Epilogue — Movement IV: The Line That Broke Me

A single sentence breaks open a life, a theory, and a responsibility that can no longer be ignored.

What I later realized was that the conviction I felt in Montana had already begun to build months earlier, when I first heard Shimanishi’s voice in a written note I had discovered.

One day, I received a reply to an email I had sent to Professor Satoshi Ōmura and several people around him. I did not know Ōmura personally, but I had come to know some in his circle because one of his close friends and colleagues had been a vocal supporter of the FLCCC and had kept him apprised of our work. Kenji Torii, who was copied on the exchange, was a publisher of a book on ivermectin that Paul Marik later edited, collecting the experiences of physicians around the world who had used it to save thousands of lives. I had simply asked what they knew of Asao Shimanishi and his work. The response came from Mr. Torii. His message was brief, generous, and deeply human. He expressed pride that a Japanese researcher like Shimanishi was finally being recognized and regretted that so few in Japan knew his name.

I was reading the email in the passenger seat of our car, with Lisa driving, while I was on the phone with MB. I forwarded it to him. As he opened it on his computer, he noticed that Mr. Torii had included a link to a website.

MB opened it first.

The site belonged to a company Shimanishi had apparently tried to build after his original company dissolved, one that MB had never encountered in more than twenty years of importing Themarox through Shimanishi-Kaken. The homepage opened with a message. Shimanishi himself had written the first half.

As MB began reading the first lines aloud to me over the phone, I felt something shift in my chest, and my eyes were already filling. I do not think Lisa noticed until I hung up and was softly crying—well, maybe not so softly—but I recovered quickly and told her, “Hearing that made me emotional.”

That was nothing compared to what happened later.

When I got home, I went into my office, opened the website myself, and read the message alone for the first time. By then, I had spent months immersed in Shimanishi’s work, his minerals, his methods, his restraint, and his refusal to claim authorship over what he believed had been entrusted to him. I thought I understood the man.

I was wrong.

In the car, I remember thinking that in all the months I had spent living inside his work, although I had read descriptions of his method and a few technical statements attributed to him, I had never encountered his voice. I had never read his thoughts. I had only known the science, the minerals, the discipline, and the result.

That evening, sitting alone in my office, was the first time I was alone with his words.

And I did not make it past the first sentence.

“In the beginning there was a rock.”

I broke. And it was not quiet.

What came out of me was sudden and involuntary, something between a sob and a wail, physical and immediate, like an eruption triggered by something I could neither control nor understand. I have cried as an adult before. This was different.

And what still shocks me is that it has not changed.

I have gone through this manuscript dozens of times since adding this passage. Many dozens. And every time I get to that line, it happens again, without exception. It hits me all over again, and I begin sobbing in bursts, eyes tearing, chest heaving, while my mind simply stands there and watches, unable to explain why it is happening.

I wish I could tell you that I am embellishing this for dramatic effect. I am not. I am writing it because it is true, and I no longer care whether admitting it makes me seem unstable, sentimental, or ridiculous. Every time I reach that line, I feel the same sudden, visceral, overpowering reaction—emotional, spiritual, whatever word one prefers. It simply breaks me.

I am not especially interested in explaining it. I might have tried if it had happened once. But when it happens every time, without exception, explanation begins to feel beside the point.

All I can do is tell you what happened and what followed from it. Before turning to his words, I want to show you the man they came from.

This is the only photograph I have of Asao Shimanishi.