“The Nightmare”

“The Nightmare” is Sanada Chiaki’s name for a recurring cycle of terror in which an abrupt loss of sexual desire precedes a collapse of her usual sense of control. Its significance lies in the way it turns an apparently ordinary change in feeling into a warning: words and bodily awareness recede, while memories she cannot readily integrate press into the present. The novel depicts the episodes through Chiaki’s own attempts to anticipate them and through the unsettling gap between her outward actions and her inner distress.

Definition and First Episode

Chiaki traces the first episode to her second year of high school. While gathered with classmates, she encountered sexually explicit material; during that experience, stomach pain was followed by a nameless terror and a sudden shift in what she perceived. The account establishes an early pattern in which an external situation gives way to an experience she cannot control or fully explain.

By the time of the events in the novel, the Nightmare has occurred seven times. Chiaki understands its beginning through a recurring loss of sexual desire. The change is not reassuring to her: she treats it as the first sign that the cycle may be starting again. That recognition creates a tense interval between the warning and the episode itself, in which she watches for familiar changes and fears what they will bring.

Warning Signs and Recurrence

Chiaki’s descriptions make the loss of desire a signal rather than an isolated difficulty. She explains that the state can persist for a long time; on one occasion, it lasted 938 days. Attempts to manage the resulting anxiety by seeking intimacy do not restore her former feelings. Instead, she can feel detached from what is happening, lose track of her surroundings, or fear that a watching figure has appeared above her.

That figure, whom Chiaki calls What’s-her-name, first appeared when she was in middle school. At first Chiaki pleaded with it not to watch; the figure answered only with a snicker that, as far as Chiaki could tell, no one else heard. She later recognizes it as an image of herself watching herself. The figure therefore makes estrangement visible: Chiaki experiences herself as both the person undergoing an event and a distant observer of it, while remaining afraid that the division could become more complete.

A later encounter shows how the warning signs can shape an otherwise quiet night. When a client falls asleep beside her, Chiaki fears the Nightmare is returning and anticipates seeing What’s-her-name. The figure does not appear, but her handbag, containing Halcion, is out of reach. Unable to take it, she remains awake until dawn, rigid with tension and frightened by the continued absence of desire. The episode’s threat thus persists even without the expected apparition: anticipation, sleeplessness, and the failure of desire are themselves part of the distress.

Language, Perception, and Memory

During a separate encounter, Kawashima Masayuki’s anger follows an accident with a can of cola. Chiaki’s heartbeat quickens, her vision blurs, and words begin to recede from her grasp. The narrative presents their disappearance as a frightening threshold: familiar terms and associations fall away, and memories begin to replace them. Although Kawashima does not understand what is happening, he sees her face become blank as she reaches for her makeup and applies lipstick with apparent calm. That visible composure contrasts with her inward panic.

The accompanying account gives this change a distinctive structure. Words are figured as dry, discarded things, while memories are described as soft, dormant forms that begin to move when language slips away. As they rise, Chiaki’s senses shut down; fragments gather until they form an image before her. This is not simply a recollection chosen at will. The sequence connects the loss of ordinary language and sensation with the arrival of material that had remained out of reach, conveying how the past can intrude without a deliberate act of remembering.

In the bathroom afterward, Chiaki recalls an earlier episode and the childhood memory it brings with it: an adult’s abuse and a little girl’s voice. The return of that memory helps explain why the Nightmare is more than fear of a recurring symptom. Its episodes expose a painful history that Chiaki has not been able to make ordinary or safely distant. The novel withholds a simple boundary between past and present; the memory arrives through disrupted perception and bodily awareness rather than as a composed account.

Control and Significance

The Nightmare also changes Chiaki’s understanding of agency. She fears that once it begins she will no longer be choosing what pain to endure; instead, the cycle will dictate what happens to her. Her efforts to monitor desire, prepare for possible episodes, and recognize the first signs are therefore attempts to preserve some measure of choice, not proof that she can prevent the state from taking hold.

The expression names both a repeated experience and the structure through which the novel renders it: warning, anticipation, loss of familiar capacities, and the return of memory. The apparition may fail to appear, and Chiaki may continue performing an everyday action, but neither outcome cancels the threat. By setting outward calm against inward disorientation, the narrative shows how an episode can be present before it becomes visible to anyone else.