Biogenesis (15 page)

The snow melted, spring came, and the vegetation burst forth into new bud. Liberated and cane in hand, Nakarai began roaming the meadows. At the higher latitudes of the Taisetsu mountain chain, the plant life differed significantly from that of Tsukiyama. The double cherry blossom trees, which flowered late in the year due to the difference in climate, blossomed only darker for the delay, while the ground
flowers were yet more vivid and bright. In his strolls, Nakarai discovered that the violet-flowering Taisetsu orchids of the region possessed faint laciniations on their petals. Impressed by this observation, Ishikawa congratulated Nakarai on his finding, further stoking the young man’s zeal for his outings.

“I’ve found Ezo black lilies flowering in areas farther north than their range is supposed to extend,” read one letter from Nakarai. “The lilies are a bit smaller than the ones found in Tsukiyama, but judging from the black-speckled white petals, they must be the same species.”

After receiving this letter, along with a pressed specimen of the lily, Ishikawa touched up Nakarai’s writing, rewording it as a short release. It was published in the trade periodical,
Botany
, under both of their names. Nakarai received a copy. Though the release amounted to less than twenty lines of text, he was more overjoyed to see his name in print on the pages of a scholarly journal. However, the publication led to problems at work. Despite his time spent gathering flora, Nakarai was also shirking duties on account of his bad leg. Soon after he was forbidden entirely from any further excursions. “It’s because one of the younger teachers is jealous of my achievements. This is all his doing,” wrote Nakarai in one of his letters, though whether that was true or not is another matter.

During this time, it seemed there was also an attractive female teacher above him in age who was more sympathetic towards Nakarai’s activities, and who fussed over him in a variety of ways. Nakarai described the lady as follows:

“She is a little strange. She teaches her students that when Prince Shotoku famously said, ‘Peace and harmony are to be valued,’ what he meant by
wa
was different from what ‘peace’ means in the West. She is obsessed with reading and carries a copy of
The Crab Canning Ship
around in the pocket of this crimson outfit she wears. She is even involved in women’s liberation. Whenever she sees me climbing the stairs she lends me her shoulder, and after lessons she sits in her classroom, where she is learning to dabble in still-life drawings.”

On one particular night, she invited Nakarai to an assembly being held at the neighboring village. Nakarai disliked going to places which were loud and boisterous, but he was reluctantly persuaded by the lady’s enthusiasm. The assembly turned out to be a study group, consisting of about ten people, which met at a local tavern.

“The meeting was held in an attic at the top of a ladder. It was a strange mix of people. One man was a miner, and there was a woman with a baby strapped to her back. As far as I could tell, the only classy person was my companion from the school. When they asked me about my background, I didn’t know what to say.”

By imitating the people around him, all of whom were engaged in discussing the socialist movement, Nakarai was finally able to express the resentment and venom he had been harboring towards society. Venting his frustrations with the principal of his school at being forbidden his botanical excursions also earned him the sympathy of the other members.

It was soon after that meeting that the principal, citing “dereliction of duty,” requested that Nakarai either resign or accept a transfer. Nakarai was given no leeway in his choice. His only option for transfer was to Tomarinai, in one of the coldest and most unforgiving regions of Hokkaido.

“She was chatting with the math teacher like they were best friends, and I told her that I was being let go. All she said was, ‘What a shame.’ Very polite. It hardly mattered to her.”

In the final letter sent to Ishikawa from Hirafu Village, Nakarai ranted bitterly of the way in which he had been fooled by her. Apologizing for allowing his own foolishness to get him driven out of a position which Ishikawa had taken such pains to secure, he added that the work he was “truly meant for” still lay ahead.

To get to Tomarinai, where Nakarai had been re-stationed, I had to take the express train from Asahikawa to Shinkawa on the Shin’u Line, and then transfer for a two-hour journey on the Meiwa Line, a local
service which runs a single-car train. For long stretches the track was lined with primeval virgin forests. After clearing the mountain folds, with its valleys crouched in flower fields, the train passed through a seemingly endless grove of silver birch. Soon after that we came to an artificial lake built for dam runoff, with a dead and withered tree poking its sunken face out from beneath the water’s surface. Finally, after passing over a long iron bridge, we pulled into an unmanned station, which consisted of only the bare platform. Disembarking, I found my clothes growing wet from the falling drizzle.

At a short walk from the station stood a small town hall built of brick. The young official working at the general affairs section where I enquired had never heard of a plant called midwinter weed. Asking him to look up the schoolhouse where Nakarai had been transferred, I learned that the building, which had been tile-roofed (a rarity in Hokkaido), was no longer in existence. The old temple where Nakarai lodged had also since been torn down.

I asked the young official where the temple had stood. Capitalizing on the great difference in temperature, the area had been turned into a vast field for cultivating buckwheat. With the rain having let up, the sun now fell through parts in the cloud, painting the broad surface of white buckwheat flowers with a patina of light. Holding my Geiger counter in one hand, I wandered the field aimlessly for over an hour in search of any trace of the midwinter weed. The dull steady beeping of the sensor was lost in the damp air, rippling outwards never to return.

Winters in Tomarinai reach as low as −20°F, freezing everything, even inside the houses, leading to an odd reversal by which the insides of people’s refrigerators are actually warmer than the air without. The winters are so cold that the only thing which might not freeze is alcohol of a higher proof. Tomarinai is so cold that members of the “Wintering Party” to Antarctica, as well as climbers bound for Mt. Everest, still visit the area for preliminary training. Considering Nakarai’s disability, the harshness of the environment must have been
overwhelming. Worse still, during the winter of Nakarai’s transfer, Tomarinai reached −43.6°F, a record for the lowest temperature ever in Japan. Nakarai’s letters to Ishikawa were full of lament.

“What a terrible place I’ve come to. When I step outside to shovel the snow, the sweat from my hair freezes into tiny icicles. It’s so cold that it actually hurts. Even your piss freezes the moment it hits the earth.

“The shoddy little workman’s cabin I live in looks like it is ready to collapse under the snow at any minute. The only thing I can see from the lone window is a field of snow, and beyond that a line of trees rising in a white blaze.

“No matter how much wood I burn I’m never warm. The only option is to live crouched over the little stove heater. One day I noticed a burning smell, only to discover that my paralyzed leg, the leg with no sensation, had suffered a bad burn, and had puckered up into a blackened blister.

“What am I going to do? I can’t imagine anything but the most pathetic plant life could exist in a place like this.”

When spring came, nearly every day after work Nakarai headed into the forest, just as he had when he was living in Hirafu. Nakarai stubbornly clung to the belief that, in order to earn recognition, his only option was to discover some new species of vegetation. However, aside from the fact that the extreme cold had turned the bark of the trees white, even a full two years after his transfer, Nakarai had still made no discoveries significant enough to include in his letters to Ishikawa.

In Nakarai’s sketchbook, which Akiba later appraised as unskilled but attentive to detail, the young man used pencils and watercolors to sketch several drawings of the Hokkaido lily of the valley. One of his favorite plants, it displayed an incredible variation in the color and shape of its flowers. The Hokkai lily of the valley, which blooms in the shade, possesses large leaves and small, cup-shaped flowers, and
exhibits differences in the demarcation of its leaves, the pattern of its arteries, and so on which are similar in their degree to fingerprinting. But not understanding the significance of a plant within a single region displaying a level of variation unheard of throughout the world, with as many as three hundred different variations of form in its flowers, it did not occur to Nakarai to disclose this discovery to Ishikawa. According to Akiba, examples such as this were evidence of Nakarai’s academic immaturity, with his endeavors amounting, after all, to little more than treasure hunting.

Nakarai often walked until the heel of his bad foot grew scraped and worn, and the hand which held his cane began to form blood blisters, but for some time made no find valuable enough to repay his effort. In the summer of his third year in Tomarinai, however, just as Nakarai was beginning to feel his efforts would prove fruitless, good luck struck suddenly. He related the event in detail to Ishikawa, as follows:

“I had gone out to Umanose Peak, an area overgrown with mammoth trees, and was on my way back when the rain began falling and I lost my way. I slipped and fell from a steep red clay embankment. While I was lying there, still too shocked to move, I saw before my eyes a small plant resembling a lily, perhaps three inches in size.”

Half-crawling over the wet earth, Nakarai drew closer to the plant. What had captured his attention so strongly was the unusual white coloring of the plant and the way in which the leaves, wet from the rain, shone transparently. Unfortunately the plant had no flowers to observe at the time, but Nakarai was certain he had never seen anything like it, not even in the illustrated botanical references he had once memorized.

“The small wing-like leaves growing from the stalk were so vibrant that they seemed ready to burst into movement. Amazingly transparent, the sheen on the leaves was similar to the rock mirror shortia, a plant which grows along craggy stretches and avoids wilting, even in winter. But the sense of transparency was something entirely amazing
and new.”

Nakarai lingered in the area for hours, observing the plant intently. Worried that once he left the location he would be unable to find it again, he uprooted the other plants in the area, and even busted down the smaller trees, so as to leave the surrounding area bare.

The following day, Nakarai began visiting the location frequently. The numerous drawings he made in his sketchbook still remain. They include figures of the plant and its leaves, in their entirety, and from all four directions, as well as details of each portion of the stem, along with detailed explanatory notes, all of which form a valuable record of the plant in its natural environment. Using a magnifying glass, he also discovered that the spines on the stem were arrayed in a spiral pattern.

After completing his observation of the plant in its natural state, Nakarai began preparations to bring it home, planning to re-cultivate it in regular unglazed pots. While attempting to dig up the root, however, he made another surprising discovery.

“Despite its small size above ground,” wrote Nakarai, “the plant’s fine, twisted root appears to stretch downwards endlessly. No matter how far I dug, the root refused to taper. I had already dug three feet deep when I felt I had no choice but to give up.”

In the end, Nakarai contented himself with cutting the root at a length suitable for potting. Perhaps the shorter root had affected the plant’s ability to absorb nutrients from the earth, for a short five days after Nakarai brought it home the plant had withered and died. To his disappointment, Nakarai had also missed his opportunity to make a dried sample. Nevertheless, the fact remained that he had discovered a new species. Though his reasoning is not entirely clear, Nakarai chose to use the characters for “winter solstice” and “grass” to name this species “Midwinter Weed.”

In search of another specimen of the plant, Nakarai began slipping away during work hours in order to search the woods. With a new species of plant, once a single instance is found, it is not uncommon to stumble upon specimen after specimen now growing in abundance.
As a new species, of course, the logic is that the plants had not existed previously, but I suppose it’s just as likely they had been under our noses all along and we had just failed to notice. Regardless, the same was true for the midwinter weed. As Nakarai wandered deeper into the mountains, legs caked in mud and his cane bouncing nimbly upon the rocks, he reached an area where he had not been before—a gulley which would later become the shore of a man-made lake—where he soon found specimen after specimen of midwinter weed, each growing in isolation from the others, as if in hiding.

“The midwinter weed is easy to miss among the taller plants, which makes it very difficult to gather. When I showed the specimens I had found to some of the elderly people in the area, they told me that it could be mashed up into a paste to treat rashes. Apparently, while the plant had always been rare, there was a period, about twenty or thirty years back, when it had suddenly flourished. During that time, according to the old folks, the downy seedpods would float on the wind in great blizzard-like clouds, and the plant would flower almost continuously throughout the year. It seems the phenomenon, however, was only temporary. When the plants began to dwindle in number the leaves also became smaller, and the whole plant also began to grow more transparent. There’s no guarantee that this is in fact the same species, but it does seem possible that a change in reproductive function might have occurred over the past few decades. Apparently, in years past, the plant largely grew in the forest. Since the specimens I’ve found have been growing entirely in valleys, it may be that together with the change in reproductive function, it also experienced a change in necessary habitat. I count myself lucky that, thanks to the cold and the poor transportation, professors from the colleges don’t make their way up here very often.”