Thirst for Love by Yukio Mishima

sitting up in bed. He clutched the quilt in both hands as a child might. His eyes stared blankly yet fixedly toward the door.
    The nurse heard and came into the room. She helped stretch Ryosuke’s body out, as if unfolding a collapsible chair, and placed his hands back under the covers. The sick man submitted, groaning all the while; then after a time he called, rolling his eyes from side to side: “Etsuko! Etsuko!”
    Etsuko heard and wondered how, of all the names he should be calling, he had chosen this one. He seemed not to be following his own will so much as hers. She had the strange conviction that he was saying this name at her command, as if reciting a rule.
    “Say it again,” she said.
    The nurse had left to call the doctor. Etsuko bent over as she spoke, took her husband by the arms, and cruelly shook him. Again he gasped: “Etsuko! Etsuko!”
    Late that night, Ryosuke shouted indistinctly: “It’s black! It’s black!” Then he propelled himself from his bed and knocked the medicine bottles and pitcher off the table, after which he walked around on the broken glass, cutting his feet horribly. Three men, including the janitor, came running and restrained him.
    The next day he was injected with sedatives, placed on a stretcher, and loaded into an ambulance. He was an unusually heavy burden. It was raining. Etsuko held an umbrella over him from the door of the hospital to the gate where the ambulance waited.
    The Hospital for Infectious Diseases. With great joy Etsuko welcomed that ugly building, on the other side of the steel bridge that threw its shadow on the broken pavement of the road. Life on an island, life in its ideal form, which Etsuko had always pined for, was about to begin. Nobody could follow them here. Nobody could get in. The only people who lived here were those who made resistance to germs their only reason for being. Unceasing approbation of life; a rough, rude approbation that did not care at all about appearances. An approbation of life beyond law and beyond morality, dramatized and incessantly demanded by delirium, incontinence, bloody excrement, vomit, diarrhea, and horrible odors. This air which, like a mob of merchants shouting bids at a produce auction, craved in every second the call: “Still alive! Still alive!” This busy terminal where life constantly came and went, arrived and departed, boarded and debarked. This mass of active bodies, unified by the unique form of existence they bore, namely, contagious disease. Here the value of men’s lives and germs’ lives frequently came to the same thing; patient and practitioner were metamorphosed into bacteria—into such objectless life. Here life existed only for the sake of being affirmed; no pettier desire was allowed. Here happiness reigned. In fact, here happiness, that most rapidly rotting of all foods, reigned in its most rotten, most inedible form.
    Etsuko lived life to the full here among death and evil odors. Her husband was constantly befouled; on the day after he arrived here, he passed bloody stools. The dreaded intestinal bleeding had begun.
    Although his high fever continued unabated, he lost neither weight nor color. On his hard, uninviting bed, his lustrous pink body lay like a baby’s. He didn’t have enough energy to toss. He lay listlessly, both hands holding his stomach or stroking his chest with fists doubled up. His fingers ineptly played under his nostrils as he inhaled that odor.
    As for Etsuko, her existence was now one fixed stare. Her eyes had forgotten how to close, like unprotected open windows mercilessly searched by wind and rain. The nurses were amazed at her mad, feverish ministrations. She took only an hour or two of sleep a day at the side of this half-naked husband reeking of urine. Even then she would dream that he was being dragged away into some deep ditch calling her name, and she would wake.
    The attending physician suggested blood transfusions as a last resort, hinting vaguely at the same