Patient X

by David Peace

  Long, long ago, a man came up from Settsu Province to the capital in order to steal. Since it was still daylight when he arrived, he hid out under the Rashōmon Gate …

  In your mind, you see this gate, this once-great gate, as though you are seeing a painting, a moving, living, breathing painting; the gate abandoned and ruined, beneath a sky thick with crows, cawing and circling, a home for badgers and for foxes, standing in the twilight, the twilight now, the twilight then …

  At this hour it was still bustling with people, and the man waited patiently under the gate for the city to quieten down. Then the man heard a large group approaching the gate …

  ‘Ryūnosuke,’ says your friend. ‘I’m sorry to have kept you waiting. But I have good news: we will have the place to ourselves …’

  Your friend is a student in the Medical School of the University of Tokyo. Now he leads you to the building, he guides you up the stairs, he leads you down a corridor and guides you to the room …

  To avoid being seen, the man stole up to the gate’s top storey, which formed an upstairs room. A dim light was burning in the gloom. Strange! The man peered in through the latticework windows and, stretched before him, he saw the corpse of a young woman …

  Cardboard tags on fine wires dangle from the big toe of each cadaver, each tag inscribed with a name, an age and a date. Your friend bends over one of the corpses and begins to peel back the skin of its face with his scalpel, gradually exposing an expanse of yellow fat, the hair of the corpse dangling over the edge of the table …

  The light by her head, an ancient crone was roughly picking out the corpse’s hair. For all the frightened thief knew, this old crone could be a demon or a ghost …

  You are afraid, afraid again. You do not want to look, but you must look, you must; you are writing a story set in the Heian era, a story of corpses. But you have been unable to finish your work, unable to balance the fantastic and the authentic. And so you have asked to be here; you have asked to see a corpse – ‘Look, Ryūnosuke! Look! You cannot turn your face from horror, you cannot look away from death. You cannot hide, you have to look. So look, Ryūnosuke! Look and see …’ – And now you look, and yes, you see. See the corpse and see the hair. And now you reach out, reach out to touch the hair, but then you stop, you stop. The smell overpowering, a stench of rotting apricots. You steel yourself, and step closer …

  The thief opened the door, drew his dagger and charged in with a shout. The terrified crone wrung her hands in a frantic plea for mercy, mercy …

  ‘You’re lucky,’ laughs your friend, still working away with his scalpel. ‘You know, we’re actually running out of decent cadavers these days.’

  ‘Who are you, what are you doing here,’ snarled the thief …

  You reach out again, and now you touch the hair, the hair of the corpse. The hair slips easily into your hand …

  ‘My mistress died, sir, and there was no one to do the needful for her, so I brought her up here. You see, sir, her hair is longer than she was tall, and I am picking it out to make a wig. Please, sir, don’t kill me!’

  Pen in hand, at your desk, under the gate, you are under the gate, in the upstairs room, you are in that room, in that place and in that time. The stench of death, the sound of rain. A flash of lightning, a peal of thunder. You strip the old woman of her robes, you tear the hair from her hands. She clutches at your legs, she clings to your ankles. You kick her, you kick her, violently, violently, sending her sprawling, sprawling back, back among the corpses, back among the dead, then you turn, you turn, turn and descend, down the steep stairs, stair by stair, into the darkness, and into the night …

  The thief took the corpse’s clothes and the old woman’s, too, picked up the pile of loose hair, dashed back down the stairs and fled …

  The old woman lies among the corpses now, naked as if dead, her tiny face ashen, her tiny body lifeless, as though she is already no longer here, always never really there. Then murmuring and muttering, now sighing and groaning, she crawls, she crawls, over the corpses, to the top of the stairs, her hair hanging down, down over her face, she peers down the stairs, staring under the gate, staring out, out, into the dark and empty night …

  Yes, the upper storey of the Rashōmon Gate used to be filled with human corpses and skeletons. If people couldn’t provide a proper funeral, they would sometimes bring the corpse to the upper storey of the gate and leave it there instead. The thief told people about what had happened to him, and thus this story came to be handed down to us today.

  At your desk, you stop writing, you look up. For a moment, you do not recognise this place, do not recognise this world. You were in the current and the light that flow through nature and through time, through life and through art, a light more powerful than a thousand shattered stars, a current faster than any river, flowing through your blood, sweeping through your mind, taking the faint spark which glimmers within, turning that spark into a flame, kindling that flame until it burns and burns, brighter and brighter, illuminating your way, forcing you on, moving your hand and moving your pen, word after word, for page after page, absorbing you, consuming you, in letters, in writing. But then, the next moment, it is gone again, gone again. And the instant you lose sight of it, the very moment it is gone, you are overcome by the immense and endless darkness that looms around you now, at your desk, in your study, leaving you lost again, alone again, in the dark and empty night, lost and alone, waiting, just waiting.

  *

  Once again upon a time, beneath the branches of the red pine, before the blackened gravestone, the child said to the man, No, no. Those are the stories, the narratives you tell yourself, you write yourself, in the mirror in the bathroom, at your desk in your study, you keep telling yourself, will keep writing yourself, these stories, these narratives that do not hold, which will not hold, that break apart, will break apart, in the mirror in the bathroom, at your desk in your study, breaking you apart, tearing you apart, splintering and splattering you, in remembered scenes, on erected screens, until it’s all too late, all too late, and all that remains, all that remains are those erected screens, your own hell screens.

  Repetition

  Westerners say that not to fear death is characteristic of savages.

  Well, perhaps I am one of those ‘savages’.

  Many times in my childhood, my parents admonished me

  that since I was born in the house of a samurai,

  I had to be able to perform seppuku, to slit my abdomen.

  And I remember thinking that there would be physical agony

  and that it would have to be endured.

  Therefore, perhaps I am one of those so-called savages.

  Yet I cannot accept the Westerners’ view as right.

  Mōsō / Daydreams, Mori Ōgai, 1911

  Ryūnosuke hated the summer. The red sun turned to white iron, pouring its light and heat over the thirsty earth, which stared back up into the enormous, cloudless sky with bloodshot eyes. Factory chimneys, walls, houses, rails and pavements; everything on the ground grinned and groaned in anguish. In his study, sweating and bitten, Ryūnosuke felt like a flying fish, lucklessly fallen onto the dusty deck of a dry-docked ship, to die tormented by the screams of cicadas, tortured by the probosces of mosquitoes.

  Every year, though, Ryūnosuke did look forward to the summer opening of the Sumida River. He would stand pressed in the crowds along the railings of the Ryōgoku Bridge. He would see the barges and the boats, the hundreds of boats – great square-bottomed boats, fine barges, with their canvas awnings and their red and white hangings, all shimmering with bright-coloured lanterns, thousands of lanterns covering the river as far as his eyes could see – the river illuminated, the banks lit up, the hands of the crowds holding their lanterns aloft, their eyes looking heavenward, transfixed by the Roman candles and the myriad other fireworks fired from the boats into the sky, up to the stars, raining back down to earth, showering the world in millions of tiny, fading, dying sparks. But
that year, that day, the kawabiraki festival was called off. The Emperor had fallen into a coma.

  The temperatures continued to rise, but the city fell under a black blanket of dread silence. Daily notices on police boxes and reports in the newspapers informed the public in explicit detail of the Emperor’s suffering, yet ‘his godly countenance remained in every aspect unchanged’. Still, day and night, temples lit sacred fires to exorcize malign spirits, to change the air, to clean the air, while rags muffled the wheels of the trolley buses around the palace moat, where hushed crowds came in their thousands from near and far to kneel in prayer by the Nijūbashi bridge, prostrating themselves in the direction of the Imperial Palace.

  Ryūnosuke listened to his sister’s tearful account of three young schoolgirls bowing for half an hour before the palace, praying for the recovery of the Emperor, to arrest the twilight, to halt the night. Ryūnosuke now wondered if he himself should go down to the palace gate. But then, after midnight, early on July 30, 1912, as a soft rain began to fall, Ryūnosuke heard the sharp cries of the newspaper boys. Ryūnosuke and his family bought and read the black-boarded extras, all of the black-boarded extras:

  THE LAST SCENES AT THE PALACE

  PEOPLE LIE PROSTRATE IN PRAYER

  AS EMPEROR SLOWLY PASSES

  REVELATION OF PEOPLE’S LOVE

  PRAYERS GIVE WAY TO SOBS AND LAMENTATION

  WHEN THE END IS KNOWN

  If an artist had been before the Imperial Palace Monday night with a masterful brush, he could have painted an immortal picture of one of the most impressive and wonderful scenes in Japanese history. That scene, of a divine revelation of the national virtue and supreme sorrow of hearts broken by the lost love, is one that can never be forgotten. The history that will record the numerous and gigantic achievements and works of the late Emperor will not be complete without a series of pictures presenting the scene before the palace, with thousands of people praying for the recovery of their beloved Emperor, and at the end, lamenting over his death.

  Midnight had tolled an hour before, but murmuring prayers still floated in the air in an unbroken chorus and with a regular cadence. The multitude that thronged before the palace before dusk remained as if riveted to the ground, while only a few withdrew. With the advance of night, breezes added a chill and seemed to fill the hearts of the ever-increasing mass of humanity with grief and fear.

  In front of the iron railing, facing the room in which the Emperor lay dying, hundreds of men, women and children squatted or lay prostrate on the ground in profound prayer. The discomfort of their position was not thought of. Still hoping against hope, they prayed and prayed. In prayers of Buddhist and Shintō words, and in prayers according to the Christian faith, the old could recite all with flawless memory; the young and uneducated followed the words and lines of prayer with difficulty and uncertainty. All united in one great appeal to the mercy of Him who reigns over man and earth. ‘Oh, canst thou not hear the words of our bleeding hearts? Grant us our prayer!’

  Behind those praying on the ground there stood crowds of more excited and less patient persons. They had read in the last official bulletin that the pulse was too weak to be felt, and that the Emperor was rapidly approaching his last moment. They were too agitated and too troubled to be quiet, even in prayer. They restlessly wandered about awaiting the next tidings. The multitude was hushed to silence in a momentary lull of a long-endured suffering. The nerves of the people were strung almost to the snapping point, and the ominous suspense appeared to forbode dreadful news.

  And then came the report that His Majesty was dead.

  Three minutes later, newspaper reporters were speeding away in kuruma; and soon the heart-breaking news was being spread through Tokyo, as fast as the presses could work; and was being flashed under seas to every part of the world. But no pen would be equal to expressing the grief of the sixty million subjects of Japan, in cottages and palaces alike.

  The prayers of the throng ceased at once. The people’s overexcited nerves gave way, and deep groans and lamentations arose in their despair.

  After half an hour of mourning, many went back to their homes to pass the remaining hours of the night in prayer now for the departed soul of the all-beloved ruler of the nation, loved as a Father, revered as a Teacher, relied upon as our Strength, and the greatest of our Emperors.

  The pale arc lights in the palace compound shone upon those who remained with a ghastly effect. The city seemed to have collapsed into a trance of sorrow under the heavy pall of black death, as the bell of Ueno Temple tolled in the far distance the knell for the passing of a great soul.

  Early the next morning, Ryūnosuke and his family bought black crepe. Ryūnosuke wrapped it around the golden ball at the end of the flag pole by the gate of their house in Shinjuku.

  Across the city, across the country, on every building, on every staff, from every lamp post and from every telegraph pole, national flags flew at half mast. Families did not play music, nor even speak aloud. Music halls and theatres called off performances, shops and department stores remained closed. Sales would slump and the stock markets fall. A crowd stoned the house of the Royal Physician.

  It was the beginning of Taishō, it was the end of Meiji. One god dies, another is born: Meiji 45, Taishō 1, 1912; cremation time, coronation time, continual time, contradictory times; between the twilight and the dawn.

  *

  General Maresuke Nogi, the officially acclaimed and popular national folk hero of the Sino- and Russo-Japanese Wars, the internationally lauded military genius who had twice captured Port Arthur, had appeared at the palace to pay his respects one hundred and thirty times in the fifty-six days between the announcement of the Emperor’s illness and today, September 13, 1912. General Nogi had waited thirty-five years and forty-five days for this day, the day of the funeral of the Emperor Meiji.

  The funeral cortège was to depart from the Imperial Palace at Nijūbashi at 8 p.m., to the sound of cannon fire, temple bells and then the plaintive drone of the processional dirge. General Nogi was expected to take his place as one of the most esteemed of the mourners in a mammoth funeral train of over twenty thousand persons; the imperial hearse, drawn by five oxen in single file, would be followed by attendants in court dress with bows and halberds, with their fans and staffs, by imperial princes and palace officials, by the genrō and government ministers, by high-ranking civil servants and the nobility, many in glittering full dress uniform, followed by members of the Diet in their black tailcoats, by members of the Tokyo city government, by its chamber of commerce, by prefectural officials and mayors, and by school principals and religious leaders, along with court musicians, military bands and an honour guard of one thousand. Twenty-four thousand more soldiers would be stationed along a route freshly strewn with gravel. Three hundred thousand citizens would line the hushed and silent streets. Across the nation, sixty million people would be bowed in distant worship as the flickering torch-lit procession followed the imperial hearse on its two-hour journey to the specially constructed hall on the parade grounds at Aoyama. Here, seated in the stands, would be foreign diplomats and special envoys from the courts and governments of the world: the princes of England and Germany, the Secretary of State of the United States, representatives of the Japanese Empire of Korea, Taiwan and Sakhalin; ten thousand people gathered to pay their respects as the trumpet sounded at midnight, when the new Emperor, the son of Meiji, dressed in the uniform of a generalissimo, would deliver a brief eulogy, followed then by Prime Minister Saionji. But General Maresuke Nogi, popular national folk hero and military genius, would not take his place in the procession, General Nogi would not stand on the parade ground, Maresuke would not hear the voice of the new Emperor.

  Early that morning, General Nogi dressed in the modern Western-style military uniform of an officer in the Imperial Japanese army. His wife Shizuko was dressed in a many-layered jūnihitoe kimono of sombre colours.

  At eight o’clock, the General and his wife p
osed separately for formal photographs outside their residence. The photographer, Akio Shinroku, persuaded the General and his wife to have one more photograph taken, inside the house, in the upstairs living room, the General seated at the table, reading the morning newspaper, Shizuko standing to his left by the fireplace, staring into the camera. The couple then left for the Imperial Palace.

  On each of the past one hundred and thirty occasions he had visited the palace, the General had usually made the journey on horseback. However, the General had already dismissed the stable boy and the only other male servant for the day. And so that morning, and only that morning, an official car had been sent from the palace for the General and his wife.

  After worshipping at the palace, the General and his wife returned to their house on Yūrei Zaka, the Hill of Ghosts, which bordered the Aoyama cemetery in Akasaka-chō, and there ate lunch with Shizuko’s elderly sister.

  Over lunch, the General and his wife told the sister that they were both feeling unwell. The General telephoned the authorities to say that he was too ill to attend the funeral ceremony for the Emperor Meiji, and so he would be unable to take his place in the procession. His wife informed their staff and servants that the couple would retire to their private quarters, where they were not to be disturbed. The General and his wife then shuttered themselves in their rooms on the second floor for the rest of the day.

  A little before eight o’clock that evening, Shizuko came down to the ground floor. She asked for some wine, wine not sake, and then returned with the bottle to their upstairs rooms.