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257 The Carefree Patient 1 Yoshida’s lungs were bad. As soon as the winter season came along and it turned cold, he developed a high fever the very next day and he began to cough badly. It was the sort of cough where you come close to spewing up all your guts from your chest. After four or five days, he was desperately thin. And there wasn’t much of a cough left. But this wasn’t because he’d recovered. It was just that the stomach muscles that did the coughing were so utterly exhausted, they seemed unwilling to cough anymore . On top of that, his heart had become really weak. Once the coughing upset it, there was a lot of pain involved before it settled down again. In other words, he’d stopped coughing because his body was so frail that all the energy he possessed at the beginning was lost. You could tell this because it was becoming gradually more difficult to breathe, and he had to take lots of shallow breaths. Before he got to this state, Yoshida thought he might be suffering from a regular bout of influenza. By instinct, he was always defensive. Maybe it’ll get a bit better tomorrow morning, he’d think, but his hopes were betrayed. PerhapsIshouldcallthedoctortoday?Buthe’dstickitouttonoavail,braving his terrible shortness of breath to the end and constantly on the run to the toilet. And when he finally got the doctor in, he’d become so weak 258 Kajii Motojirō that his cheeks were already scrawny and sunken, he was no longer able to move his body, and he’d even begun to develop bedsores during the previous two or three days. Sometimes he spent almost the whole day mumbling endlessly to himself. Next moment, he was complaining in a weak voice about how anxious he felt. It was always at nighttime that this anxiety emerged out of nowhere, and it pushed his enfeebled nerves to the edge. Yoshida had never experienced anything like this before, so the first thing he did was to fret over where the anxiety came from. Maybe it was because his heart was now so weak? Or perhaps it wasn’t quite as serious as anxiety but something that people tended to get with an illness like this? Could it be that his overexcited nerves were subjecting him to a pain that felt just like anxiety? Yoshida’s body remained rigid, barely able to move, as he struggled to breathe through his chest. He was aware that if something unexpectedly turned up now to destroy this equilibrium, he’d have no idea how to handle it. That’s why even thoughts of earthquakes and fires seriously flashed through his mind, the sort of things you encounter only once or twice in a lifetime. To maintain his present state required Yoshida to stay constantly tensed and to put every ounce of effort into it. He was walking a tightrope, and if his efforts were struck by a shadow of anxiety, he’d be unable to stop himself plunging immediately into deep pain. But Yoshida never got a clear sense of things no matter how much he thought them over, so there was no way he could come to a conclusion. If his speculations about the reason why he was in this state and his weighing up of the arguments and counterarguments relied on nothing more than his own feelings of anxiety, it stood to reason that he’d never be able to get to the bottom of it. But for Yoshida in his present condition this was hardly a comfort, and it even made things more painful. The second thing that made Yoshida suffer from anxiety was his conviction that there was a way out. He could have someone go to the doctor, or stay up with him. But Yoshida was loath to make any such request: to get someone to travel half a mile along a country road to the doctor when they’d just finished a long day’s work and were just about to go to sleep, or to ask his mother, who was past sixty, to keep awake at his bedside. And if he ever got to the point of summoning the courage to speak up, how would he make his mother, who was a bit slow on the uptake, understand what he was going through? Worse still, even if he managed to get his point over, his mother...

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