Teito Monogatari:
The Tale of the Imperial Capital
Part 1: Great Spirit of Tokyo
Author: Hiroshi Aramata
Part 2: Nobuhiro Revived
Chapter 10: Premonition
That day, Terada Torahiko felt a strange sense of unease. He felt like there was an earthquake about to start under his feet at all times. He wondered why he felt that way. He was a lecturer at Tokyo Imperial University's College of Science, but most of his hours were claimed by research and experimentation. Professor Nagaoka Hantarō was currently in charge of teaching the students, and there were also associate professors with far more experience than himself. He felt that he could devote himself freely to the pursuit of physics without imperiling the students' education.
Torahiko spent the entire day shut away in a basement laboratory with his colleague. They were attempting to photograph the motion of a fired bullet, which had never been captured successfully before in Japan.
Today felt strange. Even in the midst of tackling the ballistic photography, he felt an inexplicable sense of dread. Usually, his problems vanished from his mind the moment he entered the lab. This evening, he finished his experiments and went on his usual walk along the streets of Ginza, sipping his favorite coffee.
He could not shake off his inner turmoil. Even after finishing his experiments, taking his usual walk along the brick streets of Ginza, and sipping his favorite coffee from Fugetsu-do, his mood did not improve.
This was an unusual occurrence for him.
On the streetcar ride home from Ginza to his house in Yamanote, he finally identified what had been troubling him.
“That’s it, the newspaper article from this morning…”
He hurried home, deliberately making a loud noise as he slid open the front door so his wife would hear him. He called out to her as soon as he took off his hat.
“Hey, Yutako, do we still have this morning’s newspaper?”
His quiet wife brought the newspaper to his study. True to her name, she was a calm and gentle woman, reserved and never hasty despite her relative youth.1
“How is Toichi?” he asked her. Toichi was the name of their eldest son.
Although he was a lecturer at the University, he was still a young father with a long way to go before gaining recognition as a physicist. He was happy to learn about his son's accomplishments.
After his wife left the study, Torahiko quickly picked up the newspaper. He spread out the newspaper and searched for the headline of the article he'd skimmed over that morning.
“Suspicious Fire in the Early Hours Again at the Ministry of Finance Building... is it the Curse of Taira no Masakado's Burial Mound?!”
The sensationalist headline danced before his eyes. The article reported a suspicious fire that had broken out that morning inside the Ministry of Finance in the Marunouchi district.2 If that were all, it would not be a particularly noteworthy story. The incident had been connected to Taira no Masakado's burial mound, though. That made the article much more interesting.
Nearly everyone in Tokyo knew about the curse on the burial mound. The connection between the mound and the Ministry of Finance caught Torahiko's attention.
"What if they really are connected?" he asked in his lecturer voice. He thought about frequency and the resonances of natural substances. Substances with the same natural frequency reacted strongly to each other.
For example, if you place two tuning forks side by side and strike one to make it vibrate, the other tuning fork with the same natural frequency will “resonate” and begin to sound loudly and intensely. Similarly, if the waves from an earthquake shake a building and the vibration happens to match the building’s natural frequency, the building will experience resonance, cooperating with rather than fighting against the earthquake's frequency. Many buildings had been completely destroyed in earthquakes because of this phenomenon.
In Europe, there was a bridge where people were fined if they marched across in formation. The bridge’s natural frequency matched the vibration caused by the marching steps, leading to resonance that could potentially cause the bridge to collapse.3
Torahiko was experiencing exactly the same resonance effect from a short newspaper article.
Torahiko’s father came from the Uka family, an old household in Kōchi, Shikoku. Before the Tokugawa shogunate, they served as retainers to the Chosokabe clan, but they later served the Yamauchi clan and received a certain amount of land in exchange for that service. His father’s name was Toshimasa, and he was adopted from the Uka family into the Terada family.
Originally, the Uka family lived in the area called Ukase, located upstream along the Shimanto River where the river makes a large curve. In one corner of Ukase, there was a place called Tobis where a stone mound enshrined the ancestral deity of the Uka family. In old legends, this mound is known as “O-Chiyo’s Grave” and is said to be the burial place of Chiyo, an unfortunate daughter who was beheaded by her father.4
When he was young, Torahiko heard stories from his grandmother about Tobis. Apparently, Chiyo’s severed head flew across to the opposite side of the river. To her, Tobis meant "flying head."5
The story of the burial mount in Marunouchi deeply unsettled Torahiko. The incidents related to the severed head, repeated two or three times over, made it difficult for him to acknowledge their resonant connections.
“I don’t want to get involved with something like the Marunouchi burial mound,” Torahiko muttered. His sense of unease would not lift. He feared that some fateful connection--some resonance--would bind him to that place against his will.
“Yutako, shall we play together? It's been quite awhile, and I feel like playing the violin tonight.” The idea of playing music lifted Torahiko's spirits somewhat. He took out his beloved violin. His wife accompanied him on the single-stringed koto. The sound of their music drifted into the street as night's dark curtain fell over the world.
Translator's Notes
1 寛子: Yutako means "lenient or generous child." ↩
2 Then as now, the Maronouchi district is
the main business district of Tokyo. ↩
3 Marching in step on bridges can cause
dangerous resonance, amplifying vibrations and potentially leading to
collapse, as famously demonstrated by the 1831 Broughton Suspension Bridge
collapse in England where troops' synchronized steps caused it to fall,
injuring soldiers and leading the British Army to mandate troops "break
step" (march out of sync) on bridges ever since, a practice also seen in
Europe. ↩
4 The o- prefix adds
politeness and honor to proper names and objects in Japanese. ↩
5 飛首: Torahiko's grandmother
would need to read the first kanji of the compound "flying head" as
tobi (the Japanese pronunciation) and the second kanji as
shu (the Chinese pronunciation) to make this reading of Tobis
remotely plausible. It is likely that Tobis actually means something
else. ↩
No comments:
Post a Comment