“On Christmas Eve 1977 a forty-year-old resident of Kyoto was admitted to a hospital after being poisoned by fugu [puffer fish]. The patient soon stopped breathing, and all symptoms were consistent with brain death. Physicians immediately initiated artificial respiration and other appropriate treatments. These did not help, but twenty-four hours later the patient spontaneously began to breathe. He eventually recovered completely, and later remembered hearing his family weeping over his still body. His senses were unimpaired. He wanted desperately to let them know that he was alive, but he was unable to. ‘That,’ he later told medical investigators, ‘was really hell-on-earth.’”