Translated by Philip Boehm. New York, NY: New Directions, 2019. 160 pages. $15.95.
Christine Wunnicke’s The Fox and Dr. Shimamura, translated from the German by Philip Boehm, is a cornucopia of strange pathologies and historical oddities, spanning multiple continents and languages, that breaks down the polarities between religion and science, supernatural hauntings and neurotic hauntings, and Eastern and Western cultural ideologies. Dr. Shimamura, a Japanese neurologist who travels to the hotspots of psychiatry in early twentieth-century Europe, thinks in both Japanese and German, and harbors a slight disdain for the backwardness of Japanese science; yet while he prides himself on being a supremely rational, modern man, he can’t shake the conviction that he is possessed by a fox that slithers under his skin. Wunnicke deploys elements of magical realism to critique the mythmaking pretensions of the nascent fields of neurology and psychology in the age of Freud.
Toggling back and forth between Shimamura’s old age and youthful exploits, between Europe and Japan, we come to know with wonderful intimacy the doctor and the four eccentric women who orbit around him: his wife Sachiko, his mother Hanako, his mother-in-law Yukiko, and the mysterious housemaid Anna-Luise (is she a nurse or a patient?). The most interesting of the four are Sachiko and Hanako. Sachiko reinforces her dying husband’s will to live by lying to him about how many letters of admiration he receives (and never reads), and keeping him on edge by rearranging his toys, the precious mementos he took from his most challenging patient and that he believes to be hidden from prying eyes. Hanako is writing a biography of her son called Genius and Insanity, which she burns every time she makes progress. All the while, as Shimamura reflects on his past life, on his many failures and few successes, he endlessly procrastinates on writing his own magnum opus, dubbed his Either/Or project. The fox, of course, is partly to blame for his botched career and inability to satisfactorily braid the distinct strands of his life. Because of it, he suffers from amnesia, nocturnal manias, and an incessant fever.
Vague memories from his past haunt him: especially a trip he took with a precocious student to Shimane Prefecture to study “the annual epidemic of kitsune-tsuki,” a phenomenon in which hundreds of women become hosts for fox demons. The student defies his sensei by performing exorcisms in secret, rather than following proper scientific protocol. Everything comes to a head when the two encounter a young girl named Kiyo, a fishmonger’s daughter, whose case of fox possession goes beyond anything they’ve ever seen. Kiyo, at the height of her fit of fox mania, exposes her crotch, and there we glimpse the most visceral symptoms of the demon:
It was a small fox, two or three hand lengths, depending on whether he was stretched out or balled up, and in his cramped quarters just under Kiyo’s tender white skin he moved a bit like a caterpillar. . . . Shun’ichi Shimamura kept one eye on himself as he witnessed the outline of a perfectly formed small fox appear, slanted, just below Kiyo’s collarbone. After a short rest the fox dodged to the side, then climbed into her neck and tried to force his way into her mouth. Kiyo pressed her lips together, then pressed her hands to her mouth to contain the fox. Her cheeks swelled up, and a few tiny bubbles of pink foam oozed out between her fingers. Was it the fox’s muzzle knocking against her teeth?
Shimamura somehow imbibes Kiyo’s fox (along with her “hysteria”) and the student inexplicably vanishes. Afterwards, the doctor becomes irresistible to both women and animals. Yet his fox-illness itself is sly, slippery. The most aggressive symptoms take place out of scene, through summary and allusion; moments of fantasy or extreme grotesquerie involving the doctor are presented obliquely—suggesting that his illness, unlike Kiyo’s, is psychological or psychosomatic rather than a genuine case of possession or a malady of the body. Wunnicke’s emphasis tends to fall on the quotidian, but when fabulist elements do occur, they sparkle by contrast.
Dr. Shimamura must carry his disbelief and credulity, his disgust and fascination with a distinctly Japanese illness and mythology that he resists but can’t escape, to the universities of France and Germany. There Shinto and Yokai, Japanese etiquette and indirection, collide with the brash pretension of western learning, and the cretinism and prejudices of Europeans, when faced with the riddles of “the orient.” Shimamura, so naive and passionate about attaining the keys to neurological innovation and arcana, is paraded around, made a prop of, admired, and despised.
With razor-sharp irony Wunnicke asks (or implies) a number of questions: are our hypochondria, monomanias, and minor lunacies a product of our particular cultural and intellectual matrix, or do they correspond to some innate quality of personality and psychology? Was the diagnostic fervor surrounding female hysteria, driven by the work of Jean-Martin Charcot, Josef Breuer, and his protege Sigmund Freud, among others, a projection of these male scientists’ own desires to dissect, tame, to order the (especially female) mind and body into a rational system? And how do Ausländern, non-Germans and non-Europeans, fit into this system? Dr. Shimamura is treated as a colleague and patient, as an exotic object of narrow-minded fascination by Charcot, Breuer, and their circles; he provides them with the first “documented” case of male hysteria—their interpretation of his fox possession. They can only see Shimamura at a distance, as a projection of their own misconceptions about Eastern effeminacy.
Like the Coen Brothers’ film Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), we circle around the most famous and groundbreaking figure of the age (Bob Dylan in their case, Sigmund Freud in ours), immersed in a context of minor advancements and missteps, on the fringes of major innovation. The Fox and Dr. Shimamura celebrates and parodies the peripheral characters and subplots of an intellectual movement. It is fantastic in the technical sense laid out by Tzvetan Todorov, since Wunnicke never entirely resolves the tension between rational and irrational, natural and supernatural explanations of seemingly magical events (though the dial tilts towards the rational and natural).
In the end, Wunnicke’s exploration of eastern and western cultural drives and mythologies is penetrating but never scathing; play is at the heart of her project. The butts of her jokes, whether intellectual icons or behind-the-scenes homemakers, are never treated with derision. While her greatest sympathies lie with the minor characters in these histories, and supposedly great men are exposed as slightly ridiculous and delusional creatures, they nevertheless retain a compelling multidimensionality and never flatten into mere grotesques. Shimamura is a wry love letter to Japan and Germany and hybrid identity. Christine Wunnicke takes her place alongside the Japanese-German writer Yoko Tawada as an adept celebrator of cosmopolitan intermixture and the magic of subverting monocultural systems. The novel manages to illustrate the quirky and complex entanglements of lives and cultures that might go unobserved to those without a sharp eye for historical detail.