Biogenesis (11 page)

At the same time, the doctor noted, “The climate here seems well suited to Yuki, and her condition has clearly improved.” It appears that he attributed Yuki’s better health to the higher humidity, in particular, of the marshland environment dotted with ponds.

It was around that time that Yuhki received a letter from another physician, one Shohei Higashino, who lived on the shore of Lake Mashu. The letter indicated that Higashino had read Yuhki’s paper and that he wished to bring to the researcher’s attention a case with similar symptoms he had encountered.

Yuhki, his interest aroused, visited Higashino together with his patient, with Sugita accompanying as her nurse. The mountainous area near Lake Mashu where Higashino operated his clinic was, Yuhki
observed, “surprisingly similar to Shinjo.” On this point his impression was identical to Sugita’s, as she later testified that “Walking along the mountain paths, it was almost as if we were in Shinjo.”

A bearded Dr. Higashino, aged forty-three, came out to meet the guests. Sugita well remembered the look on his face upon seeing Yuki. His surprise at how much she resembled his own patient was enough to lead Yuhki to a certain theory: “Perhaps the deceased that Dr. Higashino had cared for belonged to Yuki’s clan.”

The journal provides a summary of the conversation with Dr. Higashino: “The case occurred twenty-one years ago and also involved a white-haired woman who had been brought in after collapsing during a snowstorm. Although her body temperature was extremely low, she was in command of her senses, and from the outset he felt that he was dealing with peculiar symptoms. At the time he thought her to be in her teens, but no clear answers were forthcoming no matter what he asked. Strangely, her temperature, which had been low upon her admission, began to rise little by little, and she succumbed to arrhythmia six months later. No autopsy was performed, nor was the case ever reported. Unfortunately, no detailed records remain.”

It was Yuhki and Sugita’s turn to be surprised when Dr. Higashino, saying that it was the only memento of his deceased patient, brought out an asshi woven in a manner identical to Yuki’s. After examining it, Yuhki pulled out from the fabric a small, dried-up red fruit belonging to the redbark Manchurian ash; he proceeded to edify Higashino just as he himself had been schooled in Ichiyan. While Higashino knew of the tree, he said that none in the area ever bore red fruit, and he was duly surprised by what Yuhki told him.

Yuhki remarked in his journal, “When we connect the dots that are the redbark’s fruit, it is highly likely that the deceased belonged to Yuki’s clan and that she wore an asshi produced in the same manner as Yuki’s.”

Behind the clinic, accompanied by Sugita and Yuki, he brought his palms together at the grave for the unknown woman who had fallen
mid-journey, and it was there that Higashino informed them that she had been rumored by the villagers to be a snow woman’s heir. This, too, mirrored Yuki’s predicament.

Wrote Yuhki, “Many settlers there had come from the Hakuba region in Nagano Prefecture, but they, too, told of the snow woman, albeit differently than in Shinjo, and I had to wonder if the legend might not have some connection with Yuki’s clan.”

He went on to record the snow woman story that Higashino shared with him: “On a snowy night, a father-and-son pair of hunters were staying at a cabin. A snow woman came and blew her icy breath, killing the father, but she allowed the youth to live if he never told anyone about that night. Upon returning to his village, the youth met a woman as pale as snow and took her as his wife. They had a child and were happy together, but one evening, the youth mentioned that he had encountered a snow woman. At that instant, his wife changed into a snow woman and left the man, who had broken his promise, as well as the baby.”

This differed somewhat from the tale told in Shinjo but had in common a mysterious detail: an infant that was the snow woman’s baby.

After his return to Uryu, the notion that “Understanding the secrets of Yuki’s body might reveal a way to adjust the pacing of humans’ internal clock” begins to appear over and over in Yuhki’s journal in various guises. The prospect here seems to have been a scientific inquiry into eternal life and eternal youth.

“I need to publish what I have discovered so far if only to obtain funds,” he wrote, but also, analyzing the difficulty of his situation: “Other than her hair and Tsuru’s story, there is no material evidence that her lower body temperature has resulted in a slower metabolism and a longer lifespan. What is more, if Yuki had indeed lived with her kin, why she should have been taken into custody, alone, in the snowy mountains of Shinjo remains obscure.”

Even so, Yuhki decided to report on his progress so far to the medical association in Tokyo. It seems that he was prepared for a certain amount of criticism, but as he frankly stated in his journal, “The presentation was torn apart as a baseless publicity stunt.” Submitting results that flew in the face of common sense in the form of raw data without sufficient scientific grounding was the most likely cause of the adverse reaction.

Reading the association’s minutes, there were clearly misunderstandings on several points, but these provoked the ire of his superior, Ishiguro, and Yuhki’s position as an army doctor conducting research on frostbite became rather tenuous. He was given direct orders to return to clinical studies targeting ordinary soldiers, and an official notice was issued to the effect that no claims for costs associated with research on Yuki would be approved. She was barred from the clinic, and Sugita from visiting her in her cabin during working hours; using the clinic’s medications to treat Yuki was disallowed too. With no other options, Yuhki resolved to continue examining her with his own funds, and he paid Sugita out of his own pocket as well.

Thus all he could do was to work on Yuki at night in the cabin even as he treated soldiers to keep up appearances. He lamented this state of things in grim terms: “A progressive endeavor is rarely understood, and when it comes to reporting on a rare illness, it is basically impossible if the messenger is not trusted. Were Yuki to be transferred to some research facility, it is clear that she would be treated like a lab animal.”

Increasingly aware of her predicament, and ignorant of her own provenance, Yuki began to suffer from anxiety. She frequently turned to Sugita, her apparent peer, and about Yuki’s pleas for help during that period the nurse would reminisce, “All of a sudden she’d start crying, or stop eating what little food she did. At times she was too much to handle for me or the doctor.”

That Yuhki was also beginning to harbor doubts can be surmised
from the following passage: “Even if Yuki, with her lower metabolism and longer lifespan, is the direction to which humanity should aspire, in light of the long hours she spends asleep and her reduced capacity for action, what is the point of merely drawing out time?” Yet, “I want to save this girl,” he also wrote.

It seems that even as “eternity” exerted a certain attraction on him, he wished to rescue, from the darkness the word also engendered, the girl under his care.

Yuhki visited the clinic to perform physicals on the soldiers now and then, but one day, he made a great discovery. Sugita, who led him to it, recalled in great detail how it came about.

Sugita was overwhelmed that day attending to the soldiers coming in one after another, and she accidentally spilled on Yuki’s asshi a reagent used in their physicals. She immediately tried to wipe the jacket clean, to no avail, and feeling somewhat guilty, she proceeded to wash it first with water and then with some detergent, without informing the doctor. When this failed too, she confessed to Yuhki, who thought it would be a shame if their one clue were soiled. They tried, together now, to get the stain out, but were finally forced to give up.

“Some chemical reaction might be preventing the color from fading,” Yuhki wondered aloud. The reagent in question was a special dye used to test whether any blood was present in the examinee’s stool. Elm bark itself contained no animal proteins.

After studying the spot under a microscope, Yuhki hypothesized that what he had previously thought of as a pattern in the dye were actually bloodstains that had been dyed over. He ordered Sugita to rip off a frayed bit of the asshi and to run a different test with another reagent that responded to blood, and this too came back positive. The doctor concluded in his journal, “Testing for latent blood indicated that Yuki’s clothing had been exposed to a large amount, and it must have gone unnoticed because the stains appeared to be a pattern in a garment dyed a light red overall with redbark Manchurian ash.”

It would have taken a significant injury to produce so much blood, but her charts list no corresponding scar on Yuki’s body, nor had there been any actual indication of anemia upon her admission. The doctor conjectured, “As the tests were non-specific, the blood may have come from a non-human animal, but quite possibly Yuki was involved in some incident—which also brought on memory loss.”

Subsequently, Yuhki searched the floor of the hut in Uryunuma, as evidenced by the addendum he made to his journal as well as Sugita’s recollections. In the absence of any explanation on Yuhki’s part, however, she was unsure as to exactly what they had been up to. It is extremely interesting how the details of Yuhki’s behavior as he attempted to cover up the facts assume clarity only when the descriptions in his journal are combined with Sugita’s testimony.

The floor had been covered in mud and dust, but after cleaning it, Yuhki and Sugita carefully applied reagent to each of the countless patterns that marked the floorboards. As with the asshi, whenever there was a positive reaction, a different reagent was applied to confirm the finding, and when that too came back positive, tests were conducted on adjacent spots. The area of application widened; had the reactions been limited to a very small range, they would have suspected a false positive.

“The work demanded a lot of patience,” Sugita would come to recall. According to her, Yuki sat in a chair all the while, staring out the window and showing no interest in the process. They had worked from the first light of dawn, and by the time darkness began to take hold in the hut they were mostly done. What they found was a large map of blood that spread from around the wooden dining table to the hut’s door. “Yuki must have captured some animal and brought it back here,” the doctor remarked to Sugita.

Meanwhile, according to the journal entry the doctor made on the same day, “The stains do not exhibit a pattern consistent with spraying, and it appears that the bleeding was posthumous.” This reads like
a passage from a forensic report and carries a somewhat different nuance from what he told Sugita.

After it grew dark, Yuhki had Sugita hold a lantern and walked around outside the hut. The doctor dug about in the dirt using a thick branch that he had picked up only to realize with a start that what he had taken for a branch was actually a femur that had turned black in color. Though its surface, exposed to the rain and wind, had taken on a bark-like appearance, Sugita also thought it resembled a soiled piece of bone.

Yuhki turned then to her and said, “From its size and shape, it’s probably from a wild boar,” managing to convince the nurse. The next morning, they combed the area around the hut and found a nearly complete humerus as well as another, flattened bone fragment whose nature eluded them.

Reviewing the later additions to the journal, however, presents a different reality. Yuhki requested the help of a university anatomy lab and sent them the bones to determine “whether they are human.” It appears that he believed from the outset that they might be; he must have avoided sending the pieces to a forensics lab precisely because they might be human, in which case the matter could become public.

Later, he made a point of informing Sugita that “The bones were determined to be a wild boar’s after all.” Yet the university report, which has survived attached to the pages of the journal, reads: “Both the femur and the humerus are those of a human, and to judge from their qualities, a young person’s, while the fragment appears to be from a pelvis with characteristics that are definitively male. It is therefore probable that the bones are those of a young male, but there remains some uncertainty as to whether they belong to the same individual.”

The contradictions between his remarks and his journal reveal that Yuhki, clearly recognizing a criminal case, attempted to conceal it from Sugita. If the facts were made public, his patient could be taken in for questioning by the police and even be arrested for murder.

He wondered, “Is the ‘ryu’ in Yuki’s subconscious the name of the male who accompanied her?” Further, he theorized that she had etched into her unconscious the name of her victim.

According to conventional medical wisdom, lost memories tend to be restored within six months to a year but are unrecoverable past that point. Ten months had passed since Yuki’s collapse in Shinjo. Sugita recalled that despite the arrival of snow season, the doctor spent day after day staring at the bones. “It seemed as if the dead man’s bones were trying to tell me something,” a passage in his journal from that period corroborates, but of course, they remained silent.

Yet, “I suddenly recognized the lines on the bones as being scars,” he wrote one day, recording his impressions as follows: “What I had taken to be insignificant marks from their having lain on the ground coalesced into something else after I had looked at them over and over again. Once I began thinking thus, I intuited that all of the spindle-shaped carvings had been made by teeth. Moreover, while at first I assumed that they were from some stray dog, when I examined them under a magnifying glass, some of the scarring was flatter and unlikely to be due to the pointed fangs of carnivorous animals.”

The process by which the doctor grouped the marks and gauged their sizes in order to arrive at an organism with the corresponding set of teeth is all meticulously recorded in the journal. What matters most, however, is the conclusion he arrived at: “Convinced the tooth marks are human.”