There is a condition known as hypothermia. The term comes from the Greek for “low body temperature” and usually signifies a pathological state where a loss of body temperature can end in freezing to death. It also, however, refers to rare instances where the patient’s metabolism stabilizes at a lower body temperature. “Idiopathic hypothermia” has been reported only sporadically worldwide, and an accurate portrait of the condition does not exist at the moment. Although the prevailing view is that the decreased metabolism leads to a longer lifespan, there is a high incidence of death from accompanying illnesses, and unlike with “idiopathic hyperthermia,” which has been shown to have no bearing on lifespans, as of yet no statistical data on the average convalescent is available. The catchall term “idiopathic” actually encompasses various pathological conditions that have been proposed, from genetic factors, mutations in the temperature-regulating abilities of the brain, and hormonal imbalances, to the production of chemical substances usually associated with hibernation. There are very few individual cases where a specific cause has been identified, and it is said that the condition may in fact be a conglomeration of several. Furthermore, there are cases where pigment production is affected, as it is in albinism, and research is currently underway to determine their connection.
Vogt-Koyanagi-Harada Syndrome and Takayasu Disease are among the relatively small number of illnesses discovered by Japanese, some of which, however, are considered to be medically significant. While not known as such among medical professionals, since it was not named after the person who discovered it unlike the preceding examples, it was a young Japanese doctor who made the earliest known report worldwide of “idiopathic hypothermia.” An Internet MEDLINE search of the phrase will display the Japanese author name H. Yuhki. This refers to one Koho Yuhki (“Koho” being an alternative reading of “Hironori”), an army doctor who had been assigned to the Ashibetsu-Shinjo Clinic in Hokkaido in the mid 1920s. He was the first person in the world to report, in an article published in the German medical journal ARZT, the symptoms of a woman whose standard body temperature was 82.4°F. Normally, at that temperature, the heartbeat becomes irregular then ceases altogether, and respiration stops completely as well; the report flaunted the conventional medical wisdom of the era. Immediately after its publication, Imperial University Professor Koin Aoyama and Nursing Institute Director Iwao Otsuki, along with many other doctors considered to be authorities, offered to examine and shed light on the condition, but refusing all such requests Yuhki attempted to treat the woman on his own at a small clinic.
The all-too-shocking content of Yuhki’s objective evaluation of the condition, which included the possibility of an extended lifespan due to lower metabolism and the presence of hibernation-related substances, elicited a negative reaction and the title of “fraud” for the army doctor, who was denied public funding and forced to finance the treatment out of his own pocket. Then, on February 22, 1927, only one year after the paper was published, the evening edition of the Hokkaido Daily reported Yuhki’s death, along with that of the woman, from unknown causes. The truth of the matter, which some deemed a lovers’ suicide, remained obscure, but on February 22, 1997—exactly seventy years after his death to the day, oddly enough—a massive number of military medical documents that had been sealed subsequent to World War II at the former Army Library (now the Korin Museum) were found, and Yuhki’s treatment logs and journal saw the light of day along with other documents such as the autopsy reports on the victims of the Mt. Hakkoda March. In addition to diary-like entries he must have written each day, glosses on parts that he considered important at a later date appear in the same journal, making for a rather unbalanced whole, but the record goes into great detail regarding the events of that time and could almost be considered a type of prose. What is more, after years of abiding by Yuhki’s order to keep her mouth shut, Nurse Tae Sugita (who still resides in Shinjo) was prompted by the stunning revelations to break her silence at long last, thereby supplying numerous new facts that have reconfigured the truth of what happened. Sugita, whose father had served as military support staff, was only sixteen at the time and more of a nursing apprentice than a nurse, but having witnessed the events as the doctor’s close assistant, she was able to leave behind valuable testimony prior to her death earlier this year. The following account of the incident that occurred in Shinjo, Ashibetsu Village, Hokkaido Prefecture, in 1926 is based on Yuhki’s diagnostic charts and journal and Sugita’s testimony.
Dr. Koho Yuhki, aged thirty-seven, was assigned to Army 7th Division in Asahikawa on October 1, 1925. A clinic had opened in Shinjo, where training for winter marches took place, and he had been ordered to head it. His job description, according to the recently discovered commission papers, was simply, “special medical research in the north.” Shinjo, a mountainous area in the vicinity of the village of Ashibetsu, had once been home to a military logging site and doubled as a training facility for new recruits. By Surgeon General Soraji Ishiguro’s orders, Yuhki was to research clinical treatments for frostbite, at the time a nearly incurable malady for which hardly any measures had been established. Although development of the prevention and treatment of frostbite was a significant priority for troops to be dispatched to northern fronts such as Russia, it was a condition rarely seen on the mostly temperate main island of Honshu. There were few researchers, and the need to experience colder climes is thought to have ushered the decision to post Yuhki there.
Thanks to nearly daily examinations of frostbitten soldiers brought to the clinic, Yuhki produced a string of research results, including the fact that rapid thawing in a 113°F bath was preferable over gradual thawing and massages in the field, which were anathema. In addition, upon puncturing the blisters, filled with cloudy liquid, he tried several traditional ointments, compared their effects, and even developed a special medicine of his own concoction that he named the “H-47” and that used a mold extract. Although these were medical facts, at the same time they were military secrets that Yuhki was strictly prohibited from publishing, and thus he was limited to reporting his progress to Ishiguro. For this reason Yuhki is not known for his work on frostbite, but it was revolutionary for its time, being half a step ahead of the intense research that Russia was conducting to counter freezing climes.
It was on the day the coldest temperature ever to be observed in Japan was recorded in nearby Asahikawa (February 22, 1926) that Mitsuo Gondo, a soldier charged with bringing in firewood to the barracks each day, discovered a woman in the woodshed, where apparently she had fallen into a coma after entering to rest awhile. He carried her into the clinic. The medical chart describes the woman who had been brought in as having white hair and a deathly pale complexion and even notes that her torso was showing signs of stiffness. Nurse Sugita recalled that when she held the woman’s arm to take her pulse, it felt so cold that she assumed for a moment that the woman must have already frozen to death. When Yuhki examined the patient, however, he found a slow pulse and confirmed slight movements of her chest and thereby respiration, upon which he immediately undertook attempts to revive her. According to the paper Yuhki later published in German, upon her arrival at the clinic the woman’s body temperature was 75.2°F, her pulse twenty beats per minute, and her respiration rate three breaths per minute.
Although her condition seemed relatively stable, actively warming her somehow resulted in a lower blood pressure, as Yuhki noted in the medical chart: “Blood pressure dipped upon warming, perhaps because capillaries, constricted under low temperature, responded to heating with overcompensating expansion.”
If her blood vessels had contracted to maintain blood pressure after her heart rate had slowed, then, assuming that the warming had not restored cardiac activity, blood vessels expanding indeed meant less resistance and lower pressure. Observation at room temperature was the only possible treatment for such symptoms whether or not they owed to a unique metabolism, and Yuhki was reduced to adopting the gradual warming method that he held to be anathema for frostbite patients, though, to be fair, the conditions were not identical. It was a little over two days later that the woman regained consciousness without any perceptible change in her condition, and Yuhki was in for an even greater surprise. While her mind seemed clear, and her overall condition stable, her body temperature never rose above 86°F, and her pulse, though it fluctuated, never exceeded thirty beats per minute.
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.
Yuhki learned from Saito that there was someone who knew much about these asshi in Asahikawa, and the very next day, they visited the elementary school teacher Shun Matsui. According to Matsui, asshi were made from the inner bark of elm trees. First the bark was matured in hot springs or ponds, and once it separated into flexible, dark brown sheets, these were washed in the river and broken into narrow threads which could then be used to fashion the traditional Ainu clothing. As Saito had said, the material was very resistant to moisture, but asshi were also worn as everyday clothing. What Yuhki understood from Matsui’s explanation was that “water” had a profound connection to the manufacturing process. When the teacher brought out several asshi from his collection, the doctor noticed a significant difference from Yuki’s jacket in one respect, and asked about this. According to Matsui, Ainu custom observed a certain set of rules for adorning the cuffs, neck, and hem with patterns and embroidery to ward off evil spirits. No such decorations were visible on Yuki’s asshi, and given the use of a red dye and the asymmetrical stain-like pattern, “It was probably a homemade item in imitation of the Ainu variety” in the schoolteacher’s estimation.
As Yuhki inferred, “Ainu would have started by looking for a source of elm trees, and in Yuki’s case too, the rational view would be that a nearby source of water such as a pond or a river occasioned the making of the jacket.”
Furthermore, when Matsui produced a magnifying glass and closely examined the asshi, he found on the fabric’s reverse side a small, hard, red fruit, which he handed over to Yuhki. “I’m not sure what kind of fruit this is,” Matsui is recorded to have said, “but weaving such things into the material is not an Ainu practice, and it must have found its way by accident from a regional plant.” Considering the condition of the fruit, “If it was woven into the fabric by mistake, then this asshi was probably made sometime within the past year,” he also offered.
When Yuhki spread out a map to look for locations not far from Ichiyan, in the direction of Moseushi, that had a river or a pond, an adjacent place name jumped out at him: Uryu. There was a pond called Uryunuma in the mountains, and a nearby river called Uryugawa, and they were not far at all from Ichiyan. Most decisive for him, however, was the name Uryu, which used the characters for “rain” and “dragon” and thus contained the ryu that Yuki had scribbled.
The doctor decided to continue on without returning to Shinjo. The trio first went to Uryunuma, situated in a valley halfway up a mountainside and a day’s hike on a treacherous path from the foothills.
While Sugita admired Yuhki’s capacity for action, she also frankly let slip, “When you’re not just a doctor but a scientist, I guess you can lose your sense of perspective.” It was a forced march for her and Yuki, but since they wanted to avoid having to camp out along the way, they set off before the sun was up and reached the shores of Uryunuma, located within a marshy area, after noon. Sugita recalled that while she and the doctor were chilled by the early summer breeze that blew across the water, Yuki seemed to find the place cozy.
“Around the large swampland grew clumps of bright purple flowers on tall stalks of grass, from which Yuki weaved herself a bracelet,” the journal tells. “It made me imagine her weaving her asshi,” naturally. They seemed to have spent a half-day there in the hopes that Yuki might recover some of her memories, but no salient developments were observed.
After that, the doctor walked from house to house in the village of Uryu just as he had in Ichiyan. Compared to Ichiyan, it was cooler and much more comfortable for Yuki, but unfortunately they had a hard time finding anyone who had seen her.
Yuhki seemed to lose heart, writing, “I might just be making connections out of coincidences. That Saito fellow was not the most trustworthy of men.”
The situation was turned around, however, when they visited the home of a man named Okabe, the village’s mayor, whose eighty-year-old mother, Tsuru, recalled seeing a woman just like Yuki back when Tsuru had first arrived as a colonist. Since this had been decades ago, at first Yuhki was dismissive, even as she went on excitedly, but his attitude changed when she said, “The woman I knew had different colored hair.” As only he and Sugita knew Yuki’s had been dyed, he felt that there had to be something to Tsuru’s story. Given Tsuru’s age, it was possible that the woman she remembered was Yuki’s mother. The doctor asked Sugita to take down Tsuru’s story, and a detailed description is presented in his journal. What follows is a summary.
When Tsuru and her family built and began to live in a small hut near Uryunuma, a brother and sister lived in another hut nearby. The siblings looked quite alike, and people said that the brother, the younger of the two, had a very gentle countenance, almost feminine in appearance, but it was the sister that Yuki closely resembled. She must have been seventeen or eighteen years old, and Tsuru, who often saw her out picking fruit from trees, called her “Chu-chan.” Tsuru had heard that Chu-chan had an older sibling somewhere; chu could mean “middle,” but the association between sound and meaning was only casual in her mind. The siblings’ parents were nowhere to be seen, there was never any fire in their hearth, and they seemed divorced from everyday life. They hardly ever mingled with the villagers, and Tsuru remembered that whenever an official came by, Chu-chan and her younger brother pretended not to be home. The brother was sick quite often and rarely left the hut, but Chu-chan took good care of him. The land was poor and even buckwheat had a hard time growing, so after two years, Tsuru and her family moved away, after which she never saw the siblings again.
Although Tsuru’s tale sounded convincing enough, Sugita recalled that its credibility was cast in doubt as it unfolded.
“Chu-chan said she’d grown her hair for a hundred years,” Tsuru had mumbled. Moreover, in an excited tone, she had asserted, “I gave it to her,” about a small scar Yuki had beneath her left ear.
“Her son, sitting next to her, looked apologetic,” Yuhki noted.
Having judged nonetheless that Tsuru’s tale contained its share of facts, Yuhki, intrigued, wrote in his journal, “A longer lifespan was somewhat expected in the face of a lower body temperature and slower metabolism. I need to know how old Yuki is.”
In addition, as Sugita testified, “Yuki’s behavior sometimes seemed more childish than her apparent years warranted,” and those who came into contact with her clearly had trouble pinning down her exact age.
“Until her memory returns, her calendrical age will remain uncertain, but it should be possible to formulate an approximation within a certain range of biological years,” the doctor held. He proposed various methods but ultimately chose one that translated Tsuru’s words into science. In other words, “Her hair, which falls to her lower back, must have taken quite some time to reach its current length if her entire metabolism is retarded. While Tsuru’s ‘a hundred years’ may be overblown, we should be able to calculate backwards to arrive at a minimum age.”
When he solicited Sugita’s help to that end, however, he learned of a shocking fact. He had previously ordered her to dye Yuki’s hair black, and now Sugita told him that no dyeing had been performed since. As she later testified, “You could barely see any white at all at the roots, so there was no need to dye it again.”
Yuhki had assumed that a new round of dyeing would be required, but instead a few strands of her hair were pulled out immediately, and the length that had grown out in white measured. The resulting number was an average of just 0.22 mm for the eight months since Yuki had been taken into custody. Dividing the 70 cm from her shoulders to her lower back by this rate of growth yielded a figure of approximately 170 years. It goes without saying that these findings were beyond surprising to both Sugita and Yuhki.
“I could not believe it,” Sugita would recall. “It was possible that her hair had suddenly come to grow very slowly, but as far as our calculations went, we were talking about two hundred years, which backed the elderly lady’s story.”
Subtracting seventy, Tsuru’s estimated age, from 170 gave one hundred, the exact number of years that her former neighbor supposedly had grown her hair as a child. The astounding conclusion that this supported was that the “Chu-chan” in Tsuru’s tale was not “Yuki’s mother” but Yuki herself.
The doctor spelled out his next question in his journal. “Is Yuki’s idiosyncratic constitution something that ran in her family or a sudden mutation? In other words, have her siblings all passed away, leaving Yuki alone in the world, or does her entire family stand apart from outside society, living in hiding, unable to come forward? Since inbreeding is linked to a high probability of abnormal births, it would not be too outlandish to hypothesize that what begat Yuki’s idiosyncratic constitution is incest in an isolated settlement.”
In those days when infants with birth defects were routinely killed, there were also countless stories of unusual children, considered their family’s shame, being locked away from sight in the cellar. It was not mysterious in the least if scattered settlements that enjoyed little mutual contact developed very special customs. Given how unreliable the family registry system had shown itself to be, the two possibilities must have seemed equally realistic.
Yuhki set out to find the location of Tsuru’s hut near Uryunuma. There were no discernible landmarks up in the mountains, and since Tsuru could neither accurately recall where she had lived so long ago nor come along since she could barely walk, the only option was a brute search with more boots on the ground. Fortunately, Yuhki was given permission to use ten soldiers under the pretense of marching drills, and together, notwithstanding any misgivings on the part of Sugita or Yuki, they trekked among the stretches of virgin forest around the pond for nearly two weeks. What they found was a cluster of planks that seemed to indicate the site of a dilapidated hut and, nearby, an old abandoned hut.
This was in a very deep part of the forest, and it seemed as if people might live there with no one ever knowing of their existence. They carried Tsuru up there so that she could confirm the location. She told them that the abandoned hut was Chu-chan’s rather than hers, and that hers appeared to have fallen apart. According to Tsuru, her childhood home had been built new, while Chu-chan’s had been on the brink of collapse, which meant that someone must have regularly attended to the latter, and indeed, when they examined its flooring they found signs that it had been redone. Moreover, these repairs clearly used wood of varying ages and spanned a period of several years, if not dozens of years. There was also a loom in the hut, and next to it a branch that sported fruits identical to the one found in Yuki’s asshi. The tiny fruit appeared to have been woven into the material because an unshorn branch had been used as a tool to comb the fabric and to remove dust. One of the soldiers who had come from Shinjo examined the leaves and told Yuhki that the branch belonged to a redbark Manchurian ash tree.
In Hokkaido, the redbark Manchurian ash is found only in Uryunuma, around Lake Mashu, and near Shinjo. Its trunk is light red in color and the bark therefore used as a dye. It had grown in nearly all of Ezo, the old name for the northern territories, but because the tree did not multiply with ease even as demand for its dye increased, it had become a rare sight. Consequently it fell out of use, and artificial dyes that produced a vivid red took its place. Although no one cut them down anymore, the tree had already lost its diversity as a species, and the Uryunuma and Shinjo areas having become its sole habitat, it never proliferated again. Interestingly, the normally white fruit of the redbark Manchurian ash only rarely turned red, and in Uryunuma, that had happened the previous year. Since Yuki’s asshi was not very old and such a fruit had been woven into it, the doctor believed that the coat had been made the previous year and that perhaps its color also owed to the redbark Manchurian ash.
Furthermore, he gave Yuki some cotton wool to see if she could use the loom to weave some cloth, and he recorded in his journal that she worked effortlessly on her first try. “Even in the absence of memory, what the body has learned is not easily forgotten—an axiom derived from experience. The fact that Yuki once sat at the same loom to fashion her asshi appears certain,” the doctor concluded.
It was around this time that he sought Yuki’s permission to perform an autopsy on her in the lamentable event of her demise. Sugita affixed her own seal as a witness when the proceedings were put to official military paper. At the same time, Yuhki wound down his research into frostbite, stopped treating soldiers at the clinic, and decided to move to a cabin in the mountains of Uryunuma. It was not normally permitted for a military doctor to leave his assigned base, but on the rather forced pretext that he could not conduct any frostbite research until it started snowing again, he transferred all of his personal belongings there. The fact that he was spending the greater part of each day examining Yuki underscored just how much he had wagered on his new subject.
Life in the cabin in Uryunuma was a life for two, Yuhki and Yuki alone, and appeared peculiar even to sole sympathizer Sugita. The hope, of course, was that the patient would remember something. Her ability to navigate the woods without losing her way indeed suggested familiarity with the locale, but there were no fresh discoveries.
At the same time, the doctor noted, “The climate here seems well suited to Yuki, and her condition has clearly improved.” It appears that he attributed Yuki’s better health to the higher humidity, in particular, of the marshland environment dotted with ponds.
It was around that time that Yuhki received a letter from another physician, one Shohei Higashino, who lived on the shore of Lake Mashu. The letter indicated that Higashino had read Yuhki’s paper and that he wished to bring to the researcher’s attention a case with similar symptoms he had encountered.
Yuhki, his interest aroused, visited Higashino together with his patient, with Sugita accompanying as her nurse. The mountainous area near Lake Mashu where Higashino operated his clinic was, Yuhki observed, “surprisingly similar to Shinjo.” On this point his impression was identical to Sugita’s, as she later testified that “Walking along the mountain paths, it was almost as if we were in Shinjo.”
A bearded Dr. Higashino, aged forty-three, came out to meet the guests. Sugita well remembered the look on his face upon seeing Yuki. His surprise at how much she resembled his own patient was enough to lead Yuhki to a certain theory: “Perhaps the deceased that Dr. Higashino had cared for belonged to Yuki’s clan.”
The journal provides a summary of the conversation with Dr. Higashino: “The case occurred twenty-one years ago and also involved a white-haired woman who had been brought in after collapsing during a snowstorm. Although her body temperature was extremely low, she was in command of her senses, and from the outset he felt that he was dealing with peculiar symptoms. At the time he thought her to be in her teens, but no clear answers were forthcoming no matter what he asked. Strangely, her temperature, which had been low upon her admission, began to rise little by little, and she succumbed to arrhythmia six months later. No autopsy was performed, nor was the case ever reported. Unfortunately, no detailed records remain.”
It was Yuhki and Sugita’s turn to be surprised when Dr. Higashino, saying that it was the only memento of his deceased patient, brought out an asshi woven in a manner identical to Yuki’s. After examining it, Yuhki pulled out from the fabric a small, dried-up red fruit belonging to the redbark Manchurian ash; he proceeded to edify Higashino just as he himself had been schooled in Ichiyan. While Higashino knew of the tree, he said that none in the area ever bore red fruit, and he was duly surprised by what Yuhki told him.
Yuhki remarked in his journal, “When we connect the dots that are the redbark’s fruit, it is highly likely that the deceased belonged to Yuki’s clan and that she wore an asshi produced in the same manner as Yuki’s.”
Behind the clinic, accompanied by Sugita and Yuki, he brought his palms together at the grave for the unknown woman who had fallen mid-journey, and it was there that Higashino informed them that she had been rumored by the villagers to be a snow woman’s heir. This, too, mirrored Yuki’s predicament.
Wrote Yuhki, “Many settlers there had come from the Hakuba region in Nagano Prefecture, but they, too, told of the snow woman, albeit differently than in Shinjo, and I had to wonder if the legend might not have some connection with Yuki’s clan.”
He went on to record the snow woman story that Higashino shared with him: “On a snowy night, a father-and-son pair of hunters were staying at a cabin. A snow woman came and blew her icy breath, killing the father, but she allowed the youth to live if he never told anyone about that night. Upon returning to his village, the youth met a woman as pale as snow and took her as his wife. They had a child and were happy together, but one evening, the youth mentioned that he had encountered a snow woman. At that instant, his wife changed into a snow woman and left the man, who had broken his promise, as well as the baby.”
This differed somewhat from the tale told in Shinjo but had in common a mysterious detail: an infant that was the snow woman’s baby.
After his return to Uryu, the notion that “Understanding the secrets of Yuki’s body might reveal a way to adjust the pacing of humans’ internal clock” begins to appear over and over in Yuhki’s journal in various guises. The prospect here seems to have been a scientific inquiry into eternal life and eternal youth.
“I need to publish what I have discovered so far if only to obtain funds,” he wrote, but also, analyzing the difficulty of his situation: “Other than her hair and Tsuru’s story, there is no material evidence that her lower body temperature has resulted in a slower metabolism and a longer lifespan. What is more, if Yuki had indeed lived with her kin, why she should have been taken into custody, alone, in the snowy mountains of Shinjo remains obscure.”
Even so, Yuhki decided to report on his progress so far to the medical association in Tokyo. It seems that he was prepared for a certain amount of criticism, but as he frankly stated in his journal, “The presentation was torn apart as a baseless publicity stunt.” Submitting results that flew in the face of common sense in the form of raw data without sufficient scientific grounding was the most likely cause of the adverse reaction.
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 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.
Whether Yuki would be able to give birth, and, if so, what kind of child would come is a constant motif in the journal, but the doctor also expressed a certain doubt: “The woman that Higashino cared for may have been pregnant as well. If we searched carefully, we might unearth the bones of a male of her clan. But if giving birth is such a risky feat, how have they been managing their rebirths?” Whatever conclusions he may have drawn he did not put down on paper.
There is, however, this: “What if we had not woken Yuki from her hibernation.” The sentence fragment seems to suggest a notion on the doctor’s part that Yuki and the other woman from her clan might have given birth safely, in their customary manner, had they not been forced awake.
“Perhaps I made a mistake when I thought to save this girl.”
Those are the last words in his journal, written in a badly disordered hand. Do they indicate a feeling of regret at having roused them from their slumber? Nothing, however, to elaborate on this regret follows, only a series of blank pages.
Yuhki’s and Yuki’s remains were discovered by Sugita, who had come to work. Arriving at their cabin shortly after eight, she had drawn water at the well to bring them something to drink. According to the Hokkaido Daily, it was after the snows had begun to melt, on a day when the clouds seemed to hang low enough to shroud the mountains in a thick mist, that the nurse made the discovery. A fresh dusting of snow from just the day before covered the mountains, and an air of complete silence reigned in the area.
Yuhki was lying on Yuki’s sickbed as if to snuggle against her. Sugita tried to wake him but noticed that he was cold to the touch. Shocked to find that Yuki’s respiration had ceased altogether as well, the nurse ran to the village hall for help. The local police arrived and sent word to the barracks in Shinjo, and some two hours later, soldiers arrived by car. The fact that the pair had been sharing the same bed became an issue, and since the circumstances surrounding the deaths seemed unnatural at best, the regimental commander decided to restrict the scene and to put the local police on their way. A doctor from Asahikawa 7th Division named Motoyasu Ashikaga was summoned, and a classified postmortem involving only military personnel was performed.
The army medical documents that later came to light included a report describing the conditions of the deceased. “Yuki Shinjo’s body was found atop the sickbed with that of army doctor Yuhki nestled close,” and everything from the hairs on their heads down to their toes was recorded in detail. Apparently, Yuki’s mouth had formed a faint smile and borne a small amount of blood around it. In light of the final passages of Yuhki’s journal, the blood must have been his, but Ashikaga, who knew nothing of that, wrote, “Injury to the oral cavity membrane upon death suspected.”
Neither had any external injuries, and the autopsy ruled that “natural causes” were the likely culprit. “There was no sign of a fire anywhere in the cabin, and the bodies of both persons were in a fresh state as if they had passed away only recently. Since their remains rested in an environment shuttered by snow that in effect preserved them in a frozen state, it is impossible to estimate the time of death. This does not contradict freezing as the cause of death,” the report summarized.
“According to the charts of his and her body temperatures kept by Dr. Yuhki, the curves indicating his patient Yuki Shinjo’s rising body temperature and his own slowly falling measurements intersected on the last night,” the report points out as a simple statement of fact.