"Behind every great man is a woman rolling her eyes," the comedian Jim Carrey once joked. Sawako Ariyoshi's novel "The Doctor's Wife," based on historical facts and first published in 1978, tells of the woman behind real-life pioneer surgeon Seishu Hanaoka, who used general anesthetic long before any doctor the West. In this fictionalized biography, the medical breakthrough is aided by Hanaoka's wife Kae, who stays forever eclipsed by her famous spouse.