Biogenesis

by Tatsuaki Ishiguro

  According to Sugita’s recollections, Yuki was roughly five feet in height, pale enough to appear anemic, and presumed to be young, on account of the white hair that fell straight to the small of her back, though her real age was unclear. Communicating with her was somewhat awkward, but she could speak normally, as well as read and write. She retained, however, nearly no memories regarding herself, including her name, where she had lived, and how she had come to Shinjo, and it was recorded that she was in “an advanced state of amnesia.” A check was made against current missing persons reports on file with the police, but no one matching her description was found. Apart from her low body temperature, her dislike of sunshine, and her predilection for drinking cold water, she did not exhibit any salient physical abnormalities. Judging from the charts, exams of her blood including the sedimentation rate did not show the decreased red blood cell counts indicative of anemia. Unfortunately, given the period’s medical standards, no additional biochemical tests were performed, as interesting as they would have been.

  The woman was given the name Yuki Shinjo as a matter of convenience. “Shinjo” was where she had been found, and the common female name “Yuki” sounded like her custodian’s, but this became her real name when a resident registration form was later created for her. Fascinated by her strange symptoms, Yuhki wrote a petition to his superior, Ishiguro, requesting that the government shoulder all treatment and living costs for her as a scientific patient for frostbite research. Perhaps Yuhki’s naming it “idiopathic hypothermia” helped establish a robust connection to frostbite in Ishiguro’s mind, and he accepted the petition without a hearing.

  At the same time, however, “Admitting her to a proper hospital for academic research would seem appropriate,” the surgeon general made his intention known.

  “Since her circulation worsened upon aggressive heating, a warmer climate risks damage to the patient’s health,” Yuhki responded, turning down the request. Perhaps his insistence on continuing in Shinjo simply betrayed an eagerness to analyze the mysterious condition unaided. A new bed was build at his clinic using the ample research funding that he had obtained, and treatment began of its sole inpatient, Yuki.

  It may be that no military value was recognized after all since Ishiguro permitted Yuhki to publish, in the German medical journal ARZT, the first paper ever to describe the strange symptoms. Today it is still possible to read Yuhki’s article in the May 1926 edition of ARZT remaining on file in the National Library. The simple, half-page symptom report proposes a new illness by the name of “idiopathic hypothermia” primarily characterized by low body temperature and a reduced pulse, and, as far as the content goes, it is quite commendable. At that time there were few contributions being made to such journals by non-Western authors, and a paper from Japan, which was behind in such matters, was a rarity, so it is not hard to imagine how the achievement won Yuhki much praise. As a matter of fact, he is the only non-Western author in that issue of ARZT. Of course, this was an article in an academic journal intended for a select group of researchers, and Yuki, the woman, only became widely known after a Japan News academics reporter who had learned of the case study reported a “Strange Illness of the North” in the human interest section. Even after articles about her appeared in newspapers with a national circulation, not a single relation or acquaintance came forward.

  The charts from the early period when there was still a treatment plan reveal that Yuhki considered restoring Yuki’s lost memory to be the appropriate focus. Among the discovered documents were several letters in German exchanged between Yuhki and the psychiatrist Dr. Graf, who had been dispatched to the Japan Medical Association from Germany for a limited stay. According to those letters, heeding the advice of Dr. Graf, who was, at the time, the leading authority on memory research, Yuhki employed a new approach known as the “associative method” advanced by a German researcher named Breit. Still in use today, the method is fairly simple in itself: the patient is allowed to draw freely, and any recurring motifs in the pictures are studied to probe the patient’s latent consciousness. When we forget a person’s name, for instance, and recite the alphabet in an effort to rectify our momentary memory loss, we are practicing an application of the approach. Back when psychiatry had yet to explore drug-based treatments in earnest, even such a method was considered revolutionary for its ability to recover memories that had been given up as irretrievable. Graf asked if he might visit the clinic to examine Yuki, but he was forced to return to Germany when his wife suddenly died; as there were no other experts on memory at the time, the actual analysis that Yuhki had hoped to entrust to Graf became the responsibility of the frostbite expert himself.

  Unfortunately, none of the pictures drawn by Yuki remain, but Yuhki recorded brief verbal descriptions of them in the charts. The drawings numbered in the dozens, but the subjects, mainly nature, fauna and flora, and interior still life, appear at first glance to have no common thread. Yuhki, however, picked out “water” as the element that appeared most often in Yuki’s drawings.

  “The subjects most often relate to water, and this analysis may be the key to restoring her memory,” he wrote. From his notes:

  A large pool of water formed by drops falling from trees

  Waves blown by the wind

  Starlight sparkling on a watery surface at night

  Clouds arising from golden-hued water

  A foggy landscape where clouds seem to descend from the sky

  In one form or another, water appeared in many of Yuki’s drawings, and she seemed to have had a particular liking for scenery that featured water.

  Sugita, however, testified that the main reason this impression of “water” attracted Yuhki’s attention was “the great distance from Shinjo, situated in the interior, to the seascapes featured in Yuki’s drawings,” a crucial point that the doctor himself brought up in a conversation with the nurse. Even the nearest coastline, Rumoi, was a fair distance away, and since in those days it was not uncommon for those raised in the interior to never get a glimpse of the ocean, “That Yuki lived somewhere with a view of the sea seems undeniable,” to quote Yuhki. Although it was later suspected that he had erred in ascribing her memories of water to “the sea” alone, at that point it served as an important clue.

  The story “Snow Woman” by the author Zenzo Kasai, who coincidentally worked in the logging industry in the same Shinjo during the Meiji era, contains the following passage:

  Bidding my boss farewell, I set out on the six-league trek to the town of Tanzan at about two in the afternoon. Along the way, I was met with a fierce snowstorm, and by the time I came to a pass not two leagues from the town, it was past ten at night. The snow lay as deep as my thighs. The storm scolded the darkness and howled and raved. And cackled.

  Please, I beg of you. Please hold this child for a spell, her beauty otherworldly, a pure-white snow woman softly pled, clinging to me. I rolled around in the blizzard. Accede to her request, though, I did not to the end.

  There had been a legend for many, many years in Shinjo of a snow woman leading a child by the hand, who would appear during early January or on the night of a full moon in winter. She would ask a passerby to either hug or piggyback her child, and anyone who did grew heavier and heavier and ended up buried in snow. Yuhki struggled against a rumor, whispered among the villagers, that Yuki had been nursed at a snow woman’s breast. This was an era when such legends still held sway in people’s hearts. Suspecting that the name Yuki, which means “snow,” was more than partly to blame, Yuhki confided to Sugita, “The name just came to me, but, in retrospect, it seems to have been a bad choice.”

  By that time, however, they had already registered her under that name and could not change it. Eventually, thanks to all of this, a rumor spread among the soldiers, too, that Yuki’s strange illness was contagious. Voiced protests were not made to Yuhki, their superior and an officer, but the clinic’s maidservant quit, and the soldiers stopped coming in. Faced with such ostracism, Sugita
had no choice but to prepare Yuki’s meals herself. The journal notes, “Yuki’s forays out of the clinic were met with children throwing stones at her or otherwise harassing her.” Believing that it might have been her singular appearance, especially her white hair, Yuhki ordered Sugita to dye it black, but that did little to paint over the rumors that had already spread. When a snowball smashed through a window at the clinic and Yuki suffered a serious injury to her left hand, the doctor immediately decided to have her move in with him in the cabin in which he lived, heedless of what people might say.

  Under his orders, the bed was brought to his home, and from then on Sugita would look after Yuki while the doctor worked at the clinic and until he came back early in the evening. At night, Yuhki headed back to the clinic, but when terrible snowstorms made this impractical, he often spent the night in the cabin as well.

  “Dr. Yuhki was as straight as an arrow,” Sugita offered on this point, but the villagers began to speculate about a possible relationship, and the pair only grew more and more isolated as a result. It appears that Sugita herself had been unable to strangle her own doubts. Nevertheless, whenever Yuhki was forced to spend the night at the cabin with Yuki, he made no efforts to conceal the fact and recorded every such occasion in his journal.

  Their difference in body temperature within the confined space bothered the doctor, as a grumbling journal entry attests: “If I choose to make Yuki comfortable, then far from our body heat warming up the cabin, I cannot even sleep at night without turning on the kerosene heater.” At the clinic, Yuhki had worn a coat to accommodate his patient, but in the cabin, where cold winds blew through every chink and crack, he was understandably less persevering. While Yuki dressed lightly, even Sugita, who only attended to her during the daytime, recalled, “Keeping the temperature down at her preferred levels meant not being able to sit still unless I had on an overcoat.” Her medical charts record that Yuki “spent sixteen hours of each day asleep.” Jotted down alongside her low temperatures at certain points are Yuhki’s own measurements, and the prolonged colds he seemed to have suffered testify to his difficult position.

  “Did her parents abandon her because they could not live with a daughter who was born with a sudden mutation?” Yuhki eventually wondered. “Perhaps it was the shock of such an abandonment that robbed her of her memory,” he theorized.

  There was a sense of contained excitement in his writing on the day that he made a relevant discovery: “One very cold morning, the air in the cabin grown humid from the difference in our body temperatures, the windows clouded over with moisture. I noticed some writing on one window that must have been there all along, that had been disappearing and reappearing unbeknownst to me according to the temperature. Perhaps some other characters have already vanished for good.”

  The phonetic characters read ryu (“dragon” or a male first name incorporating the word) or perhaps riyu (“reason, cause”). Yuki remembered having written this on the window a few days earlier, but she had done so absentmindedly and did not know what it meant. The doctor had her write the same characters, and since the penmanship was roughly identical, she seemed to be telling the truth.

  “What Yuki had written unconsciously must have remained as a trace,” the doctor reasoned. The phonetic characters perhaps did signify “reason,” but Yuhki recalled the kanji character ru in Rumoi Coast, which taken on its own would be vocalized as ryu. His hunch gradually came to border on a conviction, and he all but concluded, “A portion of Yuki’s memory may have been drawn out by the association method as Dr. Graf predicted.”

  Yuhki continued to actively pursue the association method and to carefully observe his patient, but even when the snows began to melt, there had been no further progress. It was then that he decided to take her to the Gold Coast in Rumoi to see if such a visit might not lead to new developments.

  A wide road existed that could take them to Rumoi in a military transport vehicle. Yet, “The mountain roads were not only narrow but pitted with potholes, and here and there landslides obstructed the way, such that it took us two days to get to our destination,” the journal says of the far from easy journey with the patient. After dozens of miles going up and down along the steep mountain road, the Sea of Japan appeared before their eyes. Yuhki wrote, “Perhaps it was the roughness of the mountain trip that made the bright blue Sea of Japan look all the more beautiful.”

  Sugita had a clear memory of how frightened Yuki seemed of the rough early spring sea and how she refused to approach the shoreline and the crashing waves. The sea glittered prettily in the late afternoon sun, true to the name Gold Coast, and Yuhki turned to Sugita to note how much it resembled Yuki’s drawings. The party traveled as far as Mashike, with its sandy beach and less menacing waves, but Yuki remained apprehensive. In the end, her physician could not but record his impression that “she could not have ever lived here.”

  Ultimately the three were forced to return to Shinjo without Yuki regaining any of her memories. Traveling in a vehicle required them to take a more roundabout route for their way back, and it was when they had reached roughly the halfway point of their journey that Sugita heard Yuki murmur, “Icchan.”

  Apparently she said this upon seeing a road sign pointing to a village called Ichiyan. At first, Sugita thought nothing of it, but Yuhki’s reaction was immediate. He asked the nurse whether “Icchan” (which sounded like some person’s nickname thanks to the chan, a diminutive suffix) corresponded to the two Chinese characters on the sign. Since these merely attempted an awkward phonetic transcription, most Japanese would not have been able to read it as Ichiyan, which means “where salmon lay their eggs” in Ainu. Having been born and raised in those parts, Sugita confirmed the reading, which was no mystery for her, but for Yuhki, it had an odd, foreign ring. He must have found it no less peculiar that Yuki could read the name correctly. When he pressed Sugita, she admitted that even Hokkaido residents might have trouble parsing it unless they were locals. Yuhki, visibly excited by this, steered the car toward Ichiyan.

  He acted quickly. The little farming village that was Ichiyan was quite a ways from the sea, but increasingly confident that Yuki had lived there, he negotiated with the village hall to rent two houses where he, Yuki, and Sugita could stay as he investigated the area. Over the course of the next three days, guided by a village hall staffer, Yuhki visited every home in Ichiyan accompanied by Sugita, who bore the coarse jacket Yuki had been wearing upon her discovery. In addition, he conducted a detailed inquiry into missing persons and broken-up families at the village hall; the doctor’s journal indicates that he knocked on the doors of every single home in the neighboring communities of Tadoshi and Shumarinai as well.

  Nothing stood out in the area apart from the ubiquitous crop fields where the first shoots of buckwheat plants rose from the earth. Yuhki made use of his authority to commandeer a jeep for this whole period, and he took Yuki along with him as he toured the surrounding region.

  “Catching the wind in her face as she rode in the jeep, Yuki seemed more cheerful than usual,” the doctor recorded. While sparsely populated, this was an expansive area. When they walked along the footpaths between the fields, Yuki soon had to crouch down in the heat of the flatlands pelted by the summer sun.

  There were no results of note on the first or second days. The region was found to have a rather cavalier attitude about family registries and inhabitants moving in or out. For instance, one household listed twin girls, but when Yuhki visited them, the sisters were actually several years apart; when he asked their mother, he was appalled to learn that she had registered the older girl when the younger was born.

  “The mother thinks that she has done nothing particularly culpable,” Yuhki commented in his journal, “as it simply seems to be the norm around here. The older sister was born in an unlucky year, a possible impediment in finding her a husband, and so the mother had put it off—and then forgotten, as she freely admitted.”

  In Hokkaido, inhabited as it was
by colonists from the rest of Japan, customs varied greatly depending on where the majority of immigrants in a given region had hailed from, and what Yuhki learned to his surprise was that in some of these places people could simply vanish.

  “Even without the mention of a missing person in the registry, I think it might be possible that Yuki had once lived here,” he wrote, apparently convinced that the facts heightened the chances that she had been a resident of the Ichiyan area. As significant corroborating evidence he pointed out that “The basin reaching from Ichiyan and Horokanai to Shumarinai is well known for being one of the most frigid places in all of Hokkaido, and the conditions here would have been ideal for Yuki with her lower body temperature.”

  On the morning of the third day, in the neighboring town of Chippubetsu, Yuhki and company found someone who said he had seen Yuki in that rough jacket the previous winter. He was a farmer in his mid-forties named Mamoru Saito, and he had thought it strange that a young woman should be walking through a blizzard in such light clothing. He said that he and the woman had exchanged a few words.

  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.