Patient X

want, so you say. To live quietly, composing haiku. The rain on the pond, the drops on the leaves. The wind in the pines, the sand in your shoes. In your socks, between your toes. The grains which rub, the grains that cut. In the bathroom, at the sink. The blood on your feet and the blood on the floor. The wind round your house, the waves at your door. The world lapping at your feet, the world banging at your door. The price of rice, the cost of living. The riots in the streets, the smoke in the sky. A world at war, always at war. Turning fields into trenches, trenches into graves, making soldiers of us all, corpses of us all. The blood on your hands, the blood in your sink. In the bathroom, in the mirror. You stare at your face, your skin and your skull. You stick out your tongue, you pull down your lower eyelids. Turning on the light, turning off the light. Here and then gone, gone and then here. The man you were, the man you are. Off and then on, on and then off. The man you want to be, will never be. Gone and then here, here and then gone. Want to be, don’t want to be; will and won’t be, can and can’t be, can never be, never be. How many men, how many men. In the bathroom, in the mirror. No quiet life for you, no quiet life for me. For me, for you; for us, for us, for all of us. The quiet life, a half-life. Torn in half, torn in two.

*

Monday morning, in the classroom, before the board, behind his desk, Ryūnosuke opened his briefcase and took out the notes for his lecture: Poe again. Ryūnosuke opened the book. He glanced up at the class, the rows of students at their desks in their Naval Academy uniforms, bored before he’d even begun. They were not the only ones. Ryūnosuke sighed to himself, then began to read aloud: ‘The Premature Burial … There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction. These the mere romanticist must eschew, if he does not wish to offend, or to disgust. They are with propriety handled only when the severity and majesty of truth sanctify and sustain them. We thrill, for example, with the most intense “pleasurable pain” over the accounts of the Passage of the Beresina, of the Earthquake of Lisbon, of the Plague of London, of the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew, or of the stifling of the hundred and twenty-three prisoners in the Black Hole at Calcutta. But, in these accounts, it is the fact – it is the reality – it is the history which excites. As inventions, we should regard them with simple abhorrence …’

Ryūnosuke paused, glanced up from the text to the class and froze, petrified: the students in their uniforms were still sat at their desks, but they were not the only ones; behind each of them stood their exact double, like the bleached trunks of winter trees, each double dressed in white hospital robes and a military cap, some wearing dark glasses, some leaning on crutches, with bandaged heads, with bandaged limbs, some without arms, some without legs, some with no faces, no faces at all, row upon row, the sitting and the standing, an army of doubles, a Doppelgänger Korps, the students and their doubles, all staring at Ryūnosuke, Ryūnosuke trembling now, Ryūnosuke shaking now, the students giggling now, giggling at Ryūnosuke, their doubles laughing now, laughing at Ryūnosuke, Ryūnosuke dropping the book, forgetting his briefcase, Ryūnosuke fleeing from the classroom, tearing down the corridor.

*

In his study in the new house in Kamakura, Yasukichi Horikawa threw down his pen, cursed and lit another cigarette. He had hoped to finish the latest instalment of his story, which was being serialised in the Osaka Mainichi; some days he felt it was the best work he had ever written, the story of an artist and his devotion, his obsession to his work; other times, times like tonight, he felt it was as flawed as all his other work, flawed by his own lack of devotion to his craft, his own lack of obsession to his own writing, his mind often distracted, consumed by thoughts of money and of time; never enough money, never enough time. Somehow he had managed to reduce his teaching hours while increasing his salary, much to the annoyance, even contempt, of some of his colleagues at the Academy. Yet still he needed more money, so still he accepted more commissions, so still there was not enough time, so this story for the Mainichi, this story which was so close to being his best work to date, this story was just one of the many he had agreed to write. If only he could give up teaching at the Naval Academy, if only he could find a position at a university, with a better salary, better hours, more hours to write. If only, if only. He cursed again. Then cursed himself; if only he could stop thinking about money and time, if only he could think solely about writing, his writing, not even thinking about writing, just writing, actually writing! He put out his cigarette. He picked up his pen, tried to get it moving again. But it was gone, gone; the moment lost, lost again. He put down his pen again. He got up from the desk, from his work. He went to the bathroom, then to the bedroom.

Yasukichi lay down beside his sleeping wife. He picked up a book from the floor and began to read in bed. The book was The Night-Side of Nature, or, Ghosts and Ghost-Seers by the English novelist Catherine Crowe, first published in 1848. Yasukichi had found the book one afternoon in Jimbōchō; he knew Baudelaire admired the book, but he had also heard