Biogenesis

by Tatsuaki Ishiguro

  “The meeting was held in an attic at the top of a ladder. It was a strange mix of people. One man was a miner, and there was a woman with a baby strapped to her back. As far as I could tell, the only classy person was my companion from the school. When they asked me about my background, I didn’t know what to say.”

  By imitating the people around him, all of whom were engaged in discussing the socialist movement, Nakarai was finally able to express the resentment and venom he had been harboring towards society. Venting his frustrations with the principal of his school at being forbidden his botanical excursions also earned him the sympathy of the other members.

  It was soon after that meeting that the principal, citing “dereliction of duty,” requested that Nakarai either resign or accept a transfer. Nakarai was given no leeway in his choice. His only option for transfer was to Tomarinai, in one of the coldest and most unforgiving regions of Hokkaido.

  “She was chatting with the math teacher like they were best friends, and I told her that I was being let go. All she said was, ‘What a shame.’ Very polite. It hardly mattered to her.”

  In the final letter sent to Ishikawa from Hirafu Village, Nakarai ranted bitterly of the way in which he had been fooled by her. Apologizing for allowing his own foolishness to get him driven out of a position which Ishikawa had taken such pains to secure, he added that the work he was “truly meant for” still lay ahead.

  To get to Tomarinai, where Nakarai had been re-stationed, I had to take the express train from Asahikawa to Shinkawa on the Shin’u Line, and then transfer for a two-hour journey on the Meiwa Line, a local service which runs a single-car train. For long stretches the track was lined with primeval virgin forests. After clearing the mountain folds, with its valleys crouched in flower fields, the train passed through a seemingly endless grove of silver birch. Soon after that we came to an artificial lake built for dam runoff, with a dead and withered tree poking its sunken face out from beneath the water’s surface. Finally, after passing over a long iron bridge, we pulled into an unmanned station, which consisted of only the bare platform. Disembarking, I found my clothes growing wet from the falling drizzle.

  At a short walk from the station stood a small town hall built of brick. The young official working at the general affairs section where I enquired had never heard of a plant called midwinter weed. Asking him to look up the schoolhouse where Nakarai had been transferred, I learned that the building, which had been tile-roofed (a rarity in Hokkaido), was no longer in existence. The old temple where Nakarai lodged had also since been torn down.

  I asked the young official where the temple had stood. Capitalizing on the great difference in temperature, the area had been turned into a vast field for cultivating buckwheat. With the rain having let up, the sun now fell through parts in the cloud, painting the broad surface of white buckwheat flowers with a patina of light. Holding my Geiger counter in one hand, I wandered the field aimlessly for over an hour in search of any trace of the midwinter weed. The dull steady beeping of the sensor was lost in the damp air, rippling outwards never to return.

  Winters in Tomarinai reach as low as −20°F, freezing everything, even inside the houses, leading to an odd reversal by which the insides of people’s refrigerators are actually warmer than the air without. The winters are so cold that the only thing which might not freeze is alcohol of a higher proof. Tomarinai is so cold that members of the “Wintering Party” to Antarctica, as well as climbers bound for Mt. Everest, still visit the area for preliminary training. Considering Nakarai’s disability, the harshness of the environment must have been overwhelming. Worse still, during the winter of Nakarai’s transfer, Tomarinai reached −43.6°F, a record for the lowest temperature ever in Japan. Nakarai’s letters to Ishikawa were full of lament.

  “What a terrible place I’ve come to. When I step outside to shovel the snow, the sweat from my hair freezes into tiny icicles. It’s so cold that it actually hurts. Even your piss freezes the moment it hits the earth.

  “The shoddy little workman’s cabin I live in looks like it is ready to collapse under the snow at any minute. The only thing I can see from the lone window is a field of snow, and beyond that a line of trees rising in a white blaze.

  “No matter how much wood I burn I’m never warm. The only option is to live crouched over the little stove heater. One day I noticed a burning smell, only to discover that my paralyzed leg, the leg with no sensation, had suffered a bad burn, and had puckered up into a blackened blister.

  “What am I going to do? I can’t imagine anything but the most pathetic plant life could exist in a place like this.”

  When spring came, nearly every day after work Nakarai headed into the forest, just as he had when he was living in Hirafu. Nakarai stubbornly clung to the belief that, in order to earn recognition, his only option was to discover some new species of vegetation. However, aside from the fact that the extreme cold had turned the bark of the trees white, even a full two years after his transfer, Nakarai had still made no discoveries significant enough to include in his letters to Ishikawa.

  In Nakarai’s sketchbook, which Akiba later appraised as unskilled but attentive to detail, the young man used pencils and watercolors to sketch several drawings of the Hokkaido lily of the valley. One of his favorite plants, it displayed an incredible variation in the color and shape of its flowers. The Hokkai lily of the valley, which blooms in the shade, possesses large leaves and small, cup-shaped flowers, and exhibits differences in the demarcation of its leaves, the pattern of its arteries, and so on which are similar in their degree to fingerprinting. But not understanding the significance of a plant within a single region displaying a level of variation unheard of throughout the world, with as many as three hundred different variations of form in its flowers, it did not occur to Nakarai to disclose this discovery to Ishikawa. According to Akiba, examples such as this were evidence of Nakarai’s academic immaturity, with his endeavors amounting, after all, to little more than treasure hunting.

  Nakarai often walked until the heel of his bad foot grew scraped and worn, and the hand which held his cane began to form blood blisters, but for some time made no find valuable enough to repay his effort. In the summer of his third year in Tomarinai, however, just as Nakarai was beginning to feel his efforts would prove fruitless, good luck struck suddenly. He related the event in detail to Ishikawa, as follows:

  “I had gone out to Umanose Peak, an area overgrown with mammoth trees, and was on my way back when the rain began falling and I lost my way. I slipped and fell from a steep red clay embankment. While I was lying there, still too shocked to move, I saw before my eyes a small plant resembling a lily, perhaps three inches in size.”

  Half-crawling over the wet earth, Nakarai drew closer to the plant. What had captured his attention so strongly was the unusual white coloring of the plant and the way in which the leaves, wet from the rain, shone transparently. Unfortunately the plant had no flowers to observe at the time, but Nakarai was certain he had never seen anything like it, not even in the illustrated botanical references he had once memorized.

  “The small wing-like leaves growing from the stalk were so vibrant that they seemed ready to burst into movement. Amazingly transparent, the sheen on the leaves was similar to the rock mirror shortia, a plant which grows along craggy stretches and avoids wilting, even in winter. But the sense of transparency was something entirely amazing and new.”

  Nakarai lingered in the area for hours, observing the plant intently. Worried that once he left the location he would be unable to find it again, he uprooted the other plants in the area, and even busted down the smaller trees, so as to leave the surrounding area bare.

  The following day, Nakarai began visiting the location frequently. The numerous drawings he made in his sketchbook still remain. They include figures of the plant and its leaves, in their entirety, and from all four directions, as well as details of each portion of the stem, along with detailed explanatory notes, all of which form
a valuable record of the plant in its natural environment. Using a magnifying glass, he also discovered that the spines on the stem were arrayed in a spiral pattern.

  After completing his observation of the plant in its natural state, Nakarai began preparations to bring it home, planning to re-cultivate it in regular unglazed pots. While attempting to dig up the root, however, he made another surprising discovery.

  “Despite its small size above ground,” wrote Nakarai, “the plant’s fine, twisted root appears to stretch downwards endlessly. No matter how far I dug, the root refused to taper. I had already dug three feet deep when I felt I had no choice but to give up.”

  In the end, Nakarai contented himself with cutting the root at a length suitable for potting. Perhaps the shorter root had affected the plant’s ability to absorb nutrients from the earth, for a short five days after Nakarai brought it home the plant had withered and died. To his disappointment, Nakarai had also missed his opportunity to make a dried sample. Nevertheless, the fact remained that he had discovered a new species. Though his reasoning is not entirely clear, Nakarai chose to use the characters for “winter solstice” and “grass” to name this species “Midwinter Weed.”

  In search of another specimen of the plant, Nakarai began slipping away during work hours in order to search the woods. With a new species of plant, once a single instance is found, it is not uncommon to stumble upon specimen after specimen now growing in abundance. As a new species, of course, the logic is that the plants had not existed previously, but I suppose it’s just as likely they had been under our noses all along and we had just failed to notice. Regardless, the same was true for the midwinter weed. As Nakarai wandered deeper into the mountains, legs caked in mud and his cane bouncing nimbly upon the rocks, he reached an area where he had not been before—a gulley which would later become the shore of a man-made lake—where he soon found specimen after specimen of midwinter weed, each growing in isolation from the others, as if in hiding.

  “The midwinter weed is easy to miss among the taller plants, which makes it very difficult to gather. When I showed the specimens I had found to some of the elderly people in the area, they told me that it could be mashed up into a paste to treat rashes. Apparently, while the plant had always been rare, there was a period, about twenty or thirty years back, when it had suddenly flourished. During that time, according to the old folks, the downy seedpods would float on the wind in great blizzard-like clouds, and the plant would flower almost continuously throughout the year. It seems the phenomenon, however, was only temporary. When the plants began to dwindle in number the leaves also became smaller, and the whole plant also began to grow more transparent. There’s no guarantee that this is in fact the same species, but it does seem possible that a change in reproductive function might have occurred over the past few decades. Apparently, in years past, the plant largely grew in the forest. Since the specimens I’ve found have been growing entirely in valleys, it may be that together with the change in reproductive function, it also experienced a change in necessary habitat. I count myself lucky that, thanks to the cold and the poor transportation, professors from the colleges don’t make their way up here very often.”

  “If the theory is that simple cases of extinction occur because nature doesn’t exist by working towards a purpose,” wrote Nakarai, still pondering over the plant’s beautiful new variation in form and diminished numbers, “but rather by a slipshod process of trial and error, then the beauty of the specimen is not part of its purpose but just a byproduct of chance. Considered this way, it’s difficult not to somehow identify with the plant.”

  Nakarai was a dedicated proponent of the American doctor Hideyo Noguchi’s work, A Theory of Evolution by Trial and Error. He was so dedicated that he had even copied it out by hand so as to memorize it. The phrase “slipshod process of trial and error,” used above, was inspired by that work. As a child, Hideyo Noguchi had stuck his hand into a hearth fire and suffered burns so severe that his fingers had fused together. Nevertheless, with only an elementary school education, Noguchi had traveled to America where he had then made a name for himself. For Nakarai, Noguchi was a lifelong object of worship and respect. Nakarai regularly mentioned that he, too, hoped to travel to America someday. But just around the time that he became engrossed in researching the midwinter weed, the Japanese cabinet resigned, leaving behind their famous words, that the international stage was “complicated and strange.” Soon after, the “divine nation” crossed the sea in order to wage war against the “infernal west.”

  While others were discussing Japan’s astonishing military results, Nakarai, who was in no danger of being drafted due to his disability, remained entirely preoccupied, instead, with the midwinter weed. The students at his school treated him as crazy and eccentric while the teachers avoided him, ignoring his bouts of excitement after finding a new specimen of midwinter weed. However, since Hokkaido was largely an agricultural region, the food supply was more stable than in the city centers of the main island and the atmosphere of war was less pronounced. Nakarai was largely left to his own devices. Considering the times, I suppose it was probably better to be branded a misfit or an imbecile than a traitor.

  “Gone to the mountain.”

  Leaving behind this note like some self-styled Kenji Miyazawa, Nakarai went roaming the hills once more, where he soon made another strange discovery. It was at a common cemetery for forced laborers, in an area leveling out into plateau. In order to lay track for the Meiwa line which stretches from Tomarinai to Shinkawa, to increase output from the Hirakawa coal mine, and to build the Tomarinai Dam and manmade lake, great numbers of interred Koreans and Chinese were used as labor. Between the poor conditions, malnutrition, and the biting cold, tuberculosis spread easily and deaths were frequent. The smell of death hung near the pit used for burial, and rumor held that the spirits of the dead could be seen nearby. It was an area best shunned, as the earth had been turned over in large swathes which left pitfalls, and Nakarai had avoided it as a matter of course. But in order to finish his distribution map of the midwinter weed he had no choice but to investigate. Reluctantly setting foot in the graveyard, he was shocked to find the plants growing in thick abundance.

  “Elsewhere I had yet to find even two plants growing side by side, but at the graveyard there were instances of a dozen or more midwinter weeds springing up in close proximity. Several had even sprouted white flowers. The flowers were transparent as glass bells, and when they rustled in the wind I almost expected them to make a sound.”

  Engrossed in noting the distribution of the plants in his sketchbook, Nakarai soon found a pattern to their growth and flowering. At a distance from the grave the plants grew only scarcely, but when he drew closer they could be found in thick profusion. Not only did they grow more thickly, but the pure whiteness of the plants also intensified. In fact, the flowering plants were limited almost entirely to the area of the burial grounds. Almost as if, as it occurred to Nakarai, they were drawing nourishment from the corpses buried beneath the ground.

  Human corpses as nourishment. It was a bleak and unsettling supposition. But in his letters, Nakarai indicated that the most likely explanation for the midwinter weed’s greedy meandering root might in fact be to seek out the superior nourishment offered to it by a decaying corpse. In order to test his hypothesis, Nakarai dug out the roots of several plants. Beneath one such plant he found the remains of a body, already moldering away to bone. The body was entangled in the root’s thin embrace.

  Nakarai wrote that the root’s clutch on the body was “almost cocoon-like.” Emboldened by this find, Nakarai soon discovered that, of the six roots he dug out, four led to bodies. And of those four, three were the roots of flowering plants. Suspecting that only specimens able to feed on a corpse’s nutritious bodily fluids could manage to flower, Nakarai embarked on a new experiment, burying the bodies of rats taken from the school’s traps beneath the flowerless midwinter weeds. Though he brought these trapped rats near
ly every day, cutting off their heads and burying them at a shallow level, the plants still refused to flower.

  When spreading farm fertilizer from the school also failed, Nakarai had the bizarre idea of cutting his paralyzed foot, the one free of sensation, with a small knife, and squeezing his blood over the roots for nutrients. It had likely occurred to him that the fluids which leech from a corpse were similar in composition to blood, and that applying these nutrients directly to the root would be more effective. After supplying his blood every morning and night for a week, one morning Nakarai discovered a small, tight flower bud which had appeared at last.

  “Clearly, these plants draw their nourishment from animal protein in the form of blood.” The following morning the bud opened into a tiny, pure white flower. Spirits high at his success, Nakarai wrote to Ishikawa of his find.

  No other reports exist of a plant thriving from human blood. But, as Nakarai pointed out, much like the pitcher plant or butterwort, which digest the bodies of insects, the midwinter weed’s source of nourishment seemed to be animal protein, which was provided by the blood. While the poor nutrient content of their soil led plants such as the pitcher plant and butterwort to become carnivorous, in terms of absorbability it does seem possible that blood would make for a better source of nutrition than insects.

  “Clearly, during the time when the midwinter weed flourished, there couldn’t have been enough corpses to provide the necessary nutrition for their growth. Perhaps afterwards, as the number of bodies increased and so offered a new source of nourishment, the plant experienced a change in its desired food. Or perhaps, as part of natural selection, specimens with a higher reliance on blood had won out over those with a lower reliance.”

  Regardless of whether or not, and to what degree, this speculation was accurate, Nakarai chose to renew his attempts to cultivate the potted midwinter weeds, this time feeding them with a considerable volume of blood. His experiments, this time, were met with success.