The Fox and Dr. Shimamura

✍ Scribed by Christine Wunnicke

• Publisher: New Directions Publications
• Year: 2019
• Tongue: ar-SA
• Weight: 215 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 0811226247

✦ Synopsis

A delicious mix of East and West, of wonder and irony, The Fox and Dr. Shimamura is a most curious novel

The Fox and Dr. Shimamura toothsomely encompasses East and West, memory and reality, fox-possession myths, and psychiatric mythmaking. As an outstanding young Japanese medical student at the end of the nineteenth century, Dr. Shimamura is sent--to his dismay--to the provinces: he is asked to cure scores of young women afflicted by an epidemic of fox possession. Believing it's all a hoax, he considers the assignment an insulting joke, until he sees a fox moving under the skin of a young beauty... Next he travels to Europe and works with such luminaries as Charcot, Breuer and Freud--whose methods, Dr. Shimamura concludes, are incompatible with Japanese politeness. The ironic parallels between Charcot's theories of female hysteria and ancient Japanese fox myths--when it comes to beautiful, writhing young women--are handled with a...