Dogra Magra (18/47)

by Hisashi Yumeno

...How happy I am. I'm so grateful... As I was running around, looking this way and that, suddenly, a massive earthquake, a huge volcanic eruption, and a giant tsunami, as if the world itself was disappearing, surged in from all directions. The sea boiled like hot water, leaving no place to escape. The agony of gasping for breath and thrashing on the burnt sand. The sorrow... Just when I thought I had finally overcome that suffering, I found myself under the foot of a giant creature as big as a mountain. I was almost blown away by the wings of a flying dragon. I was almost caught in the beak of a monster like an archaeopteryx. ...Ah, it's unbearable. I can't take it anymore. My companions, who have evolved alongside me, are growing thorns all over their bodies, mimicking the colors and shapes of those around them, wearing shells, or spitting poison, but isn't there a way to remain calm in this hell, in a more righteous, free, and gentle form, without resorting to such cowardly tricks? ...As I hid in a crevice in the rocks, holding my breath, one eye above my head disappeared, and I evolved into the form of a second ape, able to swing from tree to tree.

...Now, this is it. I'll be fine now. There's no creature as free and advanced as I am, I thought, waving my hand from the top of a tree, when a giant snake suddenly attacked me from an unexpected direction behind me. Startled, I fled, only to be attacked by a large eagle from above. Just when I thought I had escaped by swinging through the branches, parasites began to cling to my body. Mountain leeches sucked at me. Unable to let my guard down whether I was awake or asleep, eventually, a great thunderstorm, strong winds, and heavy snow, covering heaven and earth, struck, tearing trees and grass to shreds, and driving me mad to the point of death. ...Ah... It's so sad. It's unbearable. I haven't done anything wrong, so why am I suffering such terrible things? I wish I could somehow become stronger, and have a body that could calmly witness such disasters... As I thrust my head into a hollow in a tree, my heart pounding, and prayed, finally, my tail fell off, and I was able to take on a human form.

...How happy I am. I am grateful. Just when I thought I could finally live a life of paradise, no, no, the dream was not over yet. As soon as I took human form, the human nightmare began again.

The humans who were the ancestors of the fetus had accumulated an infinite number of various sins, both large and small, that directly or indirectly tormented others, in order to satisfy their mutual struggle for survival, the cruel and cowardly beastly psychology inherited since primitive man, and various other selfish desires. Each of these bloody, suffocating memories is reproduced before the fetus as its current subjective experience. ...The scene where a lord is assassinated and a castle is taken over...The scene where a loyal retainer is forced to commit seppuku and watched as a drinking snack...The scene where a wife and young lord are poisoned and one's own grandson is made to succeed...The scene where a sick husband is left to die of thirst and one toys with an enemy man...The unbearable feeling of suffocating a newborn illegitimate child...The pleasure of falsely accusing a daughter-in-law and strangling her...The exhilaration of pushing a hated stepchild into a well...The joy of many people bullying a virgin...The pride of driving a married man to suicide by unrequited love...The creepiness of gathering and abusing beautiful boys and girls...The delight of spending all one's precious money...The seriousness of homosexuality...The deliciousness of human flesh...Poison experiments...Acts of betrayal...Test cutting...Bullying the weak...And various other unbearable scenes change one after another as dreams before one's eyes. Or one's own ancestors...The past fetus itself, hidden crimes, and secrets that died untold, appear one after another in dreams in the form of bloody faces, headless torsos, hair in a well, a dagger in the attic, white bones at the bottom of a swamp, and each time the fetus is surprised, has nightmares, and suffers, moving its limbs with a start inside its mother's womb.

Thus, the fetus dreams of its parents' generation, and when there are no more dreams to be seen, it eventually falls into a quiet sleep. Soon, labor pains begin in the mother's body, and the fetus is pushed out of the uterus. Air rushes into the fetus's lungs. At that moment, all the previous dreams escape to the depths of the fetus's subconscious, and a completely different, superficial, intense, and poignant awareness of reality spreads throughout its body. Startled, it thrashes and cries uncontrollably. In this way, the fetus—the baby—finally experiences the boundless love of its parents and begins to form peaceful, human-like dreams. And eventually, it begins to awaken to reality, to create its own continuation of the "fetus's dream."

When a baby, who should have no memories, suddenly thrashes and cries in its sleep, or smiles as if remembering something, it is because it is seeing remnants of the "fetus's dream" left unfinished in the womb. For those born with physical disabilities or mental defects, there must have been dreams in that fetal period that explained their respective causes. Furthermore, the occasional discovery of so-called "oni-tai" (demon fetuses), where only the fetal bones remain in the womb, or only a mass of hair and teeth, must be the remnants of a fetal dream that stagnated for some reason or developed too rapidly, becoming unbearable and consequently severed.

--End--

An Unprecedented Last Will and Testament

--The night of October 19, Taisho 15

--Notes of Dr. Madman

Hark, hark! Those far away, take aim with a telescope. Those nearby, come closer and peer through a microscope. I am Masagi Keishi, who earned the name Dr. Madman in the Department of Psychiatry at Kyushu Imperial University. Today, to overturn the common sense of all the conventionalists in the world, on the occasion of my sudden decision to commit suicide, I shall present an unparalleled last will and testament. To determine who is the fool, who is the madman, between the one who reads this and the one who wrote it, I shall put pen to paper for a serious showdown... Those who consider themselves conventionalists, come forth with spit on your eyebrows...

...I started writing, but now, I have no motivation at all.

...That can't be right. I am currently sitting at my desk in the professor's office on the second floor of the main building of the Kyushu University Department of Psychiatry. There is a bottle of whiskey at hand, and I am glaring at a large Western-style ruled paper, holding a fountain pen at an angle. The electric clock above my head has just passed ten o'clock in the evening. Purple smoke is gently rising from my cigar... It's nothing, just a clumsy professor diligently studying, staying late to do research. One wouldn't think that by this time tomorrow, I would no longer be in this world... Hahahaha.

I'm always like this; I can't stand it unless I go beyond common sense. In any case, I feel sorry for the conventional people who consider me a kind of madman.

Well... I have no idea where to begin writing... After all, this is the first time I've ever written a will.

However, if I were to imitate a normal person for a moment and write in a conventional order... the first thing I would have to reveal is probably the motive for my suicide.

To begin with, I can assert that the motive for my suicide is related to a single, lovely girl... Ahem. You mustn't laugh.

The beauty of that girl is such that twenty or thirty lines wouldn't be enough to describe it. Even if you pulled out all the handkerchief boxes, cosmetic labels, covers of women's magazines, advertising dolls from clothing stores, beer shops, and department store posters from around the world... even if you turned all the film studios in Europe and America upside down, there would be no existence so pure, so painfully fragrant, so eerily youthful... Hahahahahaha. I'll stop there. I wouldn't want to be misunderstood as having been captivated by such a beautiful girl despite my age, and feeling that this world was no good... I'd rather not have such worries. In fact, that girl was removed from the family register about half a year ago...

Then, some conventional thinker might jump to the conclusion that I'm leaving this world because that girl died, but please wait a moment... don't rush. The girl who is currently registered in the deceased's family register is soon to enter into a pact to grow old together with a splendidly handsome boy, whose beauty is no less than her own. So, if I were to say that my role in this world is also coming to an end... then another clever person might emerge and think... "Well, then it's finally a mad suicide. Perhaps he went insane dreaming of love scenes between the deceased beautiful girl and the living beautiful boy..."

...I'm surprised. I didn't know writing a will was so difficult. However, since I'm going to commit suicide anyway, I thought I should somehow write it down, otherwise there would be no point later, so I write it with great effort. But actually, the beautiful girl who has passed away and the beautiful boy who is alive and well are scheduled to successfully complete an experiment that will be the conclusion of my lifelong research in mental science—that is, my research presentation on what I call psychological heredity—by actually kissing and embracing.

What do you think? Is there any other academic experiment as interesting and exhilarating as this? Ahahaha...

No, probably not. Firstly, because the field of mental science, which forms the basis of this experiment, belongs to my own new invention... and even within that, my exclusive experiments in psychopathology, unlike ordinary medicine or anything else, cannot be conducted on the corpses of birds, beasts, or humans. This is because birds and beasts, like certain mental patients, are animalistic from the start and unsuitable as research material, and dead humans lack the crucial soul that would serve as experimental material. It is absolutely necessary to use the minds of vigorous and healthy humans as material. It is a great challenge because such splendid minds must suddenly go insane and then gradually recover... and the transitions before and after must be meticulously studied and recorded. In particular, the material I chose as the subject of my research, which would be named by current scholars as hereditary, homicidal paranoia, precocious dementia, and perverted sexuality, is an extremely complicated and troublesome subject.

The person chosen as the material for such an experiment is by no means an easy one. If I were careless, I might be the one who gets hurt, so I approached this experiment with my life on the line from the beginning, but in the end, I was driven to suicide by the repercussions of that experiment... No, there's still a lot of time until suicide, so I'll calmly and leisurely wield my fountain pen, dealing with purple smoke and amber liquid.

I hope you all take your time reading this. Even if it's a will or something, it's a lighthearted one. The content is different from the Namanda style, the Amen style, or the regretful style. It's like an extra act from the Mad Doctor's mad experiments. The lingering smoke is the punchline... You'll gradually understand the hidden mechanism behind the spontaneous combustion: how the unprecedented, bizarre experiments on the perverted sexuality of the rare beautiful boy and the peerless beautiful girl, which are at the core of my research, are governed by what academic principles, how they intensify and heat up, and how they are on the verge of exploding to shatter my entire life as the experimenter...

The story goes back a little further in time.

One day in October of this year, an interview I gave, titled "The Brain Is Not Where We Think," was serialized in the academic section of a Fukuoka newspaper. To be honest, I was surprised by the magnitude of the reaction. I had vaguely felt that "humans are animals trapped by vanity and superstition," but I never imagined such a strong response. They, that is, people who value common sense, tried to crush my statements using every means possible, including newspapers, magazines, letters, and even direct meetings. What particularly surprised me was that even the professors of this university, which champions academic freedom, rose up in unison, pounded their desks, and pressed the president, saying, "Expel that irrational and arrogant mad scholar. Otherwise, throw him into the red brick building."

When I heard this story, even I felt a little anxious. I had thought that the university was a safe haven for academic research, so I never imagined such a surprising situation would occur. Fortunately, the president was a man who avoided trouble and managed to navigate the situation well, which is why I've been able to get by until today. However, when I think about it, isn't it utterly ridiculous? It's clear that people who become doctors or university professors are, at best, obsessed with honor or research. And for them to call me crazy without any shame, there's no way I wouldn't be angry. My close friend, Dean Wakabayashi, knows very well how furious I was at that time.

"In this situation, I can't possibly publish my theories on mental anatomy, psychophysiology, psychopathology, or psychological genetics. After all, my theory suggests that mentally ill people are more reliable than ordinary humans. Hahahaha..."

"That's true. Most people don't realize that nothing insults humanity more than science."

"Exactly. However, it's strange that those who are proud to be told 'humans are descendants of apes' panic and get angry when we call them crazy. They don't know the fact that apes evolved into humans, and humans evolve into crazy people, so they seem to be thinking in the exact opposite order. Wahahahahaha..."

Laughing like that, I refrained from publishing "On the Brain," which I had on hand for corrections and additions. And today, about half a year later, I burned all the manuscripts of such writings.

There's no particular reason. It was just boring.

Human culture is too childish and foolish to accept my research. Moreover, I've only now deeply realized my own foolishness for not noticing such a significant fact for twenty years and continuing such extensive research. Or perhaps my mental state is calming down like this... Hahaha...

However, I have decided to leave only the most important parts of those writings in this will, to serve as reference for any mad scholars who might conceive of such research in an appropriate era. Among them, the content of my "Theory of the Brain" has already been published in the newspaper, as shown in the clipping enclosed here, so there is no further content, and nothing to regret. Furthermore, the core of my research, from psycho-anatomy to psychopathology, is already contained in "The Fetus's Dream," which I submitted as my graduation thesis to Kyushu University twenty years ago, so the general outline is complete. Here, I merely wish to briefly record the relationship between "Liberation Therapy for the Insane," which is my specialty, and "Psychological Heredity."

If this is read together with the previous newspaper article and the thesis "The Fetus's Dream," the activity of the bizarre principles of mental science will become clear: how the aforementioned strange experiment, using the beautiful boy and beautiful girl as subjects, announced an unprecedented success and simultaneously ended in an unparalleled failure at noon on October 19, Taisho 15, which is today. At the same time, common sense and scholarship, which represent the pinnacle of modern culture, will be shattered into a thousand pieces, leaving only empty skulls... or so it goes...

Now, if you'll excuse me for a moment, I'll light my extinguished cigar. In truth, this is my favorite, and no matter how poor my life was, I never went without this and alcohol... I've reached the point where I don't know how many I've smoked in my lifetime, so please forgive me. Hahahahaha...

Thank you for waiting... Now, it seems that everyone who has seen the "Madman Liberation Therapy Ward," which was the direct cause of my journey to paradise, thinks of it as nothing more than a madman's strolling ground. Some read newspaper articles and nod, saying, "I see," but they quickly pretend to know by saying things like, "Indeed, this way the madmen won't get excited," or "It's a kind of light therapy." It's interesting that no one has ever seen through the true nature of this experiment. No, I haven't even revealed the secret of this experiment to the assistants and associates working in this classroom, so they just think it's some very sophisticated experiment... but in reality, it's a trivial, yet wonderfully interesting experiment. The pompous name "liberation therapy" is merely a temporary name to hide its true nature from the world.

To tell you the truth, this "liberation therapy" experiment is none other than the practical test of my thesis titled "The Dream of the Fetus," which I wrote when I graduated from Fukuoka Medical University.

All the examples I cited in "The Dream of the Fetus" are merely the inheritance of basic human psychological desires common to all, such as wanting to eat, sleep, play, fight, and win. However, what we are studying here are even deeper, more extreme and eccentric psychological genetic seizures unique to individuals. The recent trends in bizarre and detective hobbies don't even come close to how mysterious, cutting-edge, grotesque, eerie, and utterly malicious these are... I will show you things you have never seen before. It's an easy task. I will show you right now...

"Come, come, step right in. Here are the specimens of living souls, the causal agents, the daytime ghosts, the midday monsters, the 'Hyoo-dorodoro' scientific experiment that cannot be found anywhere else in the world! This is it, this is it... Admission is ten sen for adults, half price for small children, and free for the blind... Oh... don't push so much. The madmen will laugh at you. Quietly... quietly...

...Ahem...

What we are about to present here is a "natural color, embossed, talking film" of the "Lunatic Liberation Treatment Center" established by Professor Masaki, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Kyushu Imperial University School of Medicine, located behind the main building of the same department. The projector was recently manufactured at Kyushu University School of Medicine by Dr. Tanashi of Ophthalmology and Professor Kanatsubo of Otorhinolaryngology in cooperation with Dr. Masaki, and is very elaborately made for the purpose of medical research... The talking films currently under research in America, for example, cannot compare to this talkie... We hope to show you that there is not the slightest difference between the screen and reality.

First, as the opening act, the entire view of Kyushu Imperial University School of Medicine will be projected onto the screen.

As you can see, the campus and its surroundings at Kyushu University are covered in green pine forests, but at its western end, beneath two large chimneys standing side by side, there is a shabby two-story Western-style building painted blue. This is the main building of the Department of Psychiatry, home to the world-famous "Mad Doctor," Professor Masaki. Immediately to its south lies the "Lunatic Liberation Treatment Center" that we are about to introduce... An airplane carrying a camera and technicians gradually descends and lands on the window ledge on the upper floor of the main building of the Department of Psychiatry, on the south side of the professor's office... like a dragonfly or a fly... Let's set the time as 9:00 AM on October 19, Taisho 15 (1926).

The red brick wall surrounding this liberation treatment center is approximately 4.5 meters high. The enclosed square flat ground is covered with the pure white quartz sand peculiar to this region, making it extremely clean. In the center, about five paulownia trees stand with yellow withered leaves. These paulownia trees have been here for a long time, creating the atmosphere of the main building's courtyard, but as a result of the surrounding area being leveled for the establishment of the liberation treatment center, they are showing significant signs of weakening. This may be an ominous sign. Or, it could be that these paulownia trees have developed mental abnormalities due to being confined in an unexpected place, but the diagnosis in this regard has not yet been discovered by our department... I apologize for speaking of trivial matters.

The entrance to the treatment area, only one of which is open near the patient rooms on the east side, also serves as a passageway to the restroom. Seeing a giant man with an unpleasant face, wearing a black uniform and cap, peering into the area from morning till night through a small, horizontally cut hole next to that entrance, with cold eyes, makes the entire square open treatment area feel like a giant magic box set amidst green waves.

The white sand spread at the bottom of this magic box sparkles, reflecting the light of the deep blue sky. Black figures move across it, standing and sitting. One... two... three... four... five... six... a total of ten people.

These are the madmen moving under the principle of "psychological heredity," which is the continuation of "the dream of the fetus" derived from Dr. Masaki's "brain theory"... Furthermore, three hours from now, at noon on October 19, Taisho 15, a thunderous noonday gun will echo from Odaiba across the sea, and at that signal, an unexpectedly magnificent psychological hereditary catastrophe will erupt among these ten madmen, astonishing the public and simultaneously driving Dr. Masaki to the decision to commit suicide. The phenomena that can be called omens of that great catastrophe are already clearly appearing in this open treatment area, so I would like you to pay close attention and carefully observe every action of the madmen.