Mad Wives and Island Dreams: Shimao Toshio and the Margins of Japanese Literature

Afterword

Afterword Asked in 1981 whether he ever planned a sequel to Shi no toge, Shimao remarked, “I feel that I wrote about what happened afterward in Hi no utsuroi.” Shi no toge is indeed continued in the 1976 Hi no utsuroi, translatable as “The changing [or passing] of the days.”1 The same cast of characters appears—the tokkōtai survivor husband /narrator, the wife, who is a former mental patient, the son, and daughter, Maya—now some years after the crisis of the wife’s madness, living in Naze City on the island of Amami, the husband the head librarian depicted in “Keiji no tsutome.”2 Hi no utsuroi in a sense is also a continuation and extension of the story “Sōsaiki,” because as its title suggests, time is a key element here, with the narrator, in his contacts with the island, recovering a sense of “ordinary” time—of connectedness and continuity. Hi no utsuroi follows a diary format that, from internal evidence, covers the period of April 1, 1972–March 31, 1973.3 Based closely on events in Shimao’s life, the book fits at best uneasily into existing genres, prompting critics to see it as everything from a nikkitai shōsetsu (a novel in diary form) to an avant-garde “anti-novel.”4 Shimao identifies in Hi no utsuroi—and even more so in its sequel—his “tendency towards an anti-structure” stance.5 The problem remains as to how to define “structure” or the lack thereof (Shimao’s comments can be taken to mean the intricacies of a connected plot, a “plot for plot’s sake” attitude toward fiction), but it is important to note how this diary-cum-novel approach to writing, with its series of often marginally related vignettes held together largely through the framing device of a diary, came to dominate his writing at this time. As Shimao’s only other literary production of note during the period consists of two diaries of dreams, it 215 is fair to say that his literature of this entire period 1968–1976 (and considering Hi no utsuroi’s sequel, published serially from 1976–1985, even further) can be characterized as diary-like.6 Conceived as a sequel to Shi no toge, Hi no utsuroi is its mirror image.7 Where Shi no toge depicts the struggle of the protagonist to come to terms with his wife’s mental breakdown, Hi no utsuroi portrays the same cast of characters now dealing with the husband’s illness—chronic depression . The husband’s and wife’s roles have been reversed, with the wife, the recovered madwoman, now taking the lead in attempting to relieve her husband’s mental distress. If Shi no toge is primarily (although not exclusively) a byōsaimono—the story of a sick wife—Hi no utsuroi is very much a byōfumono—a story of a sick husband. What has been only hinted at in Shi no toge—the wife’s yuta-like restorative powers—come to the fore as the setting shifts to the island. Read together, the two works, while telling stories of terrible suffering, combine to form a wonderful kind of symmetry: in the earlier book the wife is sick on the mainland and her husband attempts to aid her recovery, while in Hi no utsuroi he is the one who is ill on her island home.8 This situation is only to be expected, because just as the wife is “out of place” on the mainland, so too is the husband on the islands. Yet, as one must also expect, for the husband the islands hold out the promise of something more. In several powerful scenes, culminating in the wife’s attempt to drag her husband off to a slaughterhouse to witness the slaughter of pigs, she attempts to bring him face-to-face with the realities of death, and the narrative reaches a climax of sorts after which is depicted his partial physical and mental recovery. That this recovery comes as the family begins to prepare for Easter allows a simple reading of the plot as a religious narrative of resurrection from death, or more accurately, the fear of death. In the text, however, the husband’s recovery is linked less with religion than with his growing awareness of, and contact with, the island. As in Shi no toge, dreams play a crucial role in Hi no utsuroi. A telegram arrives announcing the death of the husband...