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.”
If the inference held, then putting aside whether death was the goal or simply the result, a human being had eaten another human being. “The far-out immorality of it,” Yuhki admitted, “made me despair.” Even so, in order to confirm his thoughts in a scientific manner, he needed to get an imprint of Yuki’s teeth. Sugita remembered having her own taken with plaster without being told what it was for. A casting was likewise obtained from Yuki, and the intention seems to have been to compare it with Sugita’s comparable female set. That is to say, when the doctor attempted to match the scarring on the bones against the castings he had taken, those for Sugita did not fit, while Yuki’s showed “incredibly perfect matches in several places,” to quote his journal.
“Yuki’s teeth are much harder than those of ordinary people, and her incisors, canines, and premolars in particular, as sharp as awls, easily crunched a chicken bone provided to her as an experiment,” the doctor observed. “Who was this man whose remains Yuki bit into, and did she really eat human flesh?”
Along with that devastating suspicion, Yuhki dashed off the following sentences in his journal: “The woman thought to be from Yuki’s clan that Higashino had cared for had also lost her memory. I gave it little thought when he mentioned it given the wealth of correlations, but while Yuki’s clan’s idiopathy explains the other points, for a chance occurrence like memory loss to be analogous as well feels fairly unnatural. Perhaps memory loss should also be considered a trait of their idiopathy. It might very well be that the memories of humans with a constitution different from ours do not need to run continuously from birth through death like ours, and maybe a low body temperature can wipe out memories. Alternatively, periodic losses of memory might actually be necessary to maintain a longer lifespan, and arguing backwards one should say that Yuki’s comatose state served such a purpose. Comas induced by extremely low body temperatures represent a form of hibernation for these women, and just as sleep weakens our memories of the day before, hibernation perhaps results in the loss of memory?”
As Yuhki himself regretted in his journal, however, “Unless Yuki is placed in a low-temperature state again, the truth is beyond reach,” and none of it could be proven.
Who was “Ryu”? Poring over the list of missing persons that had been collated for Yuki turned up no one whose given or family name included a character that could be read that way. Then the doctor reread his own journal and noticed a certain fact: “Chu—the name Tsuru had used—and Ryu share the same ‘yu’ sound. Tsuru assumed she’d called the girl Chu-chan because she was the middle child, but perhaps order of birth had nothing to do with it. Perhaps the two siblings’ nicknames were simply Chu-chan and Ryu-chan.”
He was going out on a limb, and in those times, before DNA testing could verify familial relationships, there was no direct way of confirming his hypothesis. Hoping nonetheless to perform some comparisons with Yuki, the doctor carefully re-investigated the area around the hut. His main objective was to find the skull, which best retained a person’s unique features, but he found nothing intact, and it was possible that it had already disintegrated. Sugita, who helped out with a sieve in hand, remembered what a hassle it had been to sift through all the dirt that had been dug up.
One day, however, when heavy rain gouged the earth on the mountain’s face by natural means, Yuhki found a small bone that would prove to be key. It could easily have been overlooked, but the bone fragment, a sketch of which he included in the charts, was a sharply pointed tooth. It was a pre-molar with canine traits that matched the characteristics of Yuki’s. The doctor sent the fragment to the anatomy lab together with the casting he had made of Yuki’s teeth.
Their response: “A morphed human tooth, whose curvatures are highly comparable to the casting’s according to microscopic analysis and which can be sourced to a close relative of the patient without contradiction.” Furthermore, with regard to the femur that had been enclosed anew, “There appear to be multiple marks made by these teeth.”
Yuhki’s idea had been validated in part, but it implied a shocking episode of fratricide.
At around the same time, the doctor also entertained the possibility that “Some substance might be causing Yuki’s lowered body temperature and reduced metabolism.” The actions of specific substances explaining all physiological phenomena is a present-day concept yet to be established at the time, so it was revolutionary for Yuhki to have conjectured that hibernation could be induced materially. How he arrived at such a line of thinking offers food for thought. Meanwhile, he believed that proving his hypothesis required transfusing Yuki’s blood to another person and showing that it resulted in a lower body temperature.
His eagerness to conduct such an experiment—“Fortunately, Yuki’s blood is type O, so it would be possible for me to accept blood from her”—came coupled with an awareness that “The hypothermia will be treatable if its cause becomes clear.”
Every night, the doctor withdrew enough blood from a vein in Yuki’s arm to fill a large syringe, and injected it into himself. Sugita, who went back in the early evening, did not witness this and had no knowledge whatsoever that such an experiment was taking place. During this period, Yuhki started a medical chart for himself and recorded in detail the changes that occurred in his own body. It appears that there were none in the beginning. Regarding the expected results failing to materialize he noted, “Perhaps the transfused quantity is too small.”
After one, and then two weeks of transfusions, however, they began to take effect. Yuhki’s body temperature was decreasing, if only slightly. “After the transfusion, a desire for sleep came over me, my entire body seized by lethargy,” he wrote.
By the third week, his average body temperature had fallen two whole degrees. Moreover, “I feel a little light-headed somehow and have less of an appetite, such that taking even one light meal a day is a chore, as it has been for Yuki, and my memory has suffered dramatically.” The doctor deepened his conviction that his conjecture, namely of a transferable hibernation-inducing substance, was on the mark, not to mention his earlier hypothesis that a lower body temperature impeded memory functions. He also made an odd observation: “I have begun to feel something akin to ‘hunger’ for my daily infusion of Yuki’s blood.”
Yuhki had originally planned to halt his experiment once he had proven a decline in his body temperature; perhaps it was on account of this “hunger” that he continued the transfusions even after the fourth week had passed.
Meanwhile, the doctor observed changes in Yuki as well. Her body temperature began to rise, though again only slightly. After a month, the charts recording their daily temperatures showed that Yuki’s was up by an average of one degree, inversely to the doctor’s case. “Rising body temperature may be a dangerous portent,” he wrote, mindful of Higashino’s tale. The woman believed to be from Yuki’s clan had perished after her temperature had risen.
Initially, the small amounts of blood removed from Yuki was not suspected to be the cause, and it was unclear whether her rising temperature owed to environmental changes, such as her diet and her living conditions, or to some factor internal to her, such as illness. Yuki exhibited no change in her demeanor b
ut did gain a slight amount of weight, and it was while the doctor was attempting to take precise measurements that he came up against an unexpected fact. Once again, an error on the part of the careless Nurse Sugita triggered the discovery.
In December, when the falling snow was already threatening to pile high, Sugita, intending to add a blood reagent to Yuki’s bedpan, used the bottle next to it by mistake. As with the asshi before, Sugita could be a rather absentminded nurse, and by her own admission, pharmaceutical mishaps like dispensing cold medication to a soldier complaining of a rash were daily occurrences for her. Immediately realizing her mistake, she discarded the urine, but a trace amount of reagent remained at the bottom of the bedpan, and it had changed color.
That afternoon, in the washing area, Yuhki spotted the bedpan with the unfamiliar hue, and since he had not ordered any tests which would produce such a color that morning, he confronted Sugita about it. Her confession only puzzled him the more, and he proceeded to identify the reagent in question. This was not hard to do, but to his astonishment, it was a reagent for hormonal research, imported from overseas, that indicated pregnancy in women. Having theorized that women’s higher average body temperature made them less prone to frostbite than men and that pregnant women were even less susceptible thanks to a higher average temperature, Yuhki had gotten his hands on the newly developed reagent. He immediately repeated the test, and the results were the same, Yuki’s urine indicating a positive result.
When he conducted a gynecological examination, the pregnancy still appeared to be in its earliest stages. He forbade Sugita from speaking of Yuki’s condition to anyone, and the nurse seems to have kept her silence until the present day. She did believe, for all these years, that the father of Yuki’s child was Yuhki. The patient had been in the early stages of pregnancy, and the doctor had been the only man around her, but Sugita, who cited those facts, was mistaken in light of Yuki’s illness, as shall be explained later.
Biogenesis Page 9
