Noguchi Hideyo — The Man Who Could Never Pay It Back

The Knife and the Essay

"I should just take my knife and cut these fingers apart, one by one."

The boy said this to his friends many times, it is said. If only he could grab things like everyone else. Whenever he talked about his left hand, it always ended there.

Every time, his friends stopped him. No, no. You don't know if it would heal. Only a doctor would know.

He could say it to his friends. But he had never written it down for an adult to read.

His name was Noguchi Seisaku. Years later he would change it to Hideyo. He was born in Sanjogata, a small farming village on the shore of Lake Inawashiro in northern Japan.

When he was a year and a half old, he fell into the open fire pit in the middle of the family's farmhouse. The fingers of his left hand were burned and melted together. His thumb was pulled toward his wrist, and the other fingers were stuck to his palm. The end of his arm looked like a club.

His mother, Shika, blamed herself for looking away. It is said that she held him day and night, praying to the goddess of mercy, until her eyelids swelled shut.

The boy grew up hating to lose.

Every New Year, the village children split into an east team and a west team, and raced to see who got up first. The early team sang the bird-chasing song to wake up the other team. If the song woke you up, your team had lost.

Seisaku was on the east team. He stayed awake all night, ran out while the stars were still shining, and went around singing the song and waking up the kids on the west team, it is said. Until he grew up, the east team always won.

At school, he soon beat everyone too. He finished the English reader for the year, then the next one. At recess he read foreign books about animals and plants. Once a test asked why water expands when it freezes. He drew how the molecules line up, and the examiner was amazed.

None of that made his hand disappear.

However good his grades were, people looked at his hand first. Kids teased him and called him names. Whenever he stood in front of others, the thing he worried about most was keeping that hand out of sight.

In the middle of the fall term, in his fourth year of upper elementary school, the class was told to write an essay.

He already knew what he would write about. His left hand.

Writing was his best subject. He borrowed boys' magazines and studied how the stories were written. No one in his class could beat him.

If I'm going to write it, I'll write it so well that anyone who reads it cries.

So he held nothing back. The things he joked about with his friends, he did not joke about now. He poured out years of anger about his left hand, and he wrote all the way to the end.

His teacher, Kobayashi Sakae, read the essay in the teachers' room.

As he read, it is said, tears dropped onto the paper.

The essay went straight to the principal, Mr. Ishikawa. For a while, it is said, he could not say a word. Then the other teachers read it, one after another, and the mood in the room changed. Could we get this boy's hand operated on? That is where the talk ended up.

Mr. Kobayashi went one step further.

He shared the essay with the whole class, as an example of excellent writing.

The hand Seisaku had spent his life hiding was now laid out in front of all his classmates, in his own words.

What happened next was not what he expected.

His friends said they would give money.

Yako Yasuhei and Akiyama Yoshiji, the same friends who always stopped his talk about the knife, were the first to offer. Soon the whole class agreed to give ten sen each, a small coin. The teachers covered the rest. Together it came to a little over ten yen.

Mr. Kobayashi told Seisaku to see Dr. Watanabe Kanae in the town of Wakamatsu. Dr. Watanabe had studied in America and was a well-known surgeon.

The doctor's answer was this: the hand would never be completely normal. But an operation would definitely help.

Seisaku ran home overjoyed.

When his mother heard, she took him straight to Mr. Kobayashi's house to ask for his help. Then, it is said, she faced the direction of the temple of the goddess of mercy far away and pressed her hands together, again and again.

For more than ten years, she had blamed herself.

October 1892. Fifteen-year-old Seisaku lay on an operating table in Wakamatsu.

By his side was Akiyama Yoshiji. The class had chosen him to go along.

Dr. Watanabe's knife went in between the fingers that had been stuck together all his life.

The Vanishing Fare

Only his hand had been numbed.

Dr. Watanabe cut the burned fingers apart, one at a time. Seisaku's face went pale. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and deep lines formed between his eyebrows.

Still, it is said, he never once said "It hurts."

His friend Yoshiji, watching, went stiff, as if his own hand were being cut.

When the operation was over, Yoshiji ran out of the hospital. From Wakamatsu to Sanjogata was nearly twenty-four kilometers of mountain road, and it is said he ran almost the whole way. The autumn sun went down before he got there.

Seisaku's mother had been praying at home. When she saw Yoshiji, she rushed out. The operation is over. It went well. She grabbed his hands and thanked him again and again. Then she went out, came back with a few skewers of grilled fish, gave them to him as a gift, and walked him all the way home in the dark.

Little by little, the fingers began to move.

But there wasn't enough money. The hospital cost one yen and twenty sen a day. The ten yen from the class would not last two weeks. He really should have stayed two more weeks, but it seems he left the hospital on the day the money ran out. He had been there about ten days.

After the operation, with Mr. Kobayashi urging him on, Seisaku decided to become a doctor.

When he finished school, he moved into Dr. Watanabe's clinic as a live-in helper, doing chores by day and studying medical books at night. His favorite saying was, "Napoleon only slept three hours a night." Whenever someone looked in late at night, he was reading under the lamp.

In 1896, he went to Tokyo to take the national exam to become a doctor.

This is where another of his habits showed itself.

Money did not stay in his hands.

The money Mr. Kobayashi and others had put together for his move to Tokyo was gone in about two months. He could no longer pay for his room, and went from one acquaintance from home to the next, asking for a place to sleep. The person who took him in was Chiwaki Morinosuke, a young teacher at a dental school, six years older than Seisaku. Chiwaki did not earn much. When the head of the school said no, Chiwaki quietly let Seisaku sleep in the dormitory anyway, later got him work as the school's doorkeeper, and found money for his tuition.

In 1897 he passed the exam and became a licensed doctor. He was twenty.

Becoming a doctor did not change the habit.

After passing, he began working at Juntendo Hospital in Tokyo. He had no Western suit, so he got a friend of Chiwaki's to promise him an old one. When Chiwaki found out, he wrote Seisaku a stern letter: do not go around begging for things. Chiwaki almost never scolded anyone. The letter arrived the morning after Seisaku had stayed up all night on translation work. Before noon that same day, he wrote a long letter of apology.

Thirteen days after that apology, he wrote to his old friend Yako Yasuhei back home. "Because I don't have a single suit, people look down on me. If only I had fifty yen." The next spring, Yasuhei sent fifty yen. After it arrived, Seisaku disappeared somewhere every night for several days.

That summer, staying at Mr. Kobayashi's house, he was reading a borrowed novel when he froze. The book was a popular story about student life by the writer Tsubouchi Shoyo. In it was a medical student named Nonoguchi Seisaku. Everyone expected great things of him, but he discovered fun, and slowly ruined himself.

It was almost his own name, Noguchi Seisaku. And the story was a little too close to his own life.

He shut the book. He could not read any more.

When he told Mr. Kobayashi, the teacher chose a new name for him: Hideyo. The first character came from the Kobayashi family, and together the name meant someone who stands out in the world. The government would not change a name just because of a novel. In the end, the record was changed because there was another person in the village named Seisaku.

His name had changed. His money habits had not.

In 1899, Hideyo was chosen to join a medical team fighting plague in northern China. He was given ninety-six yen to get ready. But people he owed money to came one after another, and soon he had nothing. None of his friends would lend him more. They all knew that when he had money, it was gone by morning.

Once again, he went to Chiwaki. Chiwaki thought in silence for a while. Then, it is said, he sold things that belonged to his new wife, including her best kimono, and handed Hideyo fifteen yen.

The next year, 1900, Hideyo decided to go to America. The year before, he had worked as a guide and interpreter for Dr. Simon Flexner, an American scientist visiting Japan. There had been talk about studying in America.

His travel money was two hundred yen. It came from the family of a woman he had agreed to marry.

A few days before sailing, he went to Yokohama and threw a goodbye party for dozens of friends, at the fanciest restaurant in the area.

The next day he paid the bill. Almost nothing was left. He had not bought his ticket yet.

He went back to Chiwaki's house, unable to lift his head. It is said he told him:

"Sir, I've done something terrible."

For a while Chiwaki could not speak. If Hideyo didn't go now, it would look like he had taken the bride's family's money and run.

For the first time in his life, Chiwaki borrowed three hundred yen from a moneylender.

This time he didn't hand Hideyo the money. He went with him and bought the ship ticket himself. Third class.

December 5, 1900. On the deck of the ship in Yokohama harbor, Chiwaki listed every one of Hideyo's faults. Then, it is said, he finished with this:

"This time we find out if you were truly born with a gift, or if you are a man who has strayed from the right path. This is the start that decides it."

The ship sailed for America.

Hideyo had not told Dr. Flexner he was coming.