Authors: Tatsuaki Ishiguro
“If the theory is that simple cases of extinction occur because nature doesn’t exist by working towards a purpose,” wrote Nakarai, still pondering over the plant’s beautiful new variation in form and diminished numbers, “but rather by a slipshod process of trial and error,
then the beauty of the specimen is not part of its purpose but just a byproduct of chance. Considered this way, it’s difficult not to somehow identify with the plant.”
Nakarai was a dedicated proponent of the American doctor Hideyo Noguchi’s work,
A Theory of Evolution by Trial and Error
. He was so dedicated that he had even copied it out by hand so as to memorize it. The phrase “slipshod process of trial and error,” used above, was inspired by that work. As a child, Hideyo Noguchi had stuck his hand into a hearth fire and suffered burns so severe that his fingers had fused together. Nevertheless, with only an elementary school education, Noguchi had traveled to America where he had then made a name for himself. For Nakarai, Noguchi was a lifelong object of worship and respect. Nakarai regularly mentioned that he, too, hoped to travel to America someday. But just around the time that he became engrossed in researching the midwinter weed, the Japanese cabinet resigned, leaving behind their famous words, that the international stage was “complicated and strange.” Soon after, the “divine nation” crossed the sea in order to wage war against the “infernal west.”
While others were discussing Japan’s astonishing military results, Nakarai, who was in no danger of being drafted due to his disability, remained entirely preoccupied, instead, with the midwinter weed. The students at his school treated him as crazy and eccentric while the teachers avoided him, ignoring his bouts of excitement after finding a new specimen of midwinter weed. However, since Hokkaido was largely an agricultural region, the food supply was more stable than in the city centers of the main island and the atmosphere of war was less pronounced. Nakarai was largely left to his own devices. Considering the times, I suppose it was probably better to be branded a misfit or an imbecile than a traitor.
“Gone to the mountain.”
Leaving behind this note like some self-styled Kenji Miyazawa, Nakarai went roaming the hills once more, where he soon made
another strange discovery. It was at a common cemetery for forced laborers, in an area leveling out into plateau. In order to lay track for the Meiwa line which stretches from Tomarinai to Shinkawa, to increase output from the Hirakawa coal mine, and to build the Tomarinai Dam and manmade lake, great numbers of interred Koreans and Chinese were used as labor. Between the poor conditions, malnutrition, and the biting cold, tuberculosis spread easily and deaths were frequent. The smell of death hung near the pit used for burial, and rumor held that the spirits of the dead could be seen nearby. It was an area best shunned, as the earth had been turned over in large swathes which left pitfalls, and Nakarai had avoided it as a matter of course. But in order to finish his distribution map of the midwinter weed he had no choice but to investigate. Reluctantly setting foot in the graveyard, he was shocked to find the plants growing in thick abundance.
“Elsewhere I had yet to find even two plants growing side by side, but at the graveyard there were instances of a dozen or more midwinter weeds springing up in close proximity. Several had even sprouted white flowers. The flowers were transparent as glass bells, and when they rustled in the wind I almost expected them to make a sound.”
Engrossed in noting the distribution of the plants in his sketchbook, Nakarai soon found a pattern to their growth and flowering. At a distance from the grave the plants grew only scarcely, but when he drew closer they could be found in thick profusion. Not only did they grow more thickly, but the pure whiteness of the plants also intensified. In fact, the flowering plants were limited almost entirely to the area of the burial grounds. Almost as if, as it occurred to Nakarai, they were drawing nourishment from the corpses buried beneath the ground.
Human corpses as nourishment. It was a bleak and unsettling supposition. But in his letters, Nakarai indicated that the most likely explanation for the midwinter weed’s greedy meandering root might in fact be to seek out the superior nourishment offered to it by a decaying corpse. In order to test his hypothesis, Nakarai dug out the roots of
several plants. Beneath one such plant he found the remains of a body, already moldering away to bone. The body was entangled in the root’s thin embrace.
Nakarai wrote that the root’s clutch on the body was “almost cocoon-like.” Emboldened by this find, Nakarai soon discovered that, of the six roots he dug out, four led to bodies. And of those four, three were the roots of flowering plants. Suspecting that only specimens able to feed on a corpse’s nutritious bodily fluids could manage to flower, Nakarai embarked on a new experiment, burying the bodies of rats taken from the school’s traps beneath the flowerless midwinter weeds. Though he brought these trapped rats nearly every day, cutting off their heads and burying them at a shallow level, the plants still refused to flower.
When spreading farm fertilizer from the school also failed, Nakarai had the bizarre idea of cutting his paralyzed foot, the one free of sensation, with a small knife, and squeezing his blood over the roots for nutrients. It had likely occurred to him that the fluids which leech from a corpse were similar in composition to blood, and that applying these nutrients directly to the root would be more effective. After supplying his blood every morning and night for a week, one morning Nakarai discovered a small, tight flower bud which had appeared at last.
“Clearly, these plants draw their nourishment from animal protein in the form of blood.” The following morning the bud opened into a tiny, pure white flower. Spirits high at his success, Nakarai wrote to Ishikawa of his find.
No other reports exist of a plant thriving from human blood. But, as Nakarai pointed out, much like the pitcher plant or butterwort, which digest the bodies of insects, the midwinter weed’s source of nourishment seemed to be animal protein, which was provided by the blood. While the poor nutrient content of their soil led plants such as the pitcher plant and butterwort to become carnivorous, in terms of absorbability it does seem possible that blood would make for a better
source of nutrition than insects.
“Clearly, during the time when the midwinter weed flourished, there couldn’t have been enough corpses to provide the necessary nutrition for their growth. Perhaps afterwards, as the number of bodies increased and so offered a new source of nourishment, the plant experienced a change in its desired food. Or perhaps, as part of natural selection, specimens with a higher reliance on blood had won out over those with a lower reliance.”
Regardless of whether or not, and to what degree, this speculation was accurate, Nakarai chose to renew his attempts to cultivate the potted midwinter weeds, this time feeding them with a considerable volume of blood. His experiments, this time, were met with success.
Knowledge of Nakarai’s eccentric behavior soon spread through the small village, and he was called before the school principal, a Mr. Kuwano, who cautioned him to bring a halt to his strange goings-on. Convinced that the results would justify him in the end, Nakarai resolved to ignore the order. But fearing that repeated offense might also result in his termination, he fabricated a story that the midwinter weed, when crushed, could be used as fuel in place of oil, a substance which was then said to be “as precious as blood.” His inspiration was contemporary research into coal tar, which at the time was also under heavy scrutiny as a possible substitute for oil.
Untroubled by any pangs of conscience, Nakarai wrote to Ishikawa that “the ends will justify the means.” Considering a real demonstration necessary to inspire belief in these “means,” Nakarai even consulted with Ishikawa over a plan to smear the midwinter weed with gunpowder taken from a firework so that it would burn.
“I carried out a test run to determine how much gunpowder to use. But even without being dried, the midwinter weed caught fire immediately and burned with a fierce blaze.”
To Nakarai’s considerable surprise, it seemed that his lie had in fact led to the truth. In a later experiment, however, he found that fluid
filtered from the crushed plant did not burn so easily. Of course, for Nakarai, who feared that if the difficulty of cultivation were ignored and the plant were gathered freely it would soon grow extinct, this difficulty, too, was likely a welcome find.
Akiba’s account of the public experiment, held before a large audience in the school’s auditorium, was based on interviews gathered from the local villagers. I was also able to hear the story firsthand by speaking with a group of elderly villagers introduced to me at the town hall. One of these villagers remembered a hundred or so persons being in attendance. Another, over three hundred. Regardless, they both recalled a large crowd being packed into the fairly small auditorium. As they waited for the deputy mayor, who was running late, to take his seat in the front row, Nakarai explained the midwinter weed’s growth and features, proudly strutting his knowledge for the audience. But with the deputy mayor insisting that theory was all well and good but it was time to get on with the show, he was quickly hurried on by Kuwano. Arranged across a teacher’s desk covered in white cloth, the experiment soon began.
The midwinter weed was placed on a flat plate. When Nakarai’s lit match drew near, the flame spread immediately. In mere moments the plant had shrunk and smoldered, as if consumed from within. The flame then became a crimson ball, which slowly crawled down the plant’s stem. At the sight of this strange spectacle, the first shouts of wonder began to spread across the audience. When the flame at last reached the roots, branching off in multiple directions, a crackling noise resounded and fine sparks, like fireworks, sprang from the glow. The audience’s reaction, this time, was even greater than before. As the root faded to a glowing red ember, the excitement soon turned to shouts of praise for Nakarai. One elderly man whom I talked to recalled the root burning as like a hand-held sparkler. Possibly a small amount of fireworks had been mixed in with the plant after all. However, Kuwano, at least, was impressed, believing that a discovery
had been made in their remote lands which might aid the war effort. During his presentation, Nakarai used one phrase repeatedly. “A new weapon to aid our great nation.” That, too, had likely had its intended effect.
Before those gathered, Kuwano promised to aid Nakarai, by whatever means possible, in developing fuel from the midwinter weed. In order to produce results, Nakarai was excused from all his miscellaneous duties and set up in a private house for teachers in what had once been an old temple. He was even assigned a research assistant, named Michihisa Harimoto.
“Probably because it feeds off human blood, which spoils easily, it is hard to press the midwinter weed, which begins to rot after three to four days, giving off a strong stench, before it could dry. Attempting to dry the plant faster by applying heat also proved disastrous, as the plant simply burst into flame. A specimen I attempted to pickle in liquid, meanwhile, has nearly lost its shape, almost as if it had melted.”
Nakarai was determined to create a pressed specimen. But though the process of drying should have been simple, each of his attempts ended, without exception, in failure. Gathering the sketches he had made so far, Nakarai traveled to Tsukiyama, turning to Ishikawa for help. After some good advice on drying methods, the conversation turned to the idea of submitting a paper on the flower. According to Ishikawa, the only respectable Japanese journal in which to publish the discovery of a new species was
Natural History of the Empire
. Accordingly, Nakarai began writing, a painstaking process which required twelve direct visits to Ishikawa and thirty-two letters before completion.
His paper, however, which had been entitled “New Species of Plant Life Feeds off Human Blood,” was sent back a short three weeks after being submitted. Nakarai’s letter, requesting the reason for refusal, received no answer. For the academic world of the time, where sectarian concerns based on the author’s alma mater were paramount, the
chance of a suspicious report written by an amateur being accepted was slim to none. In the end, Ishikawa persuaded Nakarai that to let the discovery of a new species slip into obscurity would be unacceptable. With the content left intact, but the author’s name changed to Ishikawa and the title changed to “Unique Specimen Found in Hokkaido’s Coldest Regions,” the paper was readily accepted for publication. Since he had already been rejected once, the journal refused to include Nakarai’s name as a second author. Listed only as “with special thanks,” Nakarai later wrote that, “This is a country which knows nothing of the advanced discipline called science.” With the first submission, under Nakarai’s name, dismissed, followed by the refusal to list him as a second author, the incident became a source of acrimony, and Nakarai and Ishikawa soon lost touch. For the rest of Nakarai’s life, until his death, the bond between the two lay broken. At a time when the first author listed on the papers written by students was usually that of their professors, Ishikawa had likely convinced himself that, after so many rewritings, the words in the paper were practically his own. As time marched on, this single article in Japanese, which focused chiefly on the plant’s morphological features, was ultimately the only piece on the midwinter weed ever to appear. The article, which Nakarai expected to bring publishing recognition, instead earned the anger of Kuwano, who had been under the assumption that the efforts to extract flammable matter from the midwinter weed would be “classified research.” Harshly reprimanding young Nakarai, Kuwano ordered that he henceforth limit knowledge of his experiments on the plant, including their cultivation, to within his house.
What happened thereafter remained unclear, but Nakarai died suddenly shortly after the war.
“Late in his visit to Nakarai’s grave, Ishikawa returned to Tsukiyama carrying a white flower which had sprung from the ground above Nakarai’s plot. He would later press this flower.”