Biogenesis by Tatsuaki Ishiguro

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 wassomewhat 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 onehundred, 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