked, but they wound up refusing to give it to me.”
Dr Lion made a mischievous face.
“You took it all at once, didn’t you?”
I inadvertently nodded. Nagoyan nudged me with his elbow to warn me that that was a bad move.
Turning to him, the doctor said, “Can you promise me not to take your eyes off your sister until you’ve both returned to Fukuoka?”
Nagoyan timidly bobbed his head in agreement.
“You two have let off enough steam. Now be good and
go back.”
“Yes, Doctor,” I said.
After a moment’s silence, Nagoyan asked, “You won’t notify them or anything, will you?”
The doctor again burst out with the laughter of an imp in tales of long ago.
“Why would I do that?”
Nagoyan explained that he was largely on the mend and that all he needed was a few measly medicines, including some barbiturates.
The doctor carefully posed some questions concerning the onset and progress of his illness and the drugs that he had had been prescribed.
“How about sleep?”
“It’s better than before, but when I wake up at daybreak, I feel terribly anxious.”
“I see.”
“Actually, until recently I thought it would be better for me to kill myself…”
To this Dr Lion roared back, “No, you’re not to take the big baby’s way out!”
We jumped in surprise, but with this anger passed, and he immediately resumed in his normal voice.
“You have to be aware that it takes a remarkably long time to recover from depression. You have to take everything slowly, without making any hasty decisions.”
Having said this, he fell silent for a while and then, in a sober tone, bade us farewell.
We assumed that there would be a pharmacy nearby, but the fox-eyed assistant handed us our medicine along with the bill. The ingredients were the same; only the manufacturer was different. They were all generic products. The consultation fee, which Nagoyan paid, was alarmingly high.
When we got back to the car, I immediately took some Mellaril and some Limas. Counting up the capsules, we realized we had only been given a week’s worth. “How stingy!” I thought, whereupon Nagoyan remarked with a nonchalant expression on his face, “Well, well, you’re perfectly capable of speaking properly after all, with all the polite inflections to boot.”
“’Course I can.”
“What now? Are we going to do as the doctor told us to?”
“No, I can’t do that.”
I hadn’t the slightest inclination to go back. The Nekoyama Clinic had been really just a medical supply depot. We were directionless, string-cut kites.
In a plain and simple restaurant in front of the station in Takamori, we ordered cold noodles. Nagoyan took some of his own mayonnaise from the car and squeezed it over his portion in a zigzagging spiral, as though he were about to eat a Japanese tarte flambée.
“Don’t you want some too?”
“I don’ believe it. Ye put mayonnaise on cold noodles? Disgustin’!”
“Huh? Isn’t that the usual way?”
“Is that whit ye aw do in Nagoya?”
Nagoyan grumbled in reply that he did not think it a peculiarly local custom, but he had never thought about the matter before. He didn’t seem very confident as he began to slurp his noodles. Then suddenly, with a look of triumph on his face, he exclaimed, “What are you talking about? After all, people in Kyushu put Worcestershire sauce on noodles…”
“Right. An’ sauce ’n vinegar fer crispy fried noodles is quite normal too.”
“Now that is genuinely weird! What is absolutely normal is putting mayonnaise on cold noodles.”
I couldn’t eat my own noodles, even without mayonnaise. The idea of putting anything in my mouth somehow made me queasy. I took two bites and put my chopsticks down. To see Nagoyan so eagerly sucking it all in was revolting.
“Aren’t you going to eat?”
I looked sullenly at my uncut nails and wanted to get a manicure. It occurred to me that I might give them a vivid color.
I was going out of control. I was hyper but at the same time feeling utterly miserable. I wanted to throw everything on the floor – my remaining food, the bottle of condiments, the chair that was next to me. And the next object I’d destroy would be me. Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat. Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat. Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat.
Nagoyan knew that I was agitated.
“Go for a walk or something,” he said and then ordered a coffee. (Cold noodles followed by coffee!…)
“Give me th’ key. I’m goin’ back to the car.”
“All right,” thrusting out his right hip in order to put his hand in his pocket.
“But don’t start the engine. I don’t want to be left stranded here.”
“Don’ ye trust me?”
Nagoyan made a bluntly unpleasant face and got up. No one was at the cash register. The personnel were perhaps all in the back; in any case, they showed no sign of appearing.
“Let’s make a run for it.”
Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat. I didn’t need a reason to run.
Breaking out in a cold sweat, we stealthily left the restaurant and got into the car. The Luce put one more item on its rap sheet as it roared off in a mad burst of speed. We had done it again.
“And now we’ve bilked on a bill,” he lamented in a tear-filled voice. “How many years will we do if they catch us? And I left my mayonnaise behind…”
“Can’t be helped. Ye’ll jus’ have to buy some more.”
“We can’t go back now, can we?” he remarked, an expression of resignation on his face.
“How far will we go now?” I asked as I spotted a blue road sign.
The question made no sense, but I simply wanted to pose it.
“You’re asking me? This was all your idea.”
Nagoyan was squinting in obvious annoyance, so I merely muttered that he should just keep going. I had become accustomed to this car. All that I had etched in my brain was the instinct, like that of an arctic tern, to fly on south. Nothing else appeared to make any sense.