The relationship between C and Nana

The relationship between C and Nana is both intimate and practical: they live together while Nana assists in C’s medical work and manages the clinic’s accounts. C’s retrospective account places their partnership inside a complicated household that also includes the Army Medical Captain, whose name and professional identity C has borrowed. The eventual separation follows a change in the clinic’s staff, while the account also presents the relationship as entangled with the captain’s illness and fear of losing C.

Household and Working Partnership

C describes himself as unmarried, but says that until the previous year he had lived with Nana as his common-law wife. Nana had originally been the legal wife of the Army Medical Captain. According to C, she helped him as a nurse and took charge of the accounts while he practiced medicine under the captain’s name. C says that he and Nana lived together with the captain’s understanding and approval, and that this arrangement caused no conspicuous trouble at first.

Their partnership therefore spans domestic and professional roles. Nana is not described only as C’s companion: she contributes to patient care and handles the clinic’s finances. C’s claim that he remained unmarried sits alongside his description of Nana as his common-law wife, making the relationship’s social and legal standing distinct from its practical reality. The borrowed medical identity further complicates the household: C’s livelihood, Nana’s work, and the captain’s name are bound together in the same arrangement.

The Army Medical Captain and the Relationship

C places the relationship within the captain’s declining health and his own continuing role in the clinic. He says he administered drugs to the captain and continued working with him after the war, even as the captain became increasingly unable to treat patients. C presents this care as an act of friendship and responsibility, while also acknowledging that the captain’s professional identity enabled C’s livelihood.

In C’s account, the captain feared that C would leave. C says the captain used pressure on Nana to establish a relationship with C as a means of keeping him at the clinic. C also states that his intimacy with Nana developed later, after he had begun working with the captain. This makes the relationship more than a private bond in C’s telling: it is linked to the captain’s dependence on C and to the continuation of the medical practice. The account gives the captain’s motive as C understands it; it does not provide Nana’s own explanation of how the relationship began.

Separation After Toyama Yoko’s Arrival

C identifies a specific change in the household as the point at which Nana’s relationship with him became strained. After he hired Toyama Yoko as a new apprentice nurse, Nana was unhappy and suggested that she and C live apart. C agreed. He says they had been living separately since then, while also describing the period before the hiring as one without conspicuous disharmony between them.

The sequence ties the separation to the clinic’s changing staff, rather than to a stated dispute over finances or a declared end to the relationship. C records Nana’s proposal and his agreement, but does not explain what she hoped to achieve by living apart or describe the terms of their separation. The shift is clear; its private meaning remains largely outside his account.

C’s Retrospective Account

The relationship is described through C’s affidavit, where personal history forms part of his explanation for continuing to practice medicine illegally. He presents Nana’s work in the clinic, her management of the accounts, and their shared household as elements of the arrangement surrounding his use of the captain’s identity. His account also portrays their intimacy as connected to the captain’s effort to retain C, before identifying Nana’s proposal to live apart as a later break in their domestic life.

Because the account is C’s own retrospective explanation, it gives his framing of their shared past rather than an independent account from Nana. What it establishes is a relationship that shifts from a jointly maintained household and workplace to separate living, with the arrival of Toyama Yoko marking the turning point C identifies.