Dororo: Part One - Chapter 2

Dororo: Part One

Nakamura Masaru

Part 1: Hyakkimaru

Chapter 2

    The name of the shaman who first found Hyakkimaru was Jukai.

    It was close to twenty years ago, at the end of autumn, right when signs of winter were starting to make themselves felt in the forest surrounding Jukai’s mountain hut. He had crossed the border and settled there only recently.

    On the morning that he found Hyakkimaru, Jukai was near a river picking medicinal herbs. Jukai lived in the wilderness, far from town, but that wasn’t because he disliked people. He needed certain herbs and a constant, fresh supply of water to conduct his research. He’d chosen the location to build his hut specifically because it was so close to a slow-flowing river. It was also easy to gather firewood and other fuel that he needed here. That it was far from people was inconvenient in some ways, but there were some things Jukai simply couldn’t compromise on.

    It was an unusually gray, quiet morning when Jukai emerged from his sturdy hut built on a flat part of the mountain. He made his way, sure-footed, down to the river and the grassy plain that spread out below. The river split into many small, shallow tributaries in a regular arrangement that resembled an irrigated field, though Jukai suspected that the tributaries had been carved by nature and time, not people.

    A chill went down Jukai’s spine. His face was cold and wet from morning mist. As he walked along the riverbank plucking herbs to place in his basket, he noticed something floating down the river from the north.

    It was a basin.

    A basin wasn’t necessarily all that strange. Someone might have been washing clothes or drawing water and lost track of it. Jukai didn’t think so, though. Something about the basin felt--wrong. Off. There were no villages close enough to this place for someone to have lost the basin in the river. It must have traveled quite a long way.

    The dim sunshine on the basin made it look new. Jukai could use a new basin. It had been a long time since he’d had anything new. He waded partially into the river and fished the basin out, then put it down on the riverbank.

    Jukai’s joy at finding the basin in such good shape was short-lived. Is that...a body?

    The basin contained something about the size of a person’s head, all wrapped in cloth. The cloth was silk and looked expensive. It was black, embroidered in gold thread. The pattern on the silk looked like boat anchors.

    Jukai crouched down and pulled back the black silk, revealing another layer of wrapping. This layer was made of soft white silk, plain and unadorned. Jukai rubbed the black silk between his fingers, verifying the pattern. He caught his breath when he realized that he wasn’t mistaken.

    The white silk wrapping was dazzlingly bright when set against the black silk, even on this gloomy morning. Whatever was wrapped inside it was still warm--and moving.

    “Huh?”

    Warily, Jukai pulled back the layer of white silk, then took an involuntary step back from the basin.

    “What...is that?”

    The basin on the ground was wreathed in mist. It was difficult for Jukai to believe what he was seeing. Slowly and carefully, he approached the basin again and lifted the baby inside it.

    It was a baby, though a very strange one. It had no eyes, no nose, no ears, no arms and no legs. There were holes in the baby’s face where appendages should have been, but the shoulders and hips were perfectly smooth, making the baby somewhat pear-shaped.

    The baby was alive. It shifted and twitched in Jukai’s arms like it was trying to get comfortable. It made no sound.

    Jukai could imagine what must have happened to this child. It must have terrified its parents so much that they’d placed it in the river, hoping that it would drown or die of starvation and cold.

    How is this baby still alive...?

    Jukai considered the baby fortunate to be alive and was not repulsed, but most people weren’t doctors.  He pressed his finger gently to the baby’s chest. “He’s soft...too soft. Doesn’t this baby have bones?” he muttered to himself as he began his examination.

    Jukai wasn’t able to determine what was keeping the baby alive, but he did discover one thing: the child had a belly button. That meant that the baby had been born and the umbilical cord had been cut before the baby was sent down the river. This baby had a mother, somewhere.

    Jukai tried to find the baby’s pulse. The baby appeared to be breathing, but he couldn’t sense a heartbeat anywhere. When he placed his hands on the infant’s chest, there was no tell-tale rhythm of a heart.

    If he has no heart, then it’s impossible for him to be alive.

    The baby twitched in his arms. He was being kept alive by some mysterious power...what was it?

    Jukai examined the baby all over, checking for organs, trying to understand what had happened to the poor thing. He’d developed an emotional and intellectual attachment to it without consciously meaning to.

    The cool morning mist surrounded Jukai and the baby like a shroud. Jukai shivered, then gathered the baby closer to his chest.

    “He can’t catch cold. He might die.”

    Jukai decided to go home with the baby immediately. He put his herbs in the basin and carried the baby all the way home up the steep mountain path. The moon was still out, but it was on the wane. It looked like it was slowly being devoured.

    When Jukai and the baby arrived at his hut, he set the baby down, wrapped in the white and black layers of silk.

    “Sorry,” he said. “I don’t have a crib for you yet, so you’ll need to sleep on the floor for now.”

    He got out various spare blankets and pillows to make a temporary bed, then drew water and started heating it so that he could bathe the baby. When he put the baby in the water, it stopped twitching. It was no longer moving at all.

    When Jukai removed the baby from the bath and wrapped it, he felt the baby twitch again, but not as much as before. Maybe the baby was sleeping? He hoped that was the case. It was so difficult to tell.

    Jukai’s house was not large. The main room amounted to something like two hundred square feet. It was packed with tools, books, scrolls full of old records, and medical equipment. His herb shelf was overflowing with materials, some fresh, some dried.

    Jukai was a practitioner of alchemy, which was the process of turning materials like lead into gold. He’d learned it in foreign lands and settled here to conduct his research. Though he was a shaman and a doctor, he considered his most important research to be alchemical in nature. The transmutation of substances into other substances was the basis of his work.

    That night, Jukai started a case journal for the baby he’d found. He was always a meticulous record-keeper. He considered the baby’s sudden appearance as some kind of sign. He had found the baby for a reason, even if he didn’t understand it yet. The baby had no obvious sex organs. It was like a divine mistake. It was even possible that the baby was divine in origin, and had been cast to earth because of its terrifying appearance.

    A power that I do not understand helps this baby move on its own, though it seems to be lacking many bones and organs, Jukai wrote. I expect that whatever this power is is also responsible for keeping the baby alive. I suspect that it will continue keeping the baby alive for as long as it lasts. I have no way to measure this power, and no way to determine when or if the baby will die.

    Jukai paused in his writing and frowned. Just...what is this baby? Where did it come from?

    Jukai was a researcher. He had some comfort with uncertainty, but this baby might be something he would never be able to understand. He chose to assume that the baby was human, because it resembled a human child, but he couldn’t even be certain of that.

    After a while, it was easy, treating the baby as human. Jukai was invested in the baby’s welfare from the very start, but as time passed, he started to see the baby as his own child.

    The baby could not cry out or move around to signal if anything was wrong. The baby’s life consisted of a series of inscrutable twitches, followed by long periods of complete stillness that alarmed Jukai.

    There was one other very strange thing about the baby.

    After a few days in Jukai's care, the baby became able to communicate basic feelings, like hunger, hot and cold, loneliness...and a desire for understanding. Jukai understood the baby as clearly as if it was using words.

    One day, the baby communicated a new concept to Jukai, which he understood as “father” or “parent.” The baby recognized him as his caregiver and was attached to him.

    Jukai was deeply moved. He wrote in his case journal: The baby must be human...but if it is, it it a most pitiful being. No infant should have been born like this. It’s impossible.

    Father, the baby thought. Father. Father...

    Jukai understood exactly how the baby felt. He was the baby’s father now.

 

***

 

    “...and so, the shaman decided to give the baby a body,” Biwabōshi said to Dororo.

    “Give him a body?” Dororo asked. “How?”

    “He was a doctor,” Biwabōshi said. “He’d helped restore the limbs of many people who had lost them in war via surgery. You might call that his specialization. Through alchemy, he changed dead flesh into living limbs.”

    “Dead...flesh?” Dororo made a face.

    “I told you that he was a shaman as well as a doctor,” Biwabōshi said. “He used magic to give the baby limbs. I am not a shaman, so I don’t know how he did it, exactly. I couldn’t do it, myself.”

    “C’mon, you don’t know anything about that part at all?” Dororo whined. “You could make something up. Maybe Jukai used faith healing or somethin’.”

    Biwabōshi shrugged. “He was an herbalist. I know that he used medicine as well as surgery. And you might call magic a form of faith healing, if you believe that it derives from the gods. I have never claimed to possess such knowledge. He employed a number of strange arts that I am unfamiliar with.”

    “'Strange arts?'” Dororo looked at Biwabōshi with a dubious expression.

    “I know little of how limbs were reanimated for the baby’s use,” Biwabōshi said. “I know that Jukai used four elements in creating and attaching them: earth, water, fire, and lightning. But they were not ordinary earth, water, fire or lightning, though they looked the same. His research turned them into something different. And these elements could not create a child’s body on their own. They required a seed.”

    “A seed?” Dororo asked.

    Biwabōshi nodded sadly. “The corpses of children.”

 

***

 

    Jukai decided to name the baby Bōzu, which was a generic name meaning “boy.” He selected the baby’s name and gender presentation in the same word.

    Theoretically, Jukai’s researches should be sufficient to give the infant a body, but he had never tried anything so complicated before. He still didn't comprehend how Bōzu had survived past his birth or why he was still alive. He assumed that if he did nothing, the baby would be limbless and stuck in his current state for the remainder of his life.

    As he was, Bōzu was helpless. Jukai had no desire to leave him that way. To him, doing that felt the same as leaving the baby to die.

    Jukai knew that he was out of his depth in multiple respects, but he was still determined to give Bōzu a body. “Well, let’s try it,” he said to Bōzu. His heart beat faster and his hands trembled finely from excitement.

    Bōzu seemed to sense his mood and repeated, “Let’s try it!” Jukai only heard the words inside his own mind. In later years, Bōzu would be able to talk using words, but for now, he and Jukai could only communicate wordlessly via their thoughts. They retained that strange bond even after Bōzu learned to speak.

    Step by step, Jukai overcame his confusion and uncertainty and began his preparations for making Bōzu a body. Bōzu needed everything: limbs, appendages, organs, bones. Jukai left his hut and visited the war-torn villages nearby, searching for children’s bodies.

    Jukai called the pieces of dead children’s bodies “seeds.” He used electricity to break them down and form them into a clay that represented the element of earth, then boiled human skin and added it to the clay to increase the amount of raw material he had to work with. He separated bones out from the bodies very carefully. Everything had to be arranged precisely, like on a large-scale model or a doll.

    Such precise work was impossible for Jukai to do freehand, so he made molds of each major limb, appendage, and organ. With that done, he arranged the bones inside the molds, then shaped his clay over it.

    After each body part was placed in the mold, Jukai ran electricity through it using a simple machine that accepted the mold and held it still, even when the electric current rattled it. He chanted alchemical incantations and prayers as the electricity did its work. He burned homa sticks during the ritual incantations, representing the element of fire.

    The electrified body parts needed to be removed from the machine, then soaked in pure water for a short time before use.

    This process created something like a clone of the original body parts and cells as they had been in life. In a saner, less brutal time, such methods would likely be condemned. They would certainly be made illegal if they were known. But they were not. As far as Jukai knew, he was the only one capable of making new body parts in this way. It had taken him decades of research to be able to accomplish so much, and he did not pass on his knowledge to others. For someone else to spontaneously discover everything that Jukai had over the course of his long lifetime would take at least fifty years, and it was unlikely even then. If there were other shamans and doctors in the world with his skills, he didn’t know of them. Even if he did know of them, he would keep their secrets and not pry too deeply. Knowledge of this kind could be very dangerous in the wrong hands.

    “Bōzu,” Jukai said. “Are you sure? Do you really want to try this?”

    Jukai had been forming new body parts for Bōzu for more than six months. Internal organs and limbs for Bōzu were soaking in water now. They were ready to be used, but he wanted to make sure Bōzu was ready.

    Yes. Bōzu answered Jukai in his mind without an instant of hesitation.

    “You might die,” Jukai said.

    I’ll be all right.

    Jukai hesitated. Everything up until now had been nothing but preparation. If he went through with this surgery, he might be killing his child with his own hands.

    He thought of everything that had happened to him since he’d first picked up Bōzu on the riverbank: his research, his planning, his harvesting and creation of body parts. He and Bōzu could communicate with one another, mind to mind. Jukai loved Bōzu deeply and didn’t want to harm him, ever.

    “I won’t let you die,” Jukai said. “I promise.”

    The last thing Jukai had to prepare was himself. He ate a meal, drank water, and meditated to rest his mind before what was to come. Then he drew on all his energy and concentration and began the surgery.

    Jukai cut into Bōzu’s body using the smallest, most precise tools available. He placed the organs he’d made inside Bōzu’s tiny torso one by one. That done, he sewed up Bōzu’s chest cavity and started making incisions for Bōzu’s eyes, nose, and ears. The limbs came last, after everything else was already in place.

    Jukai stayed up all day and all night, performing surgery. He wanted to pause and rest, but he worked like a man possessed for the entire time. He was convinced that if he did this the wrong way, he’d never get another chance. He had no room for error. He couldn’t afford to make a mistake.

    All told, the surgeries done on Bōzu took seven days and seven nights to complete. Jukai had not slept in all that time. He used herbs to keep him awake and alert. At the end of the seventh night, Jukai understood that he had accomplished something miraculous. Bōzu was still alive. Jukai saw him breathing faintly.

    The surgeries were complete. Bōzu was completely wrapped in bandages. Jukai transferred him over to the same kind of pure, clean water that his limbs and organs had soaked in before the surgery.

    “You’re doing so well,” Jukai said hoarsely. “Sleep now.” If Jukai’s calculations were correct, Bōzu would have to soak in the water for two full years.

    When Bōzu was settled in the water, Jukai shuffled to his bedroom and collapsed.

    The surgery was just as difficult for Bōzu as it was for Jukai, if not more. For a whole week, the only thoughts they exchanged were:

    I know it’s hard, but hang in there.

    You, too.

    Jukai awoke from dreamless, untroubled sleep after three days. He gulped down some water, then went to check on Bōzu.

    “Son…” Jukai wanted to pull Bōzu from the water and hug him, comfort him, but it was too soon. He hoped that they would be able to live together as a normal father and son when Bōzu finally emerged from the water. Jukai had made him a body, though no blood pumped through his veins. It should function like a normal human body would, in time. Jukai would protect Bōzu until he could move on his own.

    “My son...” Jukai eagerly awaited the day when Bōzu would take his first steps out into the world.

 

***

 

    “But...” Biwabōshi trailed off.

    “But...what?” Dororo asked. He’d lost track of time, absorbed in Biwabōshi’s story.

    Biwabōshi  didn’t say another word. His hands were still, holding his lute in a protective posture. Dororo waited, but he didn’t speak again.