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Out of the Abyss: The “Sick Wife Stories” Absolute death (non-being) is the state of being unheard, unrecognized, unremembered. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics The Byōinki Stories (1955–1957) In the spring of 1954 Shimao’s wife Miho went mad. As she recalls in a later essay, on the day of her husband’s birthday, April 18, Miho took her two small children to greet him at the Koiwa Station in eastern Tokyo, hoping that Toshio, who often spent daysawayfromhome,wouldreturnforthecelebrationshehadplanned.1 She waited in vain: I had prepared a nice birthday dinner of whole bream for the four of us, and the sight of it lying cold on the table under the white cloth I had covered it with pierced me to the quick. I was so lonely I went into my husband’s room. My husband’s room was a sacred spot I felt guilty about invading even when I cleaned it. I didn’t touch any of the things on his table, but my eyes were drawn to a few lines dashed off in the diary which lay open on the kotatsu. I casually read these, and in that instant I felt a powerful force shoot through my body. A surge of scorching heat. But soon after, my body shivered and a wave of chills assaulted me, making me unable to stand. I was suddenly down on all fours, roaring in a terrible voice like a lion—Uoo! Uoo!—then running around the room. Put in such extremities a person becomes more like an animal, it would seem. I lost all intelligence and consciousness of being a human and became deranged.2 99 The diary entry revealed her husband’s love for another woman involved in the Tokyo literary circles in which Shimao was a participant. The mental condition sparked by the above incident soon became a chronic jealous rage, which continued throughout 1954 and into 1955, when Shimao had Miho hospitalized. Miho’s condition, defined at first as schizophrenia and later as a more treatable “psychogenic reaction,” did not improve, and some time in the summer of 1955 she was admitted to the locked and barred mental ward of Kōnodai Hospital, just east of Tokyo. Her husband joined her to care for her day-to-day needs. Finally, in October 1955 Miho was discharged from the hospital, and she and her husband immediately set off to make a new home in far off Amami Ōshima, near her home island of Kakeromajima. In one of the more poignant vignettes in postwar Japanese literary history, the Shimaos were seen off at the dock by a group of writers and critics including Yoshiyuki Junnosuke, Shōnō Junzō, and Yoshimoto Takaaki. Some, like Shimao himself, wondered whether his self-imposed exile marked the end of his writing career. Although he was soon busy with a second career as head librarian of the Amami Library, Shimao’s career as writer was not, as he feared, over; arguably, it was just beginning. And the experience of his wife’s madness , which at one point threatened to put an end to his writing, formed the basis for his best-known work. Beginning with the series of nine loosely linked stories collectively called the byōinki (literally, record of a hospital stay; 1955–1957) and culminating in the twelve stories published from 1960–1976 eventually collected in the award-winning 1977 novel Shi no toge (covering the ten months from the outbreak of Miho’s madness to their admission into the mental hospital), much of Shimao’s best-known fiction during his twenty years on Amami took as its starting point the decisive period of his wife’s madness, from 1954–1955.3 The moment of Miho’s descent into madness became the black hole of Shimao’s fiction toward which all is else is pulled. The two earlier strands of Shimao’s fiction, his surrealistic dream-based stories and depictions of his wartime tokkōtai experience, became secondary to Shimao ’s new literary preoccupation: Miho’s madness and its aftermath. But these two strands are hardly forgotten. Through these “sick wife stories” (byōsaimono) Shimao was, arguably, able to confront more directly the traumas of war and was able to bring the unconscious world in contact with the conscious world.4 Readers faithful enough to have followed all of Shimao’s literary pro100 Chapter 3 [3.136.26.20] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 12:00...

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