Christine Wunnicke
CHRISTINE WUNNICKE lives in Munich, Germany. She has published four award- winning novels, a biography, and several translations.
The Fox and Dr. Shimamura
Fiction by Christine Wunnicke
Translated by Philip Boehm
The Fox and Dr. Shimamura toothsomely encompasses Japan and Europe, memory and actuality, fox-possession myths and psychiatric mythmaking. The novel begins near the story’s end, in Dr. Shimamura’s retirement. A feverish invalid, he’s watched over by four women: his wife, his mother, his mother-in- law, and a nurse (originally one of his psychiatric patients). His mother is busily writing and rewriting his biography, Between Genius and Madness.
As an outstanding young Japanese medical student at the end of the nineteenth century, Dr.…
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—Music and LiteratureA mythical, mystical, and at times bizarre tale of a late nineteenth-century Japanese doctor who is sent to remote areas of the Shimane prefecture to cure women of fox possession. Wunnicke slyly reminds us that, although women are powerless, even when it comes to treating their own illnesses, they find ways to quietly assert their will over men.
