Authors: Tatsuaki Ishiguro
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 but 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.
“In ordinary women a slight increase in body temperature is observed during pregnancy due to the hormones involved, and similar changes occurring in Yuki would explain her higher temperature,” the doctor calmly analyzed in that day’s journal. At the same time, he did not hesitate to put into words a certain inescapable but crushing induction: “Species maintenance via incest accompanied by necrophagia as a rite?” It is evident that he believed that Yuki’s younger brother was the father of her child.
If Yuhki did not share this with Sugita, it must have been because incest was considered a worse crime than it is today; the nurse leaking the facts would have placed Yuki, already treated as an outcast, in dire straits. Yet, Sugita’s mistaken belief made sense to the extent that this was clearly contradictory. After all, it was more than ten months ago that they had admitted Yuki, while the diagnosis indicated that the pregnancy was in its early stages. Yet again, although the doctor did not address this point in his journal or the charts, if a lower body temperature slowed down something as trivial as hair growth to such
extremes, then a physiological phenomenon like pregnancy was easily imagined to progress at an excruciating speed as well.
Maintaining such a unique metabolic condition as hypothermia must have required mating with others who shared the same condition. Since there were undoubtedly never very many individuals, most likely all close relatives, their blood would have only grown thicker over the years. If Yuki had not acted by chance but according to rites that her clan had established, then hers was an unimaginable world that involved bearing a kin’s child, eating that kin, entering a state of hibernation, losing all memory, and giving birth to new life. Considering furthermore that offspring produced through incest with a sibling, the closest blood relation, would approximate oneself to the nearest possible degree, it may have been a ritual of rebirth as well. Translated into the medical language of today, what Yuhki sensed was that “Yuki was a cloned individual.” In other words, some seventy years ago, an army doctor had encountered the issue of cloning, which had yet to occur even as a concept. Yuhki’s words testify to his confusion: “To be oneself physically, yet to possess no memories as oneself—how are we to comprehend the irony of such a phenomenon?”
Were there other clan members who practiced the same customs, or were the siblings the last of them? On this point Yuhki did not speculate. He did, however, hunt down old editions of the local newspaper to find out why the reproductive behavior coincided with periods when the redbark Manchurian ash’s fruit turned red.
“It is said that the fruit of the redbark Manchurian ash turns red only once in several decades or even a century,” he wrote. “The same year apparently sees bountiful harvests of rice, originally a tropical crop, a sign that the average temperature is higher year round, and indeed, last winter was warmer than average in Uryunuma.”
Furthermore, “Although in other animals it is common for temperature increases to prompt mating, no such seasonal patterns have been observed in humans. Yet, where hypothermia, as in Yuki’s case, inculcates sensitivity to such variations, a different ecology might
obtain. Perhaps warmer temperatures necessitated abandoning the hut in Uryunuma and searching far afield for regions with similar climes, i.e., Lake Mashu and Shinjo. It is possible that humans in whom incest had instilled a homogeneous constitution failed one and all to adapt to environmental changes.”
Tracking the charts in chronological order reveals that Yuhki’s body temperature continued to decline even after he recognized the danger signs and finally aborted the transfusion experiment. “It may be that the hibernation-inducing substance affects us even in low concentrations,” he reasoned, “because it is not easily broken down, remaining stable within the body to take on a cumulative effect. Or perhaps the substance itself disappeared but brought about an irreversible shift in metabolism.”
Yuki’s body temperature continued to rise, too, and was attributed to her pregnancy. Then, “After a certain point, Yuki grew visibly weaker.”
The doctor, who was supposed to be nursing her, was also suffering from “a feeling of exhaustion the likes of which I have never experienced before.”
Their dietary intake dwindled and often consisted of mere mouthfuls of water. Still, Yuhki was still in comparatively good health. Perhaps afraid that extracting blood daily from a pregnant woman had not had the most salubrious of effects, he instated a new regimen: “I had her drink my blood directly from a cut I made in my arm since our blood types prevented a transfusion.”
Apparently, Yuki relished Yuhki’s blood and asked for it time and again. There is a condition known as allotriophagy where a patient infected with a parasite, for instance, craves dishes that she previously eschewed. A taste for blood may very well be a form of allotriophagy. “The impressions of water in her memories may have been memories not of water, but of blood,” the doctor observed.