In Pursuit of Lavender

By Akiko Itoyama, Charles De Wolf

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2005 Akiko Itoyama
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85728-046-6
CHAPTER 1

Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat.

I’ve been running and running but still can’t shake off that voice. Knowing that it’s an auditory hallucination doesn’t help me put a stop to it. Even the doctors couldn’t do that.

Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat.

I haven’t a clue what it means, but when I hear it, I fall apart. Fretful, impulsive, I fall under the sway of a pitch-black throbbing, like a bicycle in the night that loses its brakes at the top of a mountain pass and goes careening down the slope.

It was high tide and Hakata Bay had surged back up the Hiikawa, the water reaching almost to the bridge planks. I was running along the narrow private road behind Seinan Gakuin Christian university, my back to the sea. I was not going back to the hospital ever again.

Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat.

We crossed Yokatopia-dori, and found ourselves in what for the moment was a magical safety zone. I glanced back, but already our hospital, lying beyond the neat, closely packed condo buildings rising above the reclaimed land, was quite invisible. Still to be seen were the metallic blue triangular prism of Fukuoka Tower and the baseball dome with its red-rust-colored roof.

Not far behind me was Nagoyan, pattering along in his sandals. “Let’s rest!” he gasped.

He doubled over in the shade of a tree as though about to vomit. We were in a triangular lot overgrown with grass on the north side of an old and superannuated municipal housing development along the river. A sea breeze to which I would normally have been oblivious had bent all of the trees in the direction of the town. We had crossed no more than one boulevard, but suddenly the landscape was subdued, the air thinner.

“I’m out of steam,” said Nagoyan by way of excuse.

“Hafta stay on the run,” I replied, trying to catch my breath. “This is jus’ the sorta place we’ll get us nabbed.”

“On the run? Where to?”

“Doesn’t matter – we’re on the lam, remember?”

“It’s no good! Let’s go back.”

“A right wuss, aren’tcha Nagoyan!”

He pursed his lips and glared at me.

Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat.

Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat.

We staggered on.

The escape itself wasn’t hard. We had been inmates of the Momochi Psychiatric Hospital near Fukuoka Tower, both housed in the open, unisex C Ward. Most of the patients were suffering from depression, but there were also some with symptoms of atypical schizophrenia and psychosis. Momochi is the largest dedicated psychiatric hospital in Kyushu. In addition to C Ward were Wards A, B, D, and E, forming a quadrangular courtyard. A Ward was closed and sex-segregated; B Ward was for drug- and alcohol-dependent patients; Ward D was for children. Ward E was an enigma: rumor had it that those who entered it were never allowed to leave.

Even though we were in a supposedly unrestricted ward, we still called it a prison: Prison C. There were no iron bars, but the windows couldn’t be opened wider than three centimeters. Aside from the routine of meals and medication three times a day, there was little for us to do. We had two meetings with the doctor every week, each lasting at most ten minutes.

Having been admitted as manic, I was still very much on an irrepressible high during the initial consultation. I jabbered on and on and then finally asked in high spirits, “Doctor, how much longer till my discharge?”

“You need to stick it out until you’ve settled down a bit more.”

That was all he said. I wasn’t allowed any overnights at home, and my parents complied with that, so I came to feel I had no home to return to. My mind remained with the clarity that comes from staying up all night; oddly enough, despite sleep deprivation, I was still physically healthy. The summer was waning, even as I dithered – dithered as to what to do in this, the one and only summer of my twenty-first year. In my crazed mind, turgid water was surging. It was all so excruciating – the loathsome idea of ending the season there in prison.

The path along the river was largely deserted. Tottering from fatigue, we were headed toward Showa Avenue. The sight of Nishijin Palace’s giant bowling pin meant that we were quite close to Nishijin Station – and that is my briar patch. There may not be any luxury items on sale there, but it has almost everything else. Normally, it was fun just to stroll along, looking at the battalion of vendor carts stretching down the middle of the street all the way to Fujisaki, with fresh vegetables and flowers to sell. Fortunately, we were dressed in ordinary clothes; Nagoyan in a polo shirt and chinos, myself in a T-shirt and jeans.

At the hospital, reveille was at six-thirty. At seven we gathered in the dining room and did our NHK radio exercises. We were told that in order to maintain the semblance of normal life, we were to wear everyday attire, not pajamas. We were also forbidden to take naps. The prescribed footwear was sandals, not slippers. We took baths during morning hours on Tuesdays and Fridays; on other days, we were unable even to shower. I wasn’t exactly sticky with sweat, as the air conditioning system’s thermostat was set so low that it gave me headaches, but having only twice-weekly baths caused me to worry about my armpits and to forgo wearing anything sleeveless.

We were allowed to watch television for only two hours, between five and seven in the evening, with everyone gathered in the dining room. I was suffering from hallucinations and was afraid that they would blend in with the sound of the TV. Between two and five in the afternoon, we were allowed to take up to an hour’s walk about the hospital grounds. By entering our names in the sign-out log, we could have a nurse open the door for us. Within the grounds there was really nowhere to go; our options were to stroll to and fro in the well-kept courtyard or walk across the street from the hospital to the local Lawson. Yet undertaking even that modest venture beyond the gate was vastly better than being cooped up in the ward.

Twenty yards of linen are worth one coat.

I had decided that morning to make a run for it. That meant wearing shoes, not sandals. And, of course, I couldn’t take anything with me, as a nurse was checking on everyone leaving the ward. In my pockets were my purse and house key.

I had intended to leave alone but changed my mind when I saw Nagoyan. Squatting in a corner of the courtyard, a sad expression on his face, he was playing with a stray cat that scampered off as I approached.

I stood next to Nagoyan and said, “Say, let’s make a break fer it.”

His response to my suggestion was a puzzled “Huh?”

“Let’s go! Let’s git out of ‘ere!”

Nagoyan’s heart was not really in it, but he toddled along nonetheless.

We passed through the outpatient department, turned toward the rear of the hospital, and exited from the parking lot. As there was not so much as a security guard there, all we had to do to get out without a hitch was not to act in a hurry.

We entered a residential neighborhood. I had already been champing at the bit to the point of explosion, so once we lost sight of the low fence surrounding the hospital, I began to run.

“Hey, Hana-chan! Wait a minute!” shouted Nagoyan, as he followed me.

Nagoyan’s real name was Yomogida Tsukasa, a bit of a mouthful, so at first we all carefully called him Yomogida-san. He in turn called me Hanada-san. He was a twenty-four-year-old company man with dyed brown hair.

While everyone else talked in the thick local speech of Hakata, Saga, Chikko, and Kita-Kyushu, Nagoyan stuck to the national standard. As he thus stood out from the rest of us, he was naturally asked his provenance. “Tokyo!” he declared.

“Must be fearsome hard to live there!” was everyone’s comment, but he invariably issued a placid denial, “Nothing of the kind … For the moment I happen to be in Kyushu, but eventually I’ll be going back.”

It was all a lie. When his parents came for their one and only visit, they squawked in pure Nagoya dialect. Those of us who had never been out of Kyushu and had only heard such speech in television dramas were most curious, and so we all, save for an ailing patient who returned to his ward, remained in the dining room, eager to eavesdrop.

“Ya know, Tsukasa,” his mother remarked, “Grannie’s been awful worried ’bout ya!”

“No sense frettin’ on it, now that you’ve already got yusself put into hospital,” said his father.

The entire dining room reverberated with the sound. Our faces were contorted with the strain of suppressed giggles. Nagoyan did not slip once in his use of “proper language,” not even with his own parents. I thought them an odd family indeed, with their different ways of talking, but then I suppose the father and mother may well have been wondering whether it was being in a psychiatric hospital that gave people such stifled expressions.

As soon as the two had left, our crowd of idlers circled in on Nagoyan, engulfing him in guffaws. That was when he confessed to being from Nagoya, born and bred. At one point, he had protested in a high-pitched voice that his privacy was being violated, but as no one was in a mood to let him off the hook, he capitulated. Further questioning led him to blurt out that he was born in Meito Ward’s Gokuraku, Nagoya’s equivalent of the Buddhist Pure Land Paradise. He insisted that Meito was the best area in the entire city, but no one was listening to him. Fukuoka had quite a few odd place names of its own, but nothing quite as blissful as Gokuraku.

“An’ yer parents’re also from that same blessed place, I s’pose.”

“Born there ye were and die there ye will too, no doubt!”

That’s how we teased him, so that his nickname almost wound up being Gokuraku. Nagoyan bit his lip in a most endearing way.

He had only spent four years in Tokyo, first as a student at Keio University, and then as an employee of a subsidiary of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Company. He had hoped to remain in the capital and become a Tokyoite. The irony was that the company had posted him to Fukuoka.

Kyushu people may show deference towards Tokyo, but there are still some who regard Hakata as higher on the scale of things and poke fun at everywhere else. This is primarily a consequence of the local belief that all food outside of Kyushu is by comparison insipid. Hakata folk in particular are gourmands par excellence and talk about food the whole year round.

Even with the bad food served in the hospital, the patients’ pride remained unchanged. The only delicacies that came to mind at the mention of Nagoya were pork cutlet in miso paste, fried shrimp, and sweet rice jelly. Kyushu really is unrivaled, but when we suggested all of this to Nagoyan, he bristled and exclaimed impulsively, “But you’ve forgotten about nagoyan! Now that’s a treat!” “Nagoyan? Now whit would that be?” we shot back.

“The Shikishima Bakery’s bean-jam bun variety? You’ve never heard of it?” he glared at us.

He explained that nagoyan consists of steamed sponge cake filled with sweet bean paste infused in egg yolk. We had no idea what he was talking about. Up against the ropes, he flashed back that Shikishima is the most renowned bakery in Nagoya, with a Tokyo branch bearing the name of Pasco.

“Never ‘erd of it,” we all said, acknowledging his explanation with a willful twist of our own. “Must be summat like our own Ryoyu bread.”

Not only had he covered up his roots, but here he was making quite a show of his fondness for Nagoya bean-jam bun – and from a particular bakery no less! There were hoots of laughter, and from then on he was known to everyone but the doctors and nurses as “Nagoyan,” the grannie brigade being just reserved enough to call him “Nagoyan-san.” Nagoyan heartily loathed the nickname but eventually seemed to resign himself to it.

CHAPTER 2

We were already sweating by the time we had made our way to Nishijin, and so we immediately headed for the Purariba department store in the station building just to cool off in its air conditioning. There, not having brought along a towel, I bought a terrycloth handkerchief. I saw that I had only three thousand yen in my purse. Nagoyan was assiduously mopping his brow with his own properly folded hankie. Whether from all our running or from sheer tension, we were both terribly thirsty. I suggested that we get something to drink in Hanajam down on the basement floor; breathing heavily, he nodded. Once we had gulped down the water set on the table before us, I ordered iced tea, while Nagoyan, for some reason, decided on orange juice jelly.

“Come on, take a bite. It’s good!”

I took him up on his offer and tasted the slushy stuff, but my mind was somewhere else. What were we to do? What were we to do? Nishijin was indeed something like my own home turf, but that made it dangerous. Someone I knew might see us. My heart was pounding as we quickly left Hanajam and got on the subway. I got the scary feeling that the people sitting across from us were carefully studying our features. Instead of going all the way to Hakata Station, we got off at Tenjin.

“First up, we gotta do some bankin’.”

“Why?”

“Escape stash … Better get to it now. Else they’ll be on our scent …”

“Scent? What are you talking about?”

“It’s like this. If we take out our dough when we’re already some way down the road, it’s a sure way to tell ’em where we are! Don’tcha get it, Nayoyan? Yer jus’ daft, that’s what.”

He sulked, but when we were again at the street level, he happily called out, “Ah, Tokyo Mitsubishi Bank!” and, crossing the street, headed for the trademark red overlapping circles. “When in Fukuoka …” I wanted to tell him, but with Nagoyan the fact that Fukuoka Bank had branches everywhere was secondary to the pleasure of using a cash card emblazoned with the name of the capital.

At the ATM I took out thirty thousand yen, Nagoyan a lot more. He casually stuffed the thick wad of bills into his pocket and said as soon as we had left the bank, “Let’s go back to the hospital after all.”

“No way! I’m not goin’ back!”

“But that’s where we can get cured!”

“If I hafta swallow any more of that Tetropin, I jus’ know I’ll end up a vegetable. I won’t have it!”

If getting cured meant taking that stuff, I’d rather remain ill. The doctor told me it would calm my excitable nerves, a manifestation of my mania and schizophrenia, but it wasn’t so simple a matter. All the patients on it say it “curdles” them. It’s true. After every dose, you feel just terrible, as though a dark fog had descended over your brain. A paralyzing listlessness sets in that makes it impossible to speak or even to think. You forget whatever you were looking at and lose all track of time. You take it, absent-mindedly pop a sweet into your mouth, and then lose consciousness just like that. When you come to, the goo of the melted candy is still in your mouth. But that isn’t to say you’ve been sleeping. You come to your senses and find that you’re itching all over. You scratch the inside of your arms or wherever there’s soft skin. And sometimes you get a rash. It’s really the pits. To get over it takes at least two hours, and what’s scary is that the longer you’re on it, the more recovery time you need.

An outpatient might give it a quick toss into the trashcan, but as an inpatient you have to queue up after every meal and before bedtime, cup in hand, with a nurse keeping a watchful eye until you’ve swallowed it. You can’t skip out, stash it, or throw it away. I once had the idea of keeping it under my tongue and spitting it into the toilet, but the nurse caught me. After that, there was an oral inspection to make sure that I had glugged it down.

If I go on being tormented with that Tetropin and wind up unable to return to normal life, I’ll be in a total pickle – a real invalid all right. The thought of myself at the end of my days, still confined phantom-like in a hospital, fills me with unbearable dread.

“I won’t be goin’ back, no matter what! If I take any more o’ that Tetropin, I’m done fer. Any more ‘n I’ll never get back t’ normal!”

“Now, now, calm down! It’s all right!”

Nagoyan said this with his hands on his hips as we stood in front of the Iwataya department store.

“Tenjin’s not safe. Whit’ll happen if we’re caught? … We hafta go somewhere! What’re we t’ do, Nagoyan?”

“Don’t get excited! Let’s just think about it!”

“Awright then …”

“Well,” said Nagoyan, with the air of having thrown in the towel, “shall we go to my place?”

Not knowing what to say, I simply nodded. I just wanted to be anywhere that was safe.

(Continues…)Excerpted from In Pursuit of Lavender by Akiko Itoyama, Charles De Wolf. Copyright © 2005 Akiko Itoyama. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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