Biogenesis (10 page)

The woman that Saito thought was Yuki had asked him, “Where am I?” He recalled replying with a curt “Icchan.”

The woman had come on the road from Moseushi and was walking, teetering rather, towards Ashibetsu. She had caught Saito’s eye because the jacket she wore, red in color, was an Ainu
asshi
. Yuhki had not known until then that the coarse jacket was ethnic attire. Back when Saito worked on ships sailing from Rumoi, he, too, wore an asshi because it helped keep him dry, but the jackets were becoming quite rare even then, and he had never seen one dyed red. He also thought he remembered seeing a man along with the woman, but whether or not this had been her companion he could not rightly recall. In any case, the man had not been wearing an asshi.

Yuhki learned from Saito that there was someone who knew much about these asshi in Asahikawa, and the very next day, they visited the elementary school teacher Shun Matsui. According to Matsui, asshi were made from the inner bark of elm trees. First the bark was matured in hot springs or ponds, and once it separated into flexible, dark brown sheets, these were washed in the river and broken into narrow
threads which could then be used to fashion the traditional Ainu clothing. As Saito had said, the material was very resistant to moisture, but asshi were also worn as everyday clothing. What Yuhki understood from Matsui’s explanation was that “water” had a profound connection to the manufacturing process. When the teacher brought out several asshi from his collection, the doctor noticed a significant difference from Yuki’s jacket in one respect, and asked about this. According to Matsui, Ainu custom observed a certain set of rules for adorning the cuffs, neck, and hem with patterns and embroidery to ward off evil spirits. No such decorations were visible on Yuki’s asshi, and given the use of a red dye and the asymmetrical stain-like pattern, “It was probably a homemade item in imitation of the Ainu variety” in the schoolteacher’s estimation.

As Yuhki inferred, “Ainu would have started by looking for a source of elm trees, and in Yuki’s case too, the rational view would be that a nearby source of water such as a pond or a river occasioned the making of the jacket.”

Furthermore, when Matsui produced a magnifying glass and closely examined the asshi, he found on the fabric’s reverse side a small, hard, red fruit, which he handed over to Yuhki. “I’m not sure what kind of fruit this is,” Matsui is recorded to have said, “but weaving such things into the material is not an Ainu practice, and it must have found its way by accident from a regional plant.” Considering the condition of the fruit, “If it was woven into the fabric by mistake, then this asshi was probably made sometime within the past year,” he also offered.

When Yuhki spread out a map to look for locations not far from Ichiyan, in the direction of Moseushi, that had a river or a pond, an adjacent place name jumped out at him: Uryu. There was a pond called Uryunuma in the mountains, and a nearby river called Uryugawa, and they were not far at all from Ichiyan. Most decisive for him, however, was the name Uryu, which used the characters for “rain” and “dragon”
and thus contained the
ryu
that Yuki had scribbled.

The doctor decided to continue on without returning to Shinjo. The trio first went to Uryunuma, situated in a valley halfway up a mountainside and a day’s hike on a treacherous path from the foothills.

While Sugita admired Yuhki’s capacity for action, she also frankly let slip, “When you’re not just a doctor but a scientist, I guess you can lose your sense of perspective.” It was a forced march for her and Yuki, but since they wanted to avoid having to camp out along the way, they set off before the sun was up and reached the shores of Uryunuma, located within a marshy area, after noon. Sugita recalled that while she and the doctor were chilled by the early summer breeze that blew across the water, Yuki seemed to find the place cozy.

“Around the large swampland grew clumps of bright purple flowers on tall stalks of grass, from which Yuki weaved herself a bracelet,” the journal tells. “It made me imagine her weaving her asshi,” naturally. They seemed to have spent a half-day there in the hopes that Yuki might recover some of her memories, but no salient developments were observed.

After that, the doctor walked from house to house in the village of Uryu just as he had in Ichiyan. Compared to Ichiyan, it was cooler and much more comfortable for Yuki, but unfortunately they had a hard time finding anyone who had seen her.

Yuhki seemed to lose heart, writing, “I might just be making connections out of coincidences. That Saito fellow was not the most trustworthy of men.”

The situation was turned around, however, when they visited the home of a man named Okabe, the village’s mayor, whose eighty-year-old mother, Tsuru, recalled seeing a woman just like Yuki back when Tsuru had first arrived as a colonist. Since this had been decades ago, at first Yuhki was dismissive, even as she went on excitedly, but his attitude changed when she said, “The woman I knew had different
colored hair.” As only he and Sugita knew Yuki’s had been dyed, he felt that there had to be something to Tsuru’s story. Given Tsuru’s age, it was possible that the woman she remembered was Yuki’s mother. The doctor asked Sugita to take down Tsuru’s story, and a detailed description is presented in his journal. What follows is a summary.

When Tsuru and her family built and began to live in a small hut near Uryunuma, a brother and sister lived in another hut nearby. The siblings looked quite alike, and people said that the brother, the younger of the two, had a very gentle countenance, almost feminine in appearance, but it was the sister that Yuki closely resembled. She must have been seventeen or eighteen years old, and Tsuru, who often saw her out picking fruit from trees, called her “Chu-chan.” Tsuru had heard that Chu-chan had an older sibling somewhere;
chu
could mean “middle,” but the association between sound and meaning was only casual in her mind. The siblings’ parents were nowhere to be seen, there was never any fire in their hearth, and they seemed divorced from everyday life. They hardly ever mingled with the villagers, and Tsuru remembered that whenever an official came by, Chu-chan and her younger brother pretended not to be home. The brother was sick quite often and rarely left the hut, but Chu-chan took good care of him. The land was poor and even buckwheat had a hard time growing, so after two years, Tsuru and her family moved away, after which she never saw the siblings again.

Although Tsuru’s tale sounded convincing enough, Sugita recalled that its credibility was cast in doubt as it unfolded.

“Chu-chan said she’d grown her hair for a hundred years,” Tsuru had mumbled. Moreover, in an excited tone, she had asserted, “I gave it to her,” about a small scar Yuki had beneath her left ear.

“Her son, sitting next to her, looked apologetic,” Yuhki noted.

Having judged nonetheless that Tsuru’s tale contained its share of facts, Yuhki, intrigued, wrote in his journal, “A longer lifespan was
somewhat expected in the face of a lower body temperature and slower metabolism. I need to know how old Yuki is.”

In addition, as Sugita testified, “Yuki’s behavior sometimes seemed more childish than her apparent years warranted,” and those who came into contact with her clearly had trouble pinning down her exact age.

“Until her memory returns, her calendrical age will remain uncertain, but it should be possible to formulate an approximation within a certain range of biological years,” the doctor held. He proposed various methods but ultimately chose one that translated Tsuru’s words into science. In other words, “Her hair, which falls to her lower back, must have taken quite some time to reach its current length if her entire metabolism is retarded. While Tsuru’s ‘a hundred years’ may be overblown, we should be able to calculate backwards to arrive at a minimum age.”

When he solicited Sugita’s help to that end, however, he learned of a shocking fact. He had previously ordered her to dye Yuki’s hair black, and now Sugita told him that no dyeing had been performed since. As she later testified, “You could barely see any white at all at the roots, so there was no need to dye it again.”

Yuhki had assumed that a new round of dyeing would be required, but instead a few strands of her hair were pulled out immediately, and the length that had grown out in white measured. The resulting number was an average of just 0.22 mm for the eight months since Yuki had been taken into custody. Dividing the 70 cm from her shoulders to her lower back by this rate of growth yielded a figure of approximately 170 years. It goes without saying that these findings were beyond surprising to both Sugita and Yuhki.

“I could not believe it,” Sugita would recall. “It was possible that her hair had suddenly come to grow very slowly, but as far as our calculations went, we were talking about two hundred years, which backed the elderly lady’s story.”

Subtracting seventy, Tsuru’s estimated age, from 170 gave one
hundred, the exact number of years that her former neighbor supposedly had grown her hair as a child. The astounding conclusion that this supported was that the “Chu-chan” in Tsuru’s tale was not “Yuki’s mother” but Yuki herself.

The doctor spelled out his next question in his journal. “Is Yuki’s idiosyncratic constitution something that ran in her family or a sudden mutation? In other words, have her siblings all passed away, leaving Yuki alone in the world, or does her entire family stand apart from outside society, living in hiding, unable to come forward? Since inbreeding is linked to a high probability of abnormal births, it would not be too outlandish to hypothesize that what begat Yuki’s idiosyncratic constitution is incest in an isolated settlement.”

In those days when infants with birth defects were routinely killed, there were also countless stories of unusual children, considered their family’s shame, being locked away from sight in the cellar. It was not mysterious in the least if scattered settlements that enjoyed little mutual contact developed very special customs. Given how unreliable the family registry system had shown itself to be, the two possibilities must have seemed equally realistic.

Yuhki set out to find the location of Tsuru’s hut near Uryunuma. There were no discernible landmarks up in the mountains, and since Tsuru could neither accurately recall where she had lived so long ago nor come along since she could barely walk, the only option was a brute search with more boots on the ground. Fortunately, Yuhki was given permission to use ten soldiers under the pretense of marching drills, and together, notwithstanding any misgivings on the part of Sugita or Yuki, they trekked among the stretches of virgin forest around the pond for nearly two weeks. What they found was a cluster of planks that seemed to indicate the site of a dilapidated hut and, nearby, an old abandoned hut.

This was in a very deep part of the forest, and it seemed as if people might live there with no one ever knowing of their existence. They
carried Tsuru up there so that she could confirm the location. She told them that the abandoned hut was Chu-chan’s rather than hers, and that hers appeared to have fallen apart. According to Tsuru, her childhood home had been built new, while Chu-chan’s had been on the brink of collapse, which meant that someone must have regularly attended to the latter, and indeed, when they examined its flooring they found signs that it had been redone. Moreover, these repairs clearly used wood of varying ages and spanned a period of several years, if not dozens of years. There was also a loom in the hut, and next to it a branch that sported fruits identical to the one found in Yuki’s asshi. The tiny fruit appeared to have been woven into the material because an unshorn branch had been used as a tool to comb the fabric and to remove dust. One of the soldiers who had come from Shinjo examined the leaves and told Yuhki that the branch belonged to a redbark Manchurian ash tree.

In Hokkaido, the redbark Manchurian ash is found only in Uryunuma, around Lake Mashu, and near Shinjo. Its trunk is light red in color and the bark therefore used as a dye. It had grown in nearly all of Ezo, the old name for the northern territories, but because the tree did not multiply with ease even as demand for its dye increased, it had become a rare sight. Consequently it fell out of use, and artificial dyes that produced a vivid red took its place. Although no one cut them down anymore, the tree had already lost its diversity as a species, and the Uryunuma and Shinjo areas having become its sole habitat, it never proliferated again. Interestingly, the normally white fruit of the redbark Manchurian ash only rarely turned red, and in Uryunuma, that had happened the previous year. Since Yuki’s asshi was not very old and such a fruit had been woven into it, the doctor believed that the coat had been made the previous year and that perhaps its color also owed to the redbark Manchurian ash.

Furthermore, he gave Yuki some cotton wool to see if she could use the loom to weave some cloth, and he recorded in his journal that she worked effortlessly on her first try. “Even in the absence of
memory, what the body has learned is not easily forgotten—an axiom derived from experience. The fact that Yuki once sat at the same loom to fashion her asshi appears certain,” the doctor concluded.

It was around this time that he sought Yuki’s permission to perform an autopsy on her in the lamentable event of her demise. Sugita affixed her own seal as a witness when the proceedings were put to official military paper. At the same time, Yuhki wound down his research into frostbite, stopped treating soldiers at the clinic, and decided to move to a cabin in the mountains of Uryunuma. It was not normally permitted for a military doctor to leave his assigned base, but on the rather forced pretext that he could not conduct any frostbite research until it started snowing again, he transferred all of his personal belongings there. The fact that he was spending the greater part of each day examining Yuki underscored just how much he had wagered on his new subject.

Life in the cabin in Uryunuma was a life for two, Yuhki and Yuki alone, and appeared peculiar even to sole sympathizer Sugita. The hope, of course, was that the patient would remember something. Her ability to navigate the woods without losing her way indeed suggested familiarity with the locale, but there were no fresh discoveries.