Dogra Magra (4/47)

by Hisashi Yumeno

I gripped the arms of the rattan chair and straightened my posture. Watching her face in front of me, I lowered my head slightly. "Please, don't worry. Do as you like," I thought, as if muttering to myself.

However, deep down, there was a slight hesitation. No, rather, I even felt a kind of absurdity. I wondered if the girl from Room Six who called me this morning, and Dr. Wakabayashi in front of me, were actually mistaking me for someone else. Could it be that they were calling out to me so eagerly and blaming me because they believed I was someone else? Is that why I couldn't remember anything, no matter how much time passed?

Could it be that the mementos of my past that were about to be shown to me were actually all things belonging to complete strangers, unrelated to me? Would I be shown one after another grotesque and cruel crime mementos drawn by some unknown, cold-hearted psychopath lurking somewhere, and be pressed to "remember, remember"? As I let my imagination run wild, I involuntarily shrank my neck and made myself small.

At that moment, Dr. Wakabayashi, maintaining the refined elegance and humility befitting a scholar, quietly bowed to me and rose from the rattan chair. As he slowly opened the door behind him, a small man strode in, as if he had been waiting.

The small man had a closely shaven head and a black handlebar mustache. He wore an unfamiliar outfit of a white stand-collar jacket, black trousers, and slippers made from old shoes. He carried a square black leather briefcase and a soiled folding chair in his hands, but when a nurse who followed him in placed a steaming bowl in the center of the room, he briskly unfolded the folding chair beside it. The small man placed the black briefcase next to the chair, opened it with a snap, and as he took out the jumbled barber's scissors and brushes inside, he gave me a quick bow, as if to say, "Please, go ahead."

Dr. Wakabayashi also pulled a wicker chair to the head of the bed and gestured to me with his eyes, saying, "Please, go ahead."

I thought, "So, this is where my head will be shaved." I got off the bed barefoot and sat on the tatami chair. Almost simultaneously, the small man with the handlebar mustache draped a white cloth around me. He wrapped a hot, wrung-out towel around my head, pressing it firmly, then looked back at Dr. Wakabayashi.

"The same cut as last time, if that's alright..."

Upon hearing these words, Dr. Wakabayashi seemed to realize something. He glanced at my face, then quickly composed himself and replied,

"Yes, that's right. I did ask you last time, didn't I? Do you remember? The way you cut it then..."

"Yes, it was exactly a month ago, and it was a special request, so I remember it well. High in the middle, to make the whole face appear like a gentle oval, and very short around the sides, in the style of a Tokyo student..."

"Yes, yes, please do it exactly that way again this time."

"Understood."

Amidst that exchange, the scissors had already begun to snip above my head. Dr. Wakabayashi settled back into the wicker chair at the head of the bed and seemed to be taking out a red-covered Western book from his overcoat pocket.

I closed my eyes and began to think. My past was gradually becoming clearer this way. Apart from the incredible story of karma Dr. Wakabayashi had told me, things I could believe to be facts were slowly emerging through inference.

I had been hospitalized in the psychiatry department of Kyushu Imperial University in Taisho 15, though I didn't know exactly when. And I must have spent the time until yesterday in a daze. Sometime during that period, or perhaps before, about a month ago, I had apparently had my hair cut in a stylish student fashion. And now, I was being restored to that appearance...

However, how meager that is as the past memory of a single human being. Moreover, it is merely what I heard from a medical doctor and a barber, who are complete strangers, so what I truly remember as my own past are only the events of the past few hours since I heard that... buzzzzzz... sound of the clock this morning. Everything before that... buzz... is absolute nothingness to me; I am not even sure if I was alive or dead.

Where exactly was I born, and how did I grow this much? Where did I acquire the judgment and knowledge to distinguish one thing from another, saying "What is that?" and "What is this?", or the academic ability to understand Dr. Wakabayashi's explanation with such profound seriousness that it made me tremble? How could I have forgotten such a vast and boundless past memory so completely and utterly?

As I thought about such things, I closed my eyes and stared intently into the void within my head. My soul, before I knew it, seemed to shrink into a tiny speck, like a microorganism aimlessly wandering through infinite emptiness. I felt lonely... bored... sad, and my eyes somehow grew warm.

Just then, something cold touched the back of my neck. It was the barber, who had already finished cutting my hair, applying shaving cream to shave my neckline.

I hung my head in dejection.

A month ago, Dr. Wakabayashi had restored my head. Thinking about it, perhaps this terrifying experience this morning was actually something I had also experienced a month ago. According to the doctor's words, it seems this barber is not the only one who ordered the restoration of my head. If that's the case, I wondered if I had repeated the same thing over and over again even before that, like a sleepwalker, repeating meaningless actions.

Is Dr. Wakabayashi truly such a cold and heartless scientist? Could it be that all the events since this morning are merely hallucinations of my somnambulism? Is it possible that even having my head tidied and my sideburns and eyebrows groomed here is actually happening in a dream, and my real body is somewhere entirely different, wandering through a strange dream?

As I pondered this, I suddenly sprang from the chair. With the white cloth still wrapped around my neck, I tried to dash straight out, but an unexpected noise began above my head, making me unable to open my eyes or mouth. Involuntarily, I returned my backside to the chair and hunched my neck.

This was because two round combs began to fly wildly above my head, making it impossible to breathe. The sensation was so pleasant that I couldn't tell if I was going mad or if someone else was. I felt as if I was cut off from all joy, sorrow, fear, regret, past, present, and the entire universe. Leaning back in the chair, a pleasure of bottomless itchiness coursed through my entire body. Nothing mattered anymore. I felt completely resigned, as if I had no choice but to obey Dr. Wakabayashi's orders, no matter what happened.

"Please come this way."

A young woman's voice reached my ear, and when I opened my eyes in surprise, two nurses had entered without me noticing and were firmly gripping both my hands from either side. The white cloth wrapped around my neck had been removed by the barber at some point and was being vigorously swung outside the door.

At that moment, Dr. Wakabayashi, who had been engrossed in a red-covered Western book, closed the page and stood up. Lengthening his already long face, he coughed, "Ahem, ahem," and gestured towards the door, saying, "Please go that way."

Barely opening my eyes through all the hair and dandruff on my face, I was led by the nurses, treading barefoot on the cold flagstones, and stepped outside the door for the first time in my life.

Dr. Wakabayashi saw me off to the door, but then seemed to have gone somewhere along the way.

Outside the door was a wide corridor of artificial stone, with five doors of the same color as my room lined up on either side. At the end of the corridor hung a grandfather clock, heavily encased in iron bars and wire mesh, just like the window in my room. It was probably the clock that had buzzed and woken me up in the early hours of this morning. I couldn't tell where one would insert a hand to wind it, but its old-fashioned arabesque-patterned hour and minute hands pointed to 6:04, swinging a giant brass pendulum bob. It looked as if it were a human undergoing punishment. My room was to the left of that clock, and next to the door was a white-painted nameplate, with small black Gothic letters reading "Sei, Tou, Daiichi Byoutou" and large letters reading "Room No. 7." There was no nameplate for a patient.

I walked away from the clock, led by the two nurses. After a while, we emerged into a bright outer corridor. In front of us appeared a two-story wooden Western-style building painted blue. To the left and right of the corridor, red button chrysanthemums, white cosmos, and red and yellow cockscombs bloomed profusely, and a pure white sandy area stretched out. Beyond that, a deep green pine forest spread. The morning sun faintly illuminated the thin clouds drifting above the pine forest, and from somewhere, the distant sound of waves gently drifted, creating a pleasant sensation.

"...Ah...it's autumn now."

I thought. I took a deep breath of the cold, fresh air and felt relieved. However, before I could look around at the scenery, the two nurses pulled my hands and led me into a dark corridor inside the blue Western-style building. Then, when we arrived in front of a room on the right, another nurse who had been waiting opened the door and entered with us.

The room was a spacious and bright bathroom. The steam rising from the stone bathtub by the window was sparkling as it dripped down the three glass windows. In the midst of this, three nurses with flushed cheeks lifted their matching round red arms and legs high, suddenly grabbed me, spun me around, stripped me bare, and pushed me into the bathtub.

Once I warmed up and stood up, I was immediately dragged out onto the board of the sink, where cold soap and sponges were pressed against me from all sides, and I was scrubbed vigorously without any hesitation. Furthermore, suddenly my head was held down, and while soap was rubbed onto my naked body to create foam, I was treated roughly in a way that was hard to believe for a woman, and without any warning, hot water was splashed over me, leaving me unable to open my eyes or mouth.

Once again, without giving me a chance to say anything, they pulled both of my hands,

“This way, please,”

they ordered in a shrill voice, pushing me back into the bathtub. The roughness of their method made me suspect that one of the three nurses might be the one who brought me breakfast this morning and caused me to have a terrible experience. However, upon closer inspection, it seemed that they were accustomed to handling patients every day, and I became completely pessimistic.

However, at the end of it all, after having my long fingernails trimmed, my mouth cleaned with a bamboo-handled brush and salt, and after warming up again and being dried off with a new towel, I felt as if I had been reborn when they scrubbed my head with a new yellow comb. Even though I felt so refreshed, I found it strangely puzzling why I didn’t remember my past, and I felt incredibly good.

“Change into this,”

When a nurse said that, I turned around to see that the patient gown I had taken off on the wooden floor had disappeared, and in its place was a large, light-blue furoshiki bundle. When I untied the knot, out came a university student's uniform and cap in a white cardboard box, a speckled overcoat, a knitted undershirt, trousers, brown half-socks, and laced boots wrapped in newspaper. Then, when I opened the small leather pouch placed on top of everything, even a small, silver-glowing wristwatch appeared.

Without a moment's doubt, I took each item from the nurse and put it on. As I did so, I noticed that none of them had any initials or markings that would indicate they were my belongings. However, each item had firm creases, as if freshly tailored, and when I moved my body, they fit comfortably, as if they had been familiar for a long time. Only the new collar of the jacket's stand-up collar felt a little tight, but I was surprised that the brand-new square cap, the shiny laced boots, and even the length of the black ribbon on the wristwatch, which showed 6:23, fit perfectly. It was so strange that when I put both hands into the pockets of the jacket, my right hand touched a new, folded handkerchief and tissues, and my left hand touched a small, smoothly bulging coin purse, though I didn't know what was inside it.

I felt as if I had been caught by a fox again. I looked around, searching for a mirror, but unfortunately, not even a shard was to be found. The three nurses, looking back at my face with equally searching eyes, opened the door and left.

Then, just as those nurses were leaving, Dr. Wakabayashi lumbered in, bowing his head lower than the doorframe. He looked me up and down as if inspecting my attire, then silently led me to a corner of the room and removed a well-worn yukata hanging midway up the opposite wall. What appeared from underneath was an unexpectedly large, full-length mirror.

I instinctively stumbled backward. I was surprised by how young my reflection in the mirror looked.

When I had imagined it by feeling around in Room 7 in the dark this morning, I had thought it would be a bearded man in his late twenties or early thirties, with a sinister and frightening appearance. But I hadn't expected the actual person to be so different from the sensation I felt with my palm, even after being groomed.

The person standing in the full-length mirror in front of me still looked like a mere youth, barely twenty years old. My forehead was round, my chin thin, my eyes large, and I had a surprised expression. Without the uniform, I might have been mistaken for a middle school student. The thought that this youth was me filled me with an indescribable, eerie, happy, and sad feeling, a peculiar sensation that made the ambition I had felt since this morning drain away rapidly.

At that moment, Dr. Wakabayashi called out from behind me, as if urging me on.

"...How is it...? Have you remembered...? Your own name...?"

I hastily took off the hat I was about to put on. I swallowed a gulp of cold saliva and turned around, and that's when I finally understood why Dr. Wakabayashi had been toying with me in various strange ways earlier. Dr. Wakabayashi had promised to show me monuments from my own past, and as a first step, he had presented me with an image of my past self. In other words, Dr. Wakabayashi must have remembered my appearance in detail before my hospitalization, and after restoring me to that exact state, he suddenly thrust it before my eyes, trying to make me recall old memories. ...Indeed, there's no mistake about it. This is certainly a monument to my past. ...Even if everything else was a misunderstanding, this alone was undeniably an image of my own memories.

However, the doctor's painstaking efforts, unfortunately, were not rewarded. Although I was surprised to see my own reflection for the first time, I couldn't remember anything. Furthermore, realizing that I was still such a small child made me feel even more self-conscious than before, as if I was being mocked, and I felt an eerie sense of dread, unconsciously wiping the sweat from my forehead and hanging my head.

Dr. Wakabayashi, who had been silently comparing my face with the face in the mirror with an expressionless gaze, eventually nodded and said,

"...You are right. Your skin tone is much fairer than before, and you seem a little plumper, so the impression might be slightly different from before your hospitalization... Well then, please come this way. We will try the next method... This time, you will surely remember..."

I followed behind Dr. Wakabayashi, my ankles and knees stiff in my new lace-up boots, and we returned down the corridor where cockscombs bloomed. I had expected to go back to our original Room Seven, but Dr. Wakabayashi stopped in front of the door to Room Six, one room before it, and knocked. Then, a female attendant of about fifty, wearing a light yellow apron, emerged from beyond the half-open door and bowed politely.

"She is resting well at the moment,"

The woman reported modestly, looking up at Dr. Wakabayashi's face, and then departed towards the Western-style building from which we had come.

Dr. Wakabayashi then cautiously stretched his neck and entered. He gently took my hand with one hand, quietly closed the door with the other, and, muffling his footsteps, approached the iron bed lying against the far wall. There, he gently released my hand, and, pointing with his hairy finger at the face of the girl sleeping on the bed, he turned and stared at me.

I gripped the brim of my hat tightly with both hands and blinked repeatedly, doubting my own eyes.

...Such a beautiful girl was sleeping soundly there.

The girl's lustrous hair was tied in a strange shape, like large black petals, and lay disheveled on a pillow wrapped in a white towel. She wore the same white patient gown I had been wearing just moments ago, and her hands, wrapped in new bandages, were neatly folded over a white blanket covering her chest. It was indeed this girl who had troubled me since early this morning, by banging on the wall and calling out. Of course, there was no trace of the gruesome bloodstains I had imagined this morning on the surrounding walls, yet her sleep was so peaceful and innocent that it was hard to believe she was the one who had been crying out with such a terrifying voice. From her slender, crescent-moon eyebrows, long, thick eyelashes, elegant high nose, faintly rouged cheeks, small, tightly closed clover-shaped lips, to her lovely, translucent double chin, her sleeping face was as pure as a manufactured doll. ...No, at that moment, I truly doubted it, forgetting everything else, and gazed intently at the doll's sleeping face.

Then... right before my eyes, a strange, mysterious change began to occur on that doll's sleeping face.

The sleeping face of the girl, with her faintly reddish ears nestled in the large pillow wrapped in a new towel, and her long eyelashes joyfully lowered, began to change, imperceptibly, quietly, into an expression of sadness. Moreover, the contours of her slender eyebrows, thick eyelashes, and small clover-shaped lips remained still in their original beautiful positions. Only the innocent, peach-pink color of her girlish cheeks somehow shifted to a lonely rose color, but that alone transformed the naive sleeping face, which had looked seventeen or eighteen just moments before, into an elegant expression, like that of a lady of twenty-two or twenty-three. And the color of sadness, visible through its depths, was somehow divine.

Again, I began to doubt my own eyes. However, rubbing my eyes felt foolish, and I felt as if I couldn't even breathe, so I continued to gaze without blinking. Soon, clear droplets began to well up between her long, distinct double eyelids. These quickly grew into large, dewy pearls, entangled in her long eyelashes, sparkling brightly, and in an instant, they streamed down both sides, one after another. Just as I thought this, her small lips began to tremble slightly and move, and faint, dream-like words began to leak out in fragments.

"...Sister... Sister... I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. ...I... I truly loved your brother from the bottom of my heart. Even though I knew he was your precious brother... I've loved him for a very long time... That's why, it's come to this... Oh... I'm sorry, I'm so sorry... Please... Please... Forgive me... Forgive me... please... Sister... Please... please..."

It was a faltering tone, barely discernible from the trembling movement of her lips. Yet, her tears welled up anew, one after another, flowing from between her long eyelashes to the outer corners of her eyes... to her faintly white temples... and then disappearing into the translucent hairline of her youthful temples.