Slim Novel 11 - See Homepage - http://adventuresofkimi.blogspot.com
8. Yo
Kimi arrives for Hospital supper. The staff takes meals in cellar, sitting across from each other on wood benches. Direktor is absent and Kimi, in monpe knickers and padded faded blue waist-length peasant jacket with sleeves coming down to just below elbows (Wartime wear advised for women in Japan) and with bundle of belongings strapped to back and tray of food in hand, hungrily heads to an empty space at end table. Just as she is about to sit, a girl with tray hurries up and in voice from Okinawa asks “Yer Kimi, ain’cher?” Before she can nod Yes the teenager sits down facing her. “I’m Yotchan, call me Yo. I’m l’arnin’ ta be nurse. Boss ast me ta look arter yer. We be room mates.”
Yo is small, brown and barely believable. Pudgy faced, she wears patched schoolgirl sailor suit and behind has 2 pigtails to waist. She speaks rapidly and like student reciting in front of class. At table, she recounts to Kimi how she recently ran away from middle school in Okinawa and, after getting across to the mainland by doing blow jobs (oral sex on men) on the crew of the ferry in lieu of money for fare, hopped a freight north and several days later after turning her tongue trick for the railroad ticket collector, got to Hospital. Yo ran away because her parents are farmers and she is median – 9th – of their 17 kids. In normal time she would have been sold to a whore house but wartime patriotism plus monetary reward induced her father to promise her to the Imperial Army for comfort girl work. Warned by her mother, she escaped in time but in getting to Tokyo Hiroshima
Yo tells Kimi all this across an un-cozy mess hall table for more than 2 in a not very hushed voice. Others at the table, who already have heard Yo’s incredible journey in various versions, suppress giggles behind hands especially at the minutiae of the gang bang which Yo recites in loving detail and vicarious remembrance.
Dohbee-dohbee! thinks Kimi using the expression of comfort women that suggests heavy vigorous sex. This one is something else! But she keeps a level expression registering somewhere between shock and sympathy. Taking on 18 guys – the number in the gang that went bang on Yo – was not anything special to Kimi who had serviced 50 or more daily.
Supper over, Kimi goes with Yo into the sub basement down corridor lit darkly by occasional grime-covered electric bulb. Deep in rear they come to an old door barely hanging on hinge and push it open revealing cramped cubicle.
“Our room, Big Sis.” Yo kicks off sandals, drops skirt, pulls off shirt and jumps into lower bunk against wall, dressed only in a short, grimy shift-slip with nothing underneath, as Kimi can’t help noticing because Yo lies on bed with knees up and open.
The room is one and half times Kimi’s length and little wider than her arms-spread and its far wall has dirty window at sidewalk level and its privacy is preserved only by cruddy curtain across it. Double-deck bunk bed is against wall on Kimi’s left as she enters, leaving only small space between its edge and opposite wall. A small table is wedged at far end under ledge window. On it stands a photo of smiling kimono woman holding diapered newborn. It is day-after-birth photo of Yo with mother. In the space under the table are 2 drawers one of which Yo indicates is for Kimi. The rug is a well-worn indoor-outdoor faded green. Walls are dirt-white and overhead peeling-paint heating pipes run along window for heat against the underground damp cold.
“Take da uppah, Big Sis. Ahm scairt a sleepin’ so high.”
Kimi sets her bundle on the desk, climbs up into bed and sleeps.
9. Enjoy, Baby! Enjoy!
Rough shaking of shoulder wakes Kimi out of near orgasm dream. Yo's voice. “Big Sis! Mawnin’, giddup!”
Opening eyes in dark early A.M. shivering cold, Kimi jumps to floor, and splashes shockingly cold water on her face from the rusted tap-water faucet, combs her hair with jagged, half-broken black comb, and smooths out her rumpled monpe and blouse then follows Yo down dark hall and up steps to brightly lit room filled with bustling morning workers animatedly conversing and with click of silverware and clack of plates.
Three thin smiling old women in white overalls with rainbow color bandannas over hair are behind counter. The first stirs a big bowl of steaming, delicious-smelling brown bean-soup with one-centimeter size cubes of white tofu floating in it and from which she fills each diner's soup bowl, the 2nd packs each diner's empty hand-size white bowl over-full with freshly cooked steamy white rice, and the 3rd pours hot green tea into a small cup for each diner.
Direktor is already at table and Yo leads Kimi to her.
“Good morning sisters.” Then to Kimi “Eat heartily, dear, you have a busy day ahead.”
“Good morning sisters.” Then to Kimi “Eat heartily, dear, you have a busy day ahead.”
Kimi follows the advice. What pleasure to eat real rice after the usual wartime millet mix! Suddenly she feels the twitching inside – little kicks below her navel that had started early last week. Eating increases it. She directs her thought within: Enjoy, Baby! Enjoy!
Following Sanya, Kimi hurries along, carrying Sanya's black bag with instruments, bandage, syringes, and medicines. They go up stairs, 4 flights of 20 steps each, Sanya notes, suggesting Kimi count everything countable.
At first stop, Sanya sees non-infectious and pre-operative patients. Like all the wards in Hospital it is a circle of beds around a nursing desk. An old elevator is for patient transport. The beds have men, women or children, and each patient has family member who sleeps by bedside. Many beds have a horrid view: A swelling of left testicle pumpkin size; an ovary tumor that enlarged a 12-year-old's abdomen the size of 9-month pregnancy and that has turned life into uninterrupted agony; a prostate obstruction that reduced an old man to helplessness of urinating constantly through rubber pipe up his penis; a bloated blackly discolored, infested-with-insect-maggot leg of elderly diabetic woman to be cut off tomorrow!
Of them all, one patient touches Kimi most. Her bed they come to last of all. Sitting up smiling is a big-eyed healthy-looking, young woman - Mitsue - with hair and face expertly made up. Nurse recites: 38 year old unmarried childless pub girl; lump discovered in left breast, year ago; herbals, needles, skin-burning resorted to with no effect; tumor now rapidly enlarging and infected. As Nurse finishes, Mitsue pulls gown up over shoulders baring chest and Kimi’s vision is drawn to left breast twice size of right and bulged out irregularly as if stuffed with balls. Skin over it is fiery red and thickened with pores enlarged making it like the peel of orange. Kimi catches her breath and reaches for her own breast to reassure herself of no tumor.
Of them all, one patient touches Kimi most. Her bed they come to last of all. Sitting up smiling is a big-eyed healthy-looking, young woman - Mitsue - with hair and face expertly made up. Nurse recites: 38 year old unmarried childless pub girl; lump discovered in left breast, year ago; herbals, needles, skin-burning resorted to with no effect; tumor now rapidly enlarging and infected. As Nurse finishes, Mitsue pulls gown up over shoulders baring chest and Kimi’s vision is drawn to left breast twice size of right and bulged out irregularly as if stuffed with balls. Skin over it is fiery red and thickened with pores enlarged making it like the peel of orange. Kimi catches her breath and reaches for her own breast to reassure herself of no tumor.
“Mitotic figure,” Sanya recites to recording nurse, “inflammatory type, I shall do the surgery tomorrow.”
As they start to walk away Mitsue bows to them and murmurs “Thank you! Thank you! Please do well by me, Lady Professor?”
"What is ‘mitotic figure?’" asks Kimi.
"Cancer," replies Nurse.
"Cancer," replies Nurse.
11. OB
Obstetrics, or OB as Sanya says, is one flight down and its tone is jolly with pregnant patients bustling about cleaning up after breakfast, making beds, mopping floor, washing windows. At Sanya’s approach they run to beds and lay down on top of cover with gown drawn up baring belly. She stops by each, then by ear presses stethoscope into abdomen below navel and says “I hear a healthy baby” evoking big smile from soon-to-be mama.
Strange mix, they! Korean and Chinese women raped by soldiers and sent to Hospital via sympathetic network; prostitute too poor to resort to abortion; poor housewife with husband dead in war and family unwilling to help, and local Eta impregnated by father then blamed as whore and thrown out by family.
Strange mix, they! Korean and Chinese women raped by soldiers and sent to Hospital via sympathetic network; prostitute too poor to resort to abortion; poor housewife with husband dead in war and family unwilling to help, and local Eta impregnated by father then blamed as whore and thrown out by family.
OB, thinks Kimi, has more the air of poor-girl boarding school than hospital: Merry, mischievous! On same floor is labor & delivery and she follows Sanya into it. She notes all the helpers there are pregnant; Sanya explains: “Each learns to handle her own labor from a laboring fellow sister.” She fixes Kimi with a look and asks allusively “You come to midwife happily in Hospital, do you not?” and Kimi replies “Yes”, thinking, It is the best place for me to be.
12. Birth
After examining a laboring woman, Sanya says the birth is coming soon. She tells Kimi to ‘scrub up’ as helper. Two buckets of disinfectant solution – warm, blue and with strong carbolic hospital smell – are brought to washstand and, after first washing hands and forearms in warm water with soap, Kimi follows her boss, plunging hands up to wrist in the blue solution. Then she is helped into surgical gown: a green, cotton-sleeved, cloth body-wrap tied in back. A white cloth cover is placed over her hair, and then mouth & nostril opening cover mask and sterile rubber gloves complete the antiseptic precautions.
The mom-to-be gets up from bed and walks unassisted to birthing table holding her forward sagging belly with both hands and groaning quietly as the pains come on now minutes apart hard and heavy. It is a simple wood table she lies down on and two helpers place her legs on supports underneath her knees as she lowers the back of her body and head onto the table and easily fits her bottom to the position in which she'd practiced birthing this last month: knees up, thighs wide apart making nearly 90-degree arc, and her butt just jutting over lower edge of table.
An aide washes the birth-opening including the back-hole. Then a young midwife steps up on footstool and stands above and beside the birthing woman, whose big, bulging, bursting-with-baby belly the midwife is in best leveraged position to push down on to help squeeze the baby out of the birth canal.
Now the 2 helpers help the woman to sit partly upright using pillows back & shoulder support. She grasps side hand grips, smoothed by hands before her and makes ready to pull against the grip with next pain.
"All is ready for the birthing", says Sanya, who is seated between the wide opened thighs with Kimi standing peering over Sanya's left shoulder. With gloved index finger inside the sex opening, Sanya traces circle of the birth-canal and, using index & 3rd fingers, stretches the birth opening apart. In the gap, Kimi just makes out a black-haired advancing head.
Every few minutes, a pain starts and with it the woman takes deep breath, holds it, pulls against hand grips and bears down on the advancing soon-to-be-born. At same time, midwife, standing by her side on step-up stand, presses down on the belly now hard from the contracting womb with her palm using controlled power neither too much which might cause damage nor too little. And the coming newborn's black-haired advancing part bulges forward, spreading the birth opening and compressing it to thinness. Sanya assists this by a sweeping circular motion of gloved finger.
The room is hushed except for soft groan and grunt of the mother who because she trained needs no coaching. Kimi is amazed to see after 3 more pushes the shiny black-haired baby head smoothly ease out of the birth-opening. to nape of neck. Sanya gently grasps the down-facing head, with each hand on a temple, supporting and assisting the head in its clockwise rotation so baby's mouth faces mom's right inner thigh. Then in rapid alternation she depresses the head, and now the front shoulder pops out, and then she quickly elevates the head and assists birth of rear shoulder, and rest of body is immediately extruded like a noodle from its mold. Sanya holds up baby for the mom to see. 
“Girl! Here is the answer to Kipling’s question!" exclaims Sanya in an obscure allusion to opening words of a short story by the British master.
“Izzit healthy?”
“Yes, dear. And beautiful too.”
Sanya lays the new baby on its back atop mother's now flat abdomen. After seconds of surprised blinking and grimacing, the infant screams and moves extremities as if struggling to get out of an embrace. Sanya ties the blue-veined cord – 1 centimeter diameter and arm's length long. – twice, with white cotton string, first near the navel and then 3 cm further, and cuts out the in-between segment which is placed in small wood box as memento for the mom. The woman is smiling the happiest Kimi ever saw.
Helper washes off white greasy material that attaches to baby's skin, wraps the baby in light blue miniature size cotton gown and hands it over to the new mother now flat on table but ecstatically energetic and she puts baby to left breast.
Inspecting the bruised bottom to see if it needs repair, Sanya concludes it does not need stitching. Then in an unusual act in a culture that dislikes human-to-human skin contact she comes around to the woman and hugs her dearly in cheek to cheek expression of fellow feeling. And aside to Kimi “This will be you too, sister, but you will assist more, before you are ready.”
While Sanya scribbles note, Kimi lingers by the new mom who is giving suck with contented relaxed look. “Did it hurt bad?”
She laughs. “Yeah, it was murder.”
“‘Murder’, she says,” Kimi exclaims softly to herself and out loud “It looked the opposite.”
Sanya overhears the interchange and comes over, commenting “Pain has two aspects: what others see and what one feels. We outsiders can only know what we see. Here, mother-to-be does not cry out because she knows no one will respond to merely crying out. She has learned the best she can do for herself is quietly to get on with the job and finish it.” She turns to Kimi: “When your turn comes, you shall not waste time screaming”. Sanya pats the woman on the right shoulder in a goodbye touch and addresses Kimi: “Come now, time withers, and rounds not half over!” Briskly she heads out of room and down hall with Kimi hurrying after, and carrying the black bag.
13. Virtuous Queen
Before entering the tuberculosis ward, they tie on thick white, nostril-mouth face masks. Patients stand attention in front of bed, chests bared, except for the badly ill ones. Sanya stops before each patient, places her stethoscope disc flat on skin, and mid chest, and listens to lungs and heart; then, switching to finger percussion, places right mid finger front at points along chest wall and taps back of finger, noting the quality of the echo reverberating from inside chest. She always says a good word while noting her finding to a helper who writes it into record.
By the last bed, an emaciated middle-aged man stands besides rickety wood writing table under which are stacked sheets of ink-written manuscript. After Sanya examines, he asks “How much time, Lady Professor?”
“All you need, Ikeno san. Will you never learn? Stupid question begets mirror answer. How goes the novel? I suppose I am in it?”
“You are virtuous queen who leads Army against evil Knight to avenge her murdered husband.”
“Since when have I got virtuous?”
“Since I met you, damn it!” A titter of suppressed laughs spreads among the nurses.
As they walk toward the non-tuberculosis infectious ward, Sanya says “Most persons when they discover illness with close date of death run about crazily seeking to avert the inevitable like Don Quixote versus the Windmill or lie down and become a crying child. In either case it is contemptible. Nietzsche said it and he is right. You may not know Nietzsche. He was insane, they said. Yes, like the one sane man in the asylum that is this world. Of course that is what they would say. When I was young lady doctor I decided to try to stimulate a different drummer response in the dying patient. This drummer may be mysterious to you but it comes from Mr. Thoreau who marched to the beat of one. What I want to stimulate is to go out with creative bang rather than sacrificial whimper. To make dying an opportunity to produce something new, something valid and valued, something beautiful by high aesthetic standards, something perhaps that might in rare case change the world for better.” She stops for a few seconds to let her words penetrate Kimi's mind.
“Discovering mortal illness allows one to predict one's future with accuracy and knowing one is going to die in a month or even a year is reason to break free of natural constraint and unnatural restraints, and discover preternatural freedom. And that fosters courage to break out of society's mold, to do something not because it is a way of avoiding punishment but because it is self-rewarding. Thus the dying one is free to create. It could be a novel – a distillation of life in order to teach the new generation. Or another form of artistic creation – creative killing – assassination of key historic figure to deflect a noxious Now toward a finer Future; or it could be useful suicide to help friend or relative to whom one's prolonged dying is an emotional and financial disaster.
“That is my preferred state of mind for the dying patient. Concerning activities, unless medical condition dictates otherwise, all our less seriously ill patients are roused from bed each morning to engage in chores helping other weaker dying patients. Some have volunteered for medical experiment. Does it shock you? A well person thinks of the dying person as burnt-out case on whom to lavish tea and sympathy with crocodile crying. Not on ours! Our dying ones have heard my lecture-sermons proposing transplanting cancer cell to cancer-free volunteer, to study if immunity against a cancer can be evoked and have requested to be recipient. That is creative living while dying.”
Kimi sees in Sanya's face at this instant an extreme emotion and looks away as one would from a photo flash.
14. Pencil Shaped Mold
They enter the non TB infectious disease ward. In first bed is a young man with carbuncle – grapefruit size red swelling, right side of neck with foul smelling greenish pus exuding from sinus hole at top. Second bed has middle aged alcoholic man with abscessed left lung from gob of spit he breathed into the lung after a drinking bout that lost him his cough reflex and the abscess rages out of control reducing him to a constantly coughing gasping gray-faced emaciated ghost.
Sanya says to Kimi in low voice “You young healthy persons do not realize you live on the edge of a metaphoric covered manhole that we all inevitably drop down into. Now I am pulling off its cover to show the horror below.” Kimi inwardly shudders and re-ties both strings of her white cotton surgical mask more firmly behind her head so that the bicarbonate-moistened antiseptic mask pad, which had slipped, from her nose uncovering the nostril openings, re covers her nostrils.
At another bed, Sanya stops to examine a beautiful girl, obvious from make up a prostitute, with pelvic gonorrhea from sailors who had brought it from China
Next bed is a 50'ish gray-haired professor type of man who oblivious to them picks his nose and mumbles incomprehensibly. “Syphilis – general paresis,” remarks Sanya, “turns once intelligent men into idiots. Stupid sexual desire! Would we could channel it and avoid this.”
In end bed, a girl, of age 5, lies gasping shallowly, eyes filled with fear, skin flushed and covered with glisten of sweat. Beside her, two worried-looking Kimono women sit, the younger, obviously the mother, who is constantly cool-wiping the child’s forehead, and the older woman massaging the child’s legs under cover. Both look with hope at Sanya as she presses stethoscope to child’s chest going from spot to spot and listening carefully.
“The pneumonia has spread.” Sanya’s comment elicits sharp hissing inhales from both women.
“I would like to try a new drug on little Eiko. It is experimental – never used before in Japan
Thank you, thank you!” the mother half sobs. “Please save my child.”
From smaller-than-hand-size carton on tray just now set down by the bedside, Sanya picks up small cup-size vial of thick oily white fluid. Nurse runs and fetches freshly heat-sterilized 5 cc syringe and needle set. Sanya inserts the needle on syringe into the rubber stop of vial and injects 5cc of air then watches as the syringe automatically fills with the white drug. She pulls the needle out of the vial’s rubber top and, giving the child’s right buttock a short sharp slap followed at once by alcohol swab rub, plunges the needle into the soft buttock and, after first checking there is no bloody return into syringe, she depresses the plunger and slowly injects the 5 cc as a helper counts from 1 to 60. So ill is the little girl that she does not move at the slap and does not cry out from the stick of the needle.
“The injection must be repeated every six hours. I shall be back to do it myself. Keep an hourly record of the vital signs.”
As they hurry away Sanya comments to Kimi, “’Penicillin’ it is called, from the mold Penicillium so named from the pencil shape of its colonies on agar-agar jell. An Englishman discovered it in 1928 and now under stimulus of war the Americans mass-produce it. We are the only hospital in Japan Japan
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