“The Sting Of Death” And Other Stories by Shimao Toshio

Author:Shimao Toshio
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies
Published: 2020-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Out Of The Depths

During the period when we were still going to the treatment room of the hospital outpatient psychiatric clinic, I often walked from the outpatient building in a wide circle around the psychiatric ward, gazing at it from a distance, and inevitably I fell into a dark mood.

I was battered, mind and body, by my wife’s disturbed mental state. When she was in the throes of one of the attacks that were symptomatic of her illness, her logic was iron-tough, and if I were to submit to that relentless logic, neither my wife nor I could go on living. When she drove me into a corner, I would completely lose my head, and many times I grabbed a sash or a cord and tried to strangle myself. Whereupon my wife, like the Kenmun, an amphibious goblin in Ryukyuan legend, would suddenly gain amazing strength in her arms and remove the cord from my throat. When the demonic cloud lifted, my attachment to life was restored. After that, it was my wife who felt the dangerous lure to suicide. My nerves were frayed to a pulp.

At that time, for a period of about half a year, my wife and I could never be apart from each other, virtually even for a few minutes. For that reason, I had given up my teaching job, and with no leisure to do my writing either, I did not know how much longer I could continue to make ends meet.

For me society had ceased to exist. We simply went from one day to the next looking squarely into each other’s face, waking or sleeping, even in the dead of night. In the exasperation of the suspicions that bubbled endlessly, like methane gas, to the surface of my wife’s disturbed consciousness, one day turned into the next.

There was almost no indication that the treatment was working. Had the symptoms not already become part of her personality? My wife and I, and to a certain extent the children as well, had become unable to consider what form the future might take.

For a long time we went back and forth to the psychiatric clinic. I wonder how many times we got into an ugly shouting match on the train and bus we took to get there. On the crowded train platform my wife would suddenly slap my face, and I would lose my temper and slap her back. My wife’s frenzy would increase all the more, then I would start walking through the train calling her name in a loud voice. I became abnormally persistent and kept beckoning and calling to my wife, who stood near the engineer’s cabin at the opposite end of the car, forcing a simpering childish smile. (The corners of that twisted smile somehow kept haunting me, piercing my heart.) When my wife came up to me, I started walking unsteadily back toward the other end. Everyone in the car was watching us. Some farmers’ wives, who had come to the city from a neighboring prefecture to sell their vegetables, poked each other and smiled.

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