Biogenesis (19 page)

When the villagers saw the two giving their very blood, I wonder if it seemed almost religious in its ritualism, an extraordinary sacrifice, in reverence to the nation.

Around the time when every citizen had begun to prepare for war, the Tomarinai region entered into one of the hottest summers on record. Nakarai heard from the students who brought them food that the American attack was expected to extend even to the remote country. With the new bomb dropping on Hiroshima, surrender was only
a matter of time. The first taste of reality had begun to set in. Early on the morning of August 15, 1945 a messenger from the town hall arrived to let them know that an important announcement would be broadcast by radio at around noon.

“… enduring the unendurable and suffering the insufferable.” Half asleep on his feet, Harimoto went to the school with Nakarai and the other villagers to listen to the Emperor’s famous announcement.

“With all the static I really couldn’t hear what the Emperor was saying.” According to Harimoto, the reception in the mountains was so poor that most of the villagers thought that the purpose of the message was to bolster their spirits. The phrase, “for the generations to come,” in particular, led many people to the mistaken belief that Hirohito was simply telling them that the war had grown more pressed and that battles on the mainland were in sight. Once the short announcement was over people began to make eye contact with one another.
Time to be strong. There’s work to be done
. Only Kuwano was in tears. “We’ve lost the war,” he moaned. The villagers immediately broke out into loud confusion. Harimoto’s recollection, as given to Ishikawa, is as follows:

“Some people burst into tears. Others began shouting
banzai
. I was happy that it was finally over, but there didn’t seem to be anything I ought to do about it. We fed the midwinter weed with our blood, as always, we stared at the light and listened to the sound which burst from the seeds. When the glow disappeared in the bright light of dawn, we realized that the flowers themselves had taken on a slight reddish tint. Perhaps it was because of the unusual heat, but it was the one and only time there was ever a change of color in its petals.”

I read these words back to Harimoto, words which he had once spoken. “It was a pretty color,” he murmured, “but it didn’t even last until midnight.” Afterwards his lips continued to move, as if there was more he needed to say.

About two weeks after the end of the war, Harimoto rushed into the
town hall seeking help. Amidst the lush midwinter weeds, which now grew in profusion, they found Nakarai, who had collapsed out of weakness. He was immediately carried by stretcher to the village treatment center where he was examined by a veterinarian turned doctor.

Nakarai recovered slightly with the help of an I.V. drip, but his breath grew so short simply walking to the toilet that he would collapse again. Too weak even to stand, he still insisted on feeding the midwinter weeds, having Harimoto bring the pots when the doctor wasn’t looking so he could continue to water them with his blood. Nakarai grew even weaker, and, in a vicious circle, the weaker he grew the more beautifully the midwinter weeds glowed, fed with his thin anemic blood.

“The whole thing shone white … the way it dazzled … like a frozen cloud fallen from the sky. I wanted to see it sparkle … so I let him keep giving his blood … I’m the one who killed him.”

This secret crime, which Harimoto desperately confessed to me, continued for some time, until two military police arrived in Asahikawa. Nakarai’s reports on his “classified research” had been delivered to the Asahikawa army division by Kuwano. After confiscating these documents, the American army must have interpreted them to mean that secret weapons development was being undertaken in the north. Greeted by the mayor, the American soldiers visited the house where the research had occurred. When they saw Nakarai, who had used himself as a guinea pig and was now on the brink of death, they sneered at him.

Nakarai, whose consciousness was hazy at best, began repeating two words when he saw the soldiers,
Hurry
and
America
. Perhaps he was trying to say, “Hurry, and take me with you to America.” To all the questions on his reports which the interpreter asked, however, Nakarai only groaned in response, save for one sentence, which the interpreter was somehow able to understand. “Can’t lose now.” Angry, the soldiers spit their gum out in the potted plants and confiscated his logbook when they left.

In his hospital room, surrounded by potted midwinter weeds, a smile danced across Nakarai’s face as he slept. Undoubtedly, he was dreaming more of those sweet narcotic dreams. One morning a fog from the man-made lake of Tomarinai Dam, newly built just before the surrender, spread thickly over the village, and Nakarai ceased to wake from his midwinter-weed dreams. The only close acquaintance present at Nakarai’s deathbed was Harimoto. Due to extreme anemia, Nakarai’s corpse was as white as fallen snow. The potted specimens which Nakarai had fed with his own blood withered soon after his death. Fearing that he, too, was not long for this world, Harimoto stopped feeding his own plants. Like Nakarai’s, they, too, withered.

“Even if I die, I can’t fall to a capricious god.”

Harimoto found this sentence on a scrap of paper beneath Nakarai’s pillow. It was jarring for me to suddenly see the word “god,” which had yet to appear elsewhere in the chronicle of Nakarai’s short life.

I wanted to see Nakarai’s medical chart for myself, if it still existed. I asked the doctor who had first told me about Harimoto for his help. Since Nakarai died shortly after the war his records, apparently, should have been saved. On one of his days working at Tomarinai the young doctor searched the archives for me and managed to track down Nakarai’s chart. According to it, with blood more than four times as thin as that of a healthy person, by all rights Nakarai should not have been alive. Perhaps he had been able to survive so long because the change had occurred gradually. In addition to anemia, complications had also beset his heart and lungs. There was very little they could do for him at that point. Shocked at the severity of Nakarai’s anemia, the doctor who retrieved the chart added his own explanatory comment. “The cause of his anemia likely had less to do with the few dozen drops of blood he let each day than it did with weakened bone marrow due to constant exposure to radiation.” The direct cause of death written on the chart, however, was “loss of blood.”

Nakarai’s body was laid out for only one day, in the former temple where they had lived, and no funeral was given. After being questioned by the Americans, none of the villagers, not even Kuwano, were eager to visit the house and see Nakano’s face in death.

“I had to drag his body away all alone … He seemed … so heavy …” Harimoto took sole responsibility for the difficult task of removing the body, burying it near the common cemetery as per Nakarai’s wishes. Perhaps the midwinter weed which once flowered over Nakarai’s grave had come from a seed which had fallen on his clothing during the burial. It’s difficult to say why that one specimen was able to be dried and pressed naturally without rotting. Perhaps Nakarai’s anemia had progressed so far by the point of his death and his blood had grown so malnourished that there was little left that was prone to rot in the fluids drawn from his corpse.

Sitting at his bedside, I asked Harimoto many questions related to the manuscript. The one point which Harimoto stressed over and over again was the ethereal beauty of the midwinter weed. The leaves shone brighter than the stems, and the flower brighter still. “Like a star,” he said.

“Whatever made me want to see a thing like that?” he added quickly. His voice, in that moment, sounded more calm and collected than it had before.

I asked Harimoto several times why he wanted to separate the pots and feed the plants with his own blood, but he never answered me clearly. Perhaps he had no answer which could satisfy.

“Despite all that happened, no one seems to know who you are,” I said.

“That’s because I’ve got no name.” A coy smile played across his lips. When I didn’t respond, Harimoto continued. “Cho Hon Dok … The correct reading is Cho Hon Dok.”

“The correct reading?”

“It’s not Harimoto. It’s
Cho
.”

It took a moment before it hit me. Michihisa Harimoto was the
Japanese reading of a Korean name.

“Where are you from?”

“Korea.”

“You were a forced laborer?”

“I was rounded up one morning with six other villagers … by a squad of MPs …”

There was little I could say in response that wouldn’t be mundane.

“We were taken from the port to a ship … They told me I was lucky I wasn’t being executed … I lived in a labor camp … Our clothes were made from burlap rice sacks … It was so cold …” Harimoto’s voice had grown suddenly lucid and clear.

“When the wind blew … they’d fly away … enclosed in bolts and bars … They’d beat us with sticks … I was always hungry. Potatoes, boiled rice and barley, miso soup … Anything was delicious … everything worm-eaten. We would steal the dog’s food to eat. The freezing blankets with no lining …”

The more he talked the clearer he became and the more the words flowed. There was a faraway ring in his voice, almost as if he were talking about someone else entirely.

“A lot of us died building the dam … Fluid collected in our stomachs and we swelled up … If you tried to run, across the mountain, they’d just ambush you in Asahikawa … They made us work naked so that we couldn’t run away. If they found you they’d chain you up and let you die of starvation.”

“The dam? Do you mean Tomarinai Dam?”

“The floor where the bodies were placed rotted out and collapsed. Everyone scrambled to get clothes off the dead ones. Some of us were beaten to death instead.”

“When was this?”

“When was what?”

“Did you raise the midwinter weeds with Nakarai before or after you worked on the dam?”

“They chose me, from the other dam workers … It was after.”

“Why did they choose you?”

“I used to teach … at a school …” My question seemed to have annoyed Harimoto.

“So you used to be a teacher?”

“Yes, a teacher.”

It seems Harimoto was selected as Nakarai’s lab assistant because of his background as a teacher. It followed, as well, that his conversations with Ishikawa were grounded in a solid understanding of the facts. It was an unexpected development and I was left at a loss for words. Before I knew what I was saying, I found myself asking Harimoto if he resented the Japanese.

“None of us don’t,” he said. “But Nakarai was my friend … To you … No matter what happens … it all just seems natural, doesn’t it.”

After Harimoto finished speaking he closed his eyes. I wonder if it was some misplaced delicacy, that their macabre blood-feeding would be seen as human experimentation, that prevented Ishikawa from sharing what he learned with Akiba. Or perhaps, so many years after the war, as the author listed on the original article Ishikawa still worried that someone might hold him responsible.

A map, torn at the crease, was affixed to the back of Ishikawa’s manuscript. The words “Midwinter Weed Distribution” were written at the top. As far as I could tell, this was the map which, according to Ishikawa’s manuscript, Nakarai had gone “to great lengths to create.” I showed it to Harimoto.

“We used that map … to collect them … all of us …”

“All of who?”

“The midwinter weed.”

“You collected the midwinter weeds?”

“Yes.”

“Who did?”

“The principal … all of us.”

Harimoto was talking in circles, and it was difficult to understand what he was saying. After asking enough questions I soon learned that the day before the American soldiers came, a group, headed by Kuwano, had gone out into the mountains to remove the wild midwinter weeds.

“I guess they were afraid … of the Americans …”

Afraid, apparently, that the whole village would be implicated, and that they would all be suspected of participating in the development of new weapons. Hidden from human eyes, the midwinter weed had once eked out its own small existence. Aided by the accuracy of Nakarai’s map, however, it’s possible that the villagers had managed to root up every last plant. If so, then one could argue that the person responsible for the midwinter weed’s extinction was actually Nakarai himself.

When I examined the map with my Geiger counter, even some sixty years after the fact, faint traces of radiation still lingered. I had a copy made in the hospital’s office. Aside from the common cemetery, the markers were scattered at random intervals. But as I stared at the sheet I realized there was one location, fairly removed from Tomarinai, where several dots were concentrated. It wasn’t where the school once stood, nor was it in the vicinity of Tomarinai Dam.

“Where is this?” I asked. Harimoto, who hadn’t been involved in creating the map, only tilted his head quizzically.

On the last day of my investigation, I rented a car from a shop near the station so that I could confirm the location firsthand. Wherever it was, I suspected that a high concentration of uranium might be buried there. I drove along the national highway, its pavement in disrepair, before veering off onto a mountain road made of gravel. When I reached the location I spotted an old wooden sign with the words “Dovebath Hot Springs” written on it. A small waterfall flowed from the rocky surface of the nearby mountain, and at the mountain’s foot an old building stood, managed by the village, which housed the hot spring
baths. The springs were visited only infrequently by local residents. Stepping inside, I crossed the slatted hallway floor to peek inside at the bath. Cloudy, rust-colored water was trickling from a narrow pipe into the water below. A sign above the bath immediately caught my eye. Written in small letters were the words, “Radium Spring.” Neither the water nor the stones produced any response in the Geiger counter. The trace amounts of radium in the spring’s water clearly did not compare to the concentrated uranium found in the midwinter weed. Radium, however, is one of the radioactive decay products of uranium. I had finally found a clue, and I was determined that I would follow it. I asked the custodian if there was any documentation on the spring’s radium. He believed there was, at the town hall.