Biogenesis (18 page)

According to Nakarai, the potted plants with their shortened roots needed more blood in order to flower than the plants in their natural state. Selecting one plant to focus on, Nakarai and Harimoto fed it with equal amounts of blood, gradually increasing the amount until, one morning, a small white bud appeared.

I asked Harimoto how it felt to do that work. “Once the flower appeared, it wasn’t so bad giving blood anymore,” he answered. A faint smile spread beneath his unfocused eyes. Though he followed Nakarai’s orders grudgingly at first, once the beautiful flower appeared, it seems that Harimoto began to place new faith in Nakarai.

Later, Nakarai suddenly increased the number of potted plants by more than ten. He was determined to make each of them flower. Once he understood that rather than feed the plant its full amount of blood at once, it was more effective to space it out evenly with regular feedings, the nuisance of how to handle nighttime feedings arose. As Nakarai’s subordinate, the task of overnight bloodletting fell entirely to Harimoto. It was, it seems, a tiring task. Nakarai had decided that
when squeezing out blood each time, a small portion of it would be placed on filter paper. Harimoto, however, grew to hate the scheduled wake-ups, and would occasionally press his blood on the filter paper multiple times after a single bleeding and then shirk off for the remaining time. Unfortunately, he was caught by Nakarai, who happened to stir awake and to see that blood was already placed where it shouldn’t have been. Harimoto was severely rebuked.

The first to notice the plants’ glow was Harimoto. According to his younger self, the midwinter weed had been surrounded by a dim glow, with every part of the plant emitting a vague green light. The light, apparently, was so slight that one had to concentrate in order to see it. Harimoto immediately woke Nakarai. Amidst the shadowy gloom the two peered at the plant.

“The entire plant, including flowers and leaves, was glowing, with the light growing stronger as you traveled from the plant’s root to its tip. The light was a bright green and seemed to soak into the depth of our eyes. The longer we watched, the more it seemed that the light was slowly pulsing, growing stronger and weaker by turn.”

This is the account, given by Harimoto, which had been recorded by Ishikawa. Discussing why they had failed to notice this phenomenon previously, the two reasoned that the plants without flowers, not fed by enough blood, would not emit light either. Regional superstition held that, come nightfall, the area surrounding the graveyard glowed faintly. Perhaps this light had actually been caused by the midwinter weed.

Regardless, since the phenomenon had unquestionably appeared as they gradually increased the amount of blood, the next day they decided to double the amount and then wait for nightfall. When the sun set and darkness arrived, the plant, especially its tip, shone significantly brighter than the night before. The afterimage burnt into the eyes of the two from having stared too long at the glowing plant was so clear that it was difficult to distinguish from the actual plant.

“That bright light was so thrilling …” insisted Harimoto, “so
pretty … the green light … like the digits on a wristwatch …” I suppose he was trying to say that the light resembled fluorescence. Apparently, however, no amount of exposure to daylight changed the manner in which the plants shone at night. Afterwards, wanting to see how bright the light would become, Harimoto willingly began bathing the plant in copious amounts of his own blood. Feeling proud that his own blood was able to produce such a beautiful light, he soon suggested that they divide the pots between them. Regardless of his motive, if Harimoto wanted to supply the necessary blood to a plant all on his own, there was no real reason for Nakarai to object.

Even when they began feeding separate pots, there was no discernible difference in the flowers which the plants produced. There was, however, a slight difference in the green light. Nakarai’s plant had a faint reddish sheen and was darker, while Harimoto’s was brighter and with a hint of blue. As the days passed, the difference only grew stronger. Harimoto began dwelling on how beautiful his own plant was, and naturally Nakarai insisted that his own plant was better. The two began engaging in frequent bouts over the subjective issue of whether red or blue was more beautiful. Even now, it remained a thorn in Harimoto’s side.

“You agree that blue is prettier, don’t you?” When I shrugged at his question, Harimoto grew angry. “Ask anyone and they’ll tell you that blue is better.”

The nurse, who had been listening to our conversation, came over and whispered in my ear, “With his cataracts, he can barely see anymore.”

I don’t know what Harimoto thought the nurse had said, but he suddenly shouted that even just seeing it had been a treat, and burst into tears.

That blue light must have truly been something for Harimoto to remain proud of it after all these years.

In an attempt to change the light from his own plant, Nakarai began
experimenting by increasing and decreasing the amount of blood. With less blood, the light grew weaker and took on a red tone, while with more blood it grew strong and took on a blue hue. According to Harimoto, however, even at its strongest the light didn’t compare with his own plant. They also tried switching pots. The light given by the plants changed accordingly, making it clear that the difference didn’t lie with the plants themselves. The first possible difference the two thought of was, of course, blood type, but by coincidence both happened to be type O, which quickly ruled out that idea.

If they had been able to observe plants fed with blood from a wider variety of people they probably would have been able to discover what was behind the individual differences, but since Kuwano had ordered that their work remain “classified research” they were forced to conclude that this was impossible. Instead, Nakarai decided to focus on what was causing the slight day-to-day variations in the plants’ light even when fed with a fixed amount of blood by the same person. The two began keeping a record of their activities, with daily entries on sleep, diet, urination, defecation and so on, looking for any correlation between these factors and changes in the plants. Brightness and color were recorded separately on a scale of strong-medium-weak and red-green-blue. Staring at the two finished charts, the two searched for some rule governing the changes, and debated the issue passionately with each other.

It was Nakarai who noticed a pattern in the occurrence of weak days, with the light growing feebler once per week. Unsure of why at first, it wasn’t until he flipped through the journal to the next day with weak light that he realized the cause. It was the day on which one of the local students brought them chicken eggs.

“Eating those eggs,” said Harimoto, “was true happiness.” As Harimoto’s satisfaction indicated, the two had led a good life at the temple, with crops and chicken eggs sent over from the school’s farmground. On the days when the eggs were delivered, they ate them mixed with soy sauce atop rice. The difference in light seemed to be a
matter of nutrition. On the chart which Nakarai had Harimoto make, the amount of food eaten and the strength of the plants’ light formed a nearly perfect inverse relationship. The light grew weaker on days when they had eaten more, which also explained why light from Nakarai’s plant was generally weaker, since Nakarai ate more each day than Harimoto. This phenomenon, however, seemed to defy common sense, and even to be contradicted by the fact that more blood created a stronger light. For a consistent explanation, it was necessary, perhaps, to theorize that while the overall effect of blood on the plants was to strengthen its light, blood high in nutrition also had some substance which worked counter to this, and that a balance of these two effects determined the light’s strength. Regardless, in order to confirm the correlation between the plants’ light and their nutritional state, the two incorporated fasting into their future experiments.

“Once we limited ourselves to water, the light grew stronger each and every day. A mere three days in and the plants produced the most vivid light we had seen yet. Depending on your angle the light could appear either red or blue. Placed in the shadows, there was even purple or yellow tints mixed in.”

Harimoto’s words, as recorded by Ishikawa, seemed to suggest that there was some substance in blood high in nutrition which suppressed not only blue, but the light’s coloring in general. If one believes Harimoto’s claim that there was a difference in coloring even when the two followed the same diet, then it’s possible that the two were also predisposed to carry different amounts of this substance in their blood. Once their fasting ended, the two partook in a great feast. Afterwards, the light from both their plants grew weak, losing both their red and blue luminescence. It’s possible that the changes in color that appeared depending on angle had been a matter of simple polarization, but with the logbook, which would contain detailed data, now lost to time, there was no way to verify this.

Wanting to see just how vivid the light would become, the two
embarked on a series of reckless experiments, reducing the amount of food they ate as far as humanly possible. As Harimoto recalled, it was a kind of contest between them to see who could withstand the most. As bizarre as it sounds, amidst the hunger of war the two chose to willingly starve themselves, steadily growing more and more anemic. Anyone visiting the temple at that time must have been greeted with a strange and macabre sight.

Nakarai delivered regular reports on his experiments to Kuwano. As Nakarai insisted upon each visit that if his experiments were met with success it could lead to incredible new weapons of destruction, Kuwano continued to exempt him entirely from his work at the school. With more pots to feed and a longer schedule of nighttime feedings, Nakarai and Harimoto began suffering from lack of sleep. But when they did take their broken rest, both were visited, time and time without fail, by strangely sweet dreams.

“But not dreams, for instance,” Harimoto explained to Ishikawa, “about eating good food or sleeping with beautiful women.”

Ishikawa supplemented these words with his own explanation. “The dreams,” he wrote, “were perhaps of some happiness which resonated directly and deeply with the emotions.”

“When you were with Nakarai, did you dream?”

“Yes, lots,” answered Harimoto.

“What sort of dreams?”

“I’ve forgotten them all … But they were very good dreams.”

The glass in the temple windows where they worked would jar in the wind. One night the wind grew strong enough to crack a pane, and the dreams, which Harimoto had since forgotten, were blown somewhere far away. Harimoto attempted to repair the window by simply covering it with tape, but the wind persisted through the gaps. This continued for a full week, during which the two grew dour and depressed and ceased to dream at all. However, once the window was
nailed over with a board and sealed tight, the dreams returned exactly as before. The change was so drastic that it occurred to both at once that the fragrance given off by the midwinter weed must have some connection, perhaps even a narcotic-like effect.

There was once piece of the surviving manuscript whose order I couldn’t clearly place, but it seemed to indicate that another reason behind their upset sleep patterns was an eerie noise that the midwinter weed had emitted at night. When the swollen ovaries burst and its seeds, with their cottony down, scattered into the closed air, the plants would give off a faint ringing. This “ringing” sounded almost like human whispers, and in the dead of night it carried surprisingly well. The ovaries from a single plant were separated into several rooms, and they burst on a daily basis. Nakarai would scrape up the fallen seeds and plant them in the garden, hoping to cultivate them there as well. Success in raising the plants from seeds, however, was extremely poor, and nearly all of them wilted before sprouting buds.

The illumination and the bursting seeds both occurred at night. Ensorcelled by the green light, narcotic scent, and whispering murmurs, the daily rhythm of the two soon grew entirely nocturnal. In order for the plants to flower, however, daytime feedings were still necessary, and their sleep deprivation grew even worse. Meanwhile, all their desires, including their desire for sleep, seemed to grow thin. Their only need was the need to give blood. Their rising anemia probably had much to do with it, but most of their days were spent in an abstracted fog. According to Harimoto, to see the eerie glow upon Nakarai’s pale strained profile as he stared upon the midwinter weed had chilled him to the bone. But of course, I imagine that in the next instant Harimoto, too, could be found staring at the plants, with the same eerie light and pale blue smile upon his face.

While the two were literally spilling blood over their infatuation with the midwinter weed, the blood of many others was also flowing on islands in the South Pacific. The tide of war was growing bleaker day
by day, and rumor spread that some had begun resorting to cannibalism. By this time, even those living in the hinterlands were well aware that the war was not going as the Imperial General Headquarters announcements claimed. More than a few people, it seems, had begun to turn their frustration towards Nakarai, who had been exempted from military drills under the pretext of developing a new weapon of war. Some of Nakarai’s neighbors, angry that he wasn’t helping even to dig the air-raid shelters, came to the temple to give him a piece of their minds. Ishikawa heard of the incident in detail directly from the group of villagers who had been involved.

The neighbors came with shouts on their lips, ready to demand that Nakarai come help dig the air-raid shelter that he too would need to hide in, that they doubted if he was really working on a weapon at all, that it was worthless if he didn’t succeed before the war was over. They were left speechless at the gruesome sight which greeted them from the door. Amidst the emaciated visages of Nakarai and Harimoto, only their sunken eyes shone with mad life. Inside the room, where the two had happily spilt drop after drop of blood from their fingertips to feed the midwinter weeds, the indescribable scent of rotting blood, sickly and sweet, pervaded. The righteous anger of the villagers quickly faded. Some stepped back outside and threw up. In the end the group left without a word, withdrawing their complaints. “Nakarai and his assistant,” they decided, “are already giving enough to serve their country.”