Post-awakening Pathological Irritability

Post-awakening Pathological Irritability is the state of sustained rage that follows the child’s emergence from two years of apparent stillness. It is the disturbing counterpart of that awakening: the child first becomes unmistakably alive through an outburst, then makes the household reorganize itself around unpredictable screams and a volatile temper. The specialists’ label gives the behavior a medical name without resolving its cause, while the narrative presents it as a bodily and developmental upheaval that adults can observe but not explain.

Identity and Medical Background

Before the awakening, the child had been known as the Tube and then affectionately as the Plant. Specialists had tested the child’s limbs and pupils without finding reflexive responses; the parents reported that the child never cried, moved, or made a sound. They concluded that the case was one of pathological apathy, a phrase the narrative points out is contradictory. Their judgment made the child legible as a medical problem, but not as a person whose stillness might express anything other than a defect.

The parents did not follow the specialists’ recommendation to put the child in hospital. They already had two older children who were, in their description, full members of the human race, and they accepted the possibility that their third child might remain a vegetable. That diagnosis even softened into tenderness: they called the child the Plant. This history frames the later rage as more than a change in temperament. The child’s first movement and cry overturn the identity adults had settled upon, and the suddenness of the reversal exposes how little their earlier explanation had established.

By the age of two, the child had not tried to crawl or made a peep. The adults around the child—parents, doctors, and nanny—assumed a developmental blockage. The possibility that the child might have preferred inertia did not occur to them. Against those expectations, the awakening arrives not as gradual progress but as a rupture: the body that had seemed unresponsive begins moving in a display no adult has anticipated.

The Awakening and Its First Outburst

The change becomes audible before the Mother locates its source. Screams echo through the house as she and the nanny search from room to room. In the Mother’s bedroom, she finds the Plant sitting upright in the crib and howling. The child’s familiar gray-green eyes have become entirely black in appearance, and the Mother, confronted with this striking change, tries to reconcile the furious child with the placid figure she has known for two years.

Rage is the clearest feature of the awakening. The Mother lifts the child, fascinated, but the child kicks wildly enough that she immediately puts the child back down. She runs through the house calling out that the Plant is not a plant, summons the Father, and invites the child’s brother and sister to witness the scene. The fury is therefore not an inward condition inferred by a doctor: it is a force made visible in the child’s howling and movement, and it changes the family’s understanding of who is before them.

The outburst does not end in reconciliation or explanation. After a while, the child stops howling, but the eyes remain menacingly dark. The child regards the assembled family while still seething, then lies down, exhausted, and falls asleep. The family applauds, overjoyed that the child has at last come to life. Their celebration sits uneasily beside the violence of the scene: the very anger that frightens the Mother is also the first evidence the family has that the child is no longer inert.

A Household Governed by Rage

The awakening proves not to be a single dramatic episode. In the period that follows, the child remains constantly enraged. The Mother or the nanny nearly has to throw a bottle into the crib and retreat before being struck. At times the child becomes calm, sometimes for hours, but the adults experience these intervals as pauses before another storm rather than a lasting change. Caregiving becomes a matter of approaching and withdrawing, with even the ordinary act of feeding shaped by the threat of a sudden blow.

The household also loses its rest. God, as the narrator is called after awakening, sleeps barely an hour or two a night and screams when not asleep. The Father shouts at the crib, reminding the child that two years have already been spent sleeping. His complaint turns the child’s long stillness into a family grievance: the sleep once associated with a peaceful, beautiful Plant now seems to have been borrowed time, repaid through sleepless nights.

The comparison with Louis XIV sharpens the description of the child’s new insistence on attention. God cannot tolerate other people sleeping, eating, or talking when God is not doing the same. Speech is especially provoking. The behavior is not simply loudness; it registers the child’s growing awareness of other people as independent beings with activities not controlled by God. When the child is taken into the yard during a quiet interval and placed among toys, the child becomes upset at realizing that the toys exist outside God and do not depend on God. The articulated sounds made by the people nearby also draw the child’s attention, because those sounds seem to let them control and annex objects. The account links the volatile state to an emerging encounter with a world that is not the child’s possession.

Diagnosis and Unresolved Cause

The specialists cannot explain the sudden rebirth any better than they had explained the earlier stillness. They suggest that the child required two full years of extrauterine, womb-like existence before becoming operational. For the rage, they offer a mental event: something happened in the child’s brain that could not be accommodated, shaking the gray matter from sleep and setting neural messages in motion through the nervous system. This account supplies a sequence—mental disturbance, neural activity, bodily movement—but does not identify what the triggering event was.

The label changes from pathological apathy to pathological irritability, yet the specialists have no hard proof for the new diagnosis either. They fall back on common sense and suggest that the child is compensating for the two years missed and will eventually quiet down. That prediction remains a hope, not a demonstrated outcome in the account of this period. The contrast between the doctors’ confident labels and their acknowledged lack of explanation makes the medical language part of the story’s subject: it classifies what adults can see while leaving the cause of the child’s change obscure.

Developmental and Narrative Significance

The state marks a reversal in how the child is treated and understood, but it does not mean that the child has simply entered ordinary development. The earlier adults had interpreted immobility as blockage because they could not imagine that an infant might prefer not to move or speak. The awakening unsettles that assumption without supplying a conventional developmental path. Rage is at once a sign of life, a bodily disturbance, and an assertion of separateness from a world that continues to exist beyond the child.

The account also places the episode against the child’s culturally specific status in Japan. Nishio-san treats the young child as an okosama, a sacred and highly honored child before nursery school, while the later reflection on turning three describes that birthday as the end of the divine state. At three, the child sees change but lacks the memory of the previous year that might make seasonal change comprehensible. This later account of childhood anxiety does not establish that the irritability continues unchanged; instead, it shows how the narrative distinguishes the initial bodily eruption from the difficult consciousness that follows. The awakening makes the child visible to others, but being alive means encountering limits: other people sleep and speak independently, toys exist apart from God, and the world cannot be made wholly obedient by rage.