Inuyasha | Rhapsody in Eight Movements

[luxken27fics]

Title: Rhapsody in Eight Movements
Author: LuxKen27
Fandom: Inuyasha
Universe: Alternate (modern day Japan)
Genre: Mystery, Suspense
Rating: T
Warning(s): Mentions of death, the treatment of mental illnesses
Summary: When a mysterious man washes ashore on Halloween night, it becomes a race against time to uncover his identity – and the circumstances that left him there.

Author’s Note: Further author's notes for this story can be found here.


The dead walk among us!
What other secrets are hidden behind the walls of TMU?

SPECIAL REPORT for YUKAN FUJI
10 November 2005

The best and brightest at Tokyo Medical University’s hospital are harboring a secret – literally.

On Halloween night, an unidentified man was brought to the hospital, the victim of an apparent drowning. He was left in the morgue with the other unfortunate souls who had surrendered their lives that week, but there was one key difference between this mystery man and all of the others:

He came back to life.

“It gave the medical examiner quite a scare,” noted a source close to the case, who has not been authorized to officially speak on behalf of the hospital. “It was thought to have been a prank at first, albeit not a very funny one.”

From the cold slab of the morgue, the mystery man was trundled off into the recesses of the intensive care unit before being dispatched to one of the other wards, all the while under heavily armed guard. No one knows his name, his nationality, or how or why he came to end up on the shores of the Tokyo Bay.

So why the sudden interest from the hospital’s security force?

Sources within the hospital’s administration declined to comment.

Still, slowly but surely, details about the cryptic case are beginning to trickle out. The man is still alive, our sources confirm. He is of unusual coloring, leading most to believe that he is not of Japanese heritage (or, indeed, of any known Asiatic ancestry). He is apparently obsessed with pianos, and has earned the nickname “Piano Man” by those in charge of his care.

And, allegedly, the man knows just as little about himself as any of the expert doctors on staff at Tokyo’s most prestigious hospital.

So just how do they expect to uncover his identity, then?

“Law enforcement hasn’t been brought in on the case,” a confidential source close to the case confided. “It appears his doctors – and the hospital administration – are content to leave him as an unknown entity, even unto himself.”

So we’re left to wonder why – why is there such an intense interest in this mysterious man’s case, and why such a campaign to keep details of it from the public? What other secrets are hiding behind the walls of the university and its hospital?

This is not the first time TMU – or the medical establishment in all – has become embroiled in scandal.

How many of these cases do you, dear readers, recall?

*In the early 1980s, the Ministry of Health & Welfare was forced to launch a full-scale investigation of the national medical system after receiving numerous reports of unlicensed doctors running clinics, performing surgeries, and dispensing unnecessary and potentially hazardous drugs to their patients in order to collect insurance payments. This, of course, followed the bribery schemes at the medical schools, in which families could place one or more of their children in courses after paying large sums of money to the administrations of those schools – perhaps some of these unlicensed professionals were the ones who couldn’t afford to pay above and beyond the tuition?

*The massive HIV-tainted blood scandal, the repercussions of which still reverberate in society today. How can we forget those 1,500 hemophiliacs, who were infected with the virus that causes AIDS after receiving unsterilized blood products, which their doctors and physicians knew were dangerous, even when safer alternatives were available. In 2000, three pharmaceutical executives were sentenced to prison terms for their negligence – and not even their cushy positions within the government could save them from that fate. Even so, it was too little, too late for those families of the victims who died from complications related to their transfusions.

*The Yokogawa Medical scandal in the early 1990s proved that bribery and university medicine were still hand in hand, when reps from the company were banned from university hospitals after plying those professors in charge of buying medical equipment with cash and gifts in order to boost sales.


So, who knows who could be greasing the hands at TMU this time around, in order to keep this once-dead man so carefully hidden from public view? Your intrepid reporter will not rest until the truth is out, and any secrets and lies the hospital administration seem so adamant to protect are revealed!