Teito Monogatari:
The Tale of the Imperial Capital
Part 2: Supernatural Babylon
Author: Hiroshi Aramata
Part 3: Solvers of Mysteries
Chapter 15: Torahiko Terada Explores the Underground of Taira no Masakado’s Burial Mound
“Wait, wait! Carefully set the seismograph down.”
Narutaki Junichi looked around the freshly dug vertical shaft, found a spot where the soil was nicely dry, and placed the seismograph there. Terada Torahiko descended a rope ladder and came over to him.
“Junichi, make sure it’s in a flat spot,” Torahiko said. “This matter calls for great caution.”
The shaft they had dug was roughly twenty feet deep. Ōkōchi Masatoshi, Torahiko’s colleague, had been watching the bottom of the hole from ground level. He called down to Torahiko, chuckling all the while.
“You’ve got some weird hobbies,” Masatoshi said. “You just got back from studying in Germany, and the first thing you want to to is dig a giant hole on the Ministry of Finance grounds? What’s wrong with you?”
“Keep your voice down,” Torahiko hissed. “We can’t have outsiders interrupting us now. I got permission from Yōichirō, so it’s fine. I’m still worried, though. This kind of project weighs on my conscience.”
“Oh, it does?” Masatoshi asked. Not enough to stop you from doing this, though, he thought privately to himself. He folded his arms and gazed toward Mitarashi Pond. The surface shimmered brilliantly in the early summer sunlight. Right in front of him rose a small mound—the famous burial mound of Taira no Masakado’s head.
“Digging a hole in a place like this… if Masakado’s curse comes down on us, don’t expect me to take the blame,” Masatoshi said. He was nearly six feet tall, but he was a physical coward.
“Damn! I forgot the recording paper and the magnet. Masatoshi, drop them down to me! Please, my lord?” Torahiko called up to his friend.
Masatoshi flinched a little at being referred to as “my lord,” but Torahiko was far from the only person to address him that way. He had the rank and title of a viscount, after all.
In 1908 (Meiji 41), he had been one of the first Japanese men to study abroad in Germany at his own expense. He spent his days in Berlin completely absorbed in skating. When Torahiko arrived, they were companions in everything. Both were born geniuses, so even while they amused themselves they kept their scientific eyes wide open. Even skating could be perceived through a scientific lens. Masatoshi often pondered the physical relationship between a smooth, icy surface and the blade of an ice skate.
While Torahiko waited for the magnet and recording paper to appear, he watched Junichi digging in the dirt with his fingers. Looking closely, he saw the outline of a stone structure.
“There’s something here,” Torahiko said excitedly.
“What is it?” Junichi asked. “Shall I dig a bit more, Mr. Terada?”
“Go ahead and try. A stone structure at this depth may be something constructed before Ōta Dōkan’s time.”
Junichi thrust a nearby hoe into solid ground and dug out the stonework. After several strikes, part of the structure suddenly caved in, opening a gaping black hole.
“It’s hollow! Mr. Terada—it’s completely empty under this stonework!”
Spurred by his excited shout, Torahiko ignored the narrowness of the hole, dropped to all fours, and peered into the gap. But it was too dark to see well.
“Break away more of it,” Torahiko said. “I can’t see.”
The black space rapidly grew larger.
“Stop. Take a break there for a moment.”
The inside of the stone structure was coming into view. Torahiko carefully surveyed the dark interior of the structure, crouched down like a frog.
“What’s wrong, Torahiko?” Masatoshi asked from far above.
“Quiet. You don’t understand what we’re looking at, do you?”
The physicist strained his eyes and stared into the darkness. In the gloom, the inner surface of the structure floated dimly into view. It appeared to be an old stone chamber. He made out gray fragments scattered across the floor. What were they?
Torahiko pressed his cheek against the dirt-covered stonework. Then he saw part of a human skull.
From there, he was able to identify many of the other fragments. They were all bones—and there were so many of them.
Tearing his gaze away from the eerie scene in the stone chamber, the physicist said, “Bones! Human bones!”
“What did you say? Human bones?” Masatoshi shouted in alarm. His voice echoed in the stone chamber below.
“We’ve found something tremendous. This is astonishing. Is this an ancient cemetery? There are quite a lot of bones here.” Torahiko looked up at Masatoshi. His face was streaked with mud. Then he glanced at Junichi.
“We can excavate the bones later,” Torahiko said to Junichi. “The seismograph comes first. Get the seismograph set up and then record your observations on the paper.”
While preparations were being made, Torahiko picked up a compass and carefully checked their location underground. Then he checked the time on his pocket watch, wrote it in his notebook, and finally turned his eyes to the needle of the seismograph.
“Is it ready?” Torahiko asked Junichi.
Junichi nodded.
“Good. From here on out, we have to rely on luck. I don’t know how many hours it will take, but we must stay here staring at it until the needle moves. Be prepared for anything.”
“What about me? What should I do now?” Masatoshi asked.
“You’re too tall to fit in the hole,” Torahiko said. “So just stay up there and lord it over us from above. You’d only get in the way if you came down here.”
Junichi and Torahiko focused all their attention on the seismograph. After about ten minutes, the needle began to quiver slightly. They hurriedly shifted their eyes to the recording paper, but no tremor was recorded on the white sheet.
The quivering needle must have been a shared hallucination, for it made no mark on the paper at all.
Over time, the illusion became more intense. The needle looked like it was vibrating violently, but there was no change at all recorded on the pure white recording paper. After about three hours, Junichi and Torahiko felt the ground shake beneath their feet, but the seismograph recorded no disturbance.
The shaking became so pronounced that Junichi and Torahiko could no longer keep their eyes fixed on the seismograph. They gradually realized that the illusion of the seismograph moving was caused by slight convulsions in their own bodies. The illusion of tremors showed no sign of subsiding. As if under hypnosis, their bodies kept shaking. The seismograph seemed to shake as well, but the recording paper remained unmarked.
At six-thirty in the evening, the sun touched the western horizon. It had been five hours since this experiment had begun. Jagged black lines appeared on the recording paper all of a sudden, accompanied by a terrible shuddering of the earth below. Torahiko hastily peered at his pocket watch and wrote down the time.
“An earthquake!” Torahiko called out to Junichi. He sounded as excited as a little child.
This earthquake was undeniably bizarre. The recording paper captured a few seconds of disturbance, then a few seconds of disturbance, in an uneven pattern. It was as if a tremendous force were being unleashed from the sky down toward the ground. After that force vented itself on the ground, the earth quieted until the next bolt of force came in from above.
Earthquakes were not generally anything like lightning storms… but this one was.
About a minute later, when everything grew quiet, the hypnotic state that had held them dissolved. The seismograph needle was no longer trembling. The five-odd hours they had spent down in the pit seemed like a dream.
The physicist let out a breath, patted the young man beside him on the shoulder, and urged him to stand. Then he entered the stone structure, rummaged around for awhile, and picked up several white bones.
“That will do for today. We managed to get an actual earthquake record. And we should have someone in the zoology department or the medical school take a look at these bones.”
Torahiko and Junichi climbed up the rope ladder. Looking around, they saw a large man sitting a short distance away, leaning against a pine tree. He was breathing in his sleep and looked sinfully comfortable. Torahiko laughed and kicked Masatoshi’s foot.
“Wake up, my lord.”
***
Two weeks later, Terada Torahiko paid a visit to Natsume Sōseki for the first time in a long while. After several hours of wide-ranging conversation, he decided to go on to Nihonbashi and stop by the Ōkōchi residence. On the way, he crossed the newly completed Nihonbashi.
“Well, what do you think of it? Quite a bridge, isn’t it?” Masatoshi asked from the entrance of his house. The new Nihonbashi was clearly visible from there. He gestured to the bridge with an air of pride. “That’s the symbol of the imperial capital’s reconstruction. We spent an enormous amount of money on it. At the opening ceremony a few months ago, there was a lantern parade and a real festival atmosphere. The statues of the qilin and lions guarding the bronze light posts are splendid, aren’t they? Far superior to the lion statues I saw in London’s Trafalgar Square. It’s sure to become a new landmark.”
Torahiko wasn’t as impressed with the bridge as his friend was, so he simply nodded and said nothing. He removed his shoes and walked into Masatoshi’s study. Masatoshi followed him.
“What’s wrong? You look troubled.”
“It’s that earthquake record. I’ve compared the quake we felt that day with all sorts of records, but I can’t find anything similar. None of the seismographs installed in the Kantō region show a record of such a clear earthquake. I’m at a loss, Masatoshi.”
Masatoshi smiled faintly at the exhausted Torahiko.
“There’s something even stranger than that. After making very wide-ranging inquiries, I managed to find a seismograph that traced exactly the same wave pattern as the one we recorded at the burial mound of Taira no Masakado. But it wasn’t in Kantō. It wasn’t even in Japan.”
“Oh? Where was it?”
“That’s the unbelievable part—it was in Dalian.”
“Dalian? In Manchuria?” Masatoshi had put a cigarette in his mouth, but surprise made him forget to light it.
“Yes. The seismograph waves recorded in Dalian were the closest match. The pattern of the shaking was a perfect match.”
“It’s a geological issue, surely. Most likely the geology of Tōkyō and Dalian is similar. That’s why only those two locations recorded such large tremors.”
“No, it’s not that simple. The Dalian observatory is quite a distance from the port, and that area was under attack by bandits at the time of the recorded quake. Maybe the Russians or the British were pulling the strings behind the scenes, but they dropped some pretty powerful bombs. There’ve been attacks like that in that area at least once a month for the past few years. No doubt because Dalian is a hotbed of anti-Japanese activity, but that means the seismograph record I saw from Dalian wasn’t recording a natural earthquake, but a man-made explosion.”
Masatoshi’s unlit cigarette dropped from his mouth.
“So you’re saying the tremor you felt at the mound was caused by the explosion in Dalian?”
Torahiko shook his head. “That’s impossible. It should be impossible. And yet I can’t help but conclude that it is so, Masatoshi.”
“What on earth do you mean? It sounds like you’re proposing that there’s some kind of underground tunnel linking Dalian and Marunouchi! Hah!”
Torahiko did not appear amused. He removed a sheaf of documents from his breast pocket and thrust them at Masatoshi.
Masatoshi placed a fresh cigarette into his mouth and lit it. Pale purple smoke wreathed his face as he looked over the documents.
“And there’s one more thing,” Torahiko said.
“What is it now?” Masatoshi asked.
“I asked Tanaka Shigeho of the zoology department to do an analysis of the bones we found. They are definitely human bones, but they are probably not the bones of Japanese people.”
Masatoshi’s lit cigarette dropped to the floor; he ground it out. “But that… that can’t be right,” he said.
“It is, though,” Torahiko said. “The ruin we found is older than Edo. It was built before Dōkan founded the city.”
“If those weren’t the bones of Japanese people, then were they Ainu?”
“Don’t be absurd. Ainu or Ryukyuans are still Japanese. To put it more plainly, the bones we found might not even be the bones of modern humans. The average height of the skeletons is about four feet tall, but their arms and legs were disproportionately long.”
“But that doesn’t seem possible,” Masatoshi said. “Are they human bones, or aren’t they?”
“I can guess what you’re thinking,” Torahiko said. “The tsuchigumo appear in the Chronicles of Japan. Or perhaps the dwarfish little people, similar to pygmies, mentioned in the in the Eastern Barbarians section of The Book of Wei. According to The Book of Wei, that race of little people lived on Shikoku and did not resemble the Japanese people. I was born in Tōkyō, but I spent my early childhood in Tosa, so I already had a particular interest in legends about these dwarfs.”
Ōkōchi Masatoshi shrank like a balloon pricked with a needle, and then he slumped back into his chair.
Torahiko watched him in silence.
Outside, it was already dark.
Tsuchigumo (literally “dirt” or “earth spider”) refers to both a monstrous creature in Japanese folklore and a historical, derogatory term used by ancient Japanese imperial courts to describe renegade local clans. In early texts like the Records of Ancient Matters and Chronicles of Japan, The term tsuchigumo was used to marginalize indigenous tribes and rebel clans who refused to submit to the emperor’s authority. These groups were often characterized as living in caves or underground hideouts, leading to the “earth spider” moniker.
The The Book of Wei, also known by its Chinese name as the Wei Shu, is a classic Chinese historical text compiled by Wei Shou from 551 to 554, and is an important text describing the history of the Northern Wei and Eastern Wei from 386 to 550.
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