Shiboruto 1

The Discovery of the East Pole

Nippon Trilogy

Part I - Shiboruto

[The author is German, and although he is bearing a most Anglo-Saxon Christian name, he is not an English native speaker. So don't be surprised by misspellings, false idioms or eventually odd sounds. I am grateful for any kind of feedback. For more information please see here to my Collection 'The Discovery of the East Pole' or right away to http://www.east-pole.com ] 

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"Lucifer sought to being an artist. He saw the Creation and understood the reason why he ought to be a separate God on his own in it; and reign with the Centralic Fire-Power in all things and form himself into all things and turn into any form of things that he wanted, and not what the Creator wanted. "

Jakob Böhme, Quaestiones theosophicae, 1624

“Hence when the name of the christian religion had but been received with some seeming approbation in the country of Japan, Satan immediately, as if alarm’d at the thing, and dreading what the consequence of it might be, arm’d the Japoneses against it with such fury, that they expell’d it at once [...] Some have suggested, that there is yet a Time to come, when the Devil shall exert more Rage, and do more Mischief than ever yet he has been permitted to do; whether he shall break his Chain, or be unchain’d for a Time, they cannot tell,
nor I neither.”

Daniel Defoe, The Political History of the Devil, 1726

Prologue

During the first month of the fourth year of the regnancy Kansei, on a late afternoon on the peninsula of Shimabara in southern Japan, flocks of screaming birds rose from the treetops. The sun sank towards the mountains in the west and the wind blew freshly from the sea through the streets of the fishing village Himi. The calyces of flowers were wide open, the azaleas were whispering in the salty breeze and the cicadas, exhausted by their frantic chant in the heat of the afternoon, yearned twilight and slid into a slower minor. Everything witnessed the arrival of a warm spring evening on the Ariake Bay. The old volcano Unzen laid silently behind the village. Only the swarms of barn swallows and sparrows were getting bigger and their crys louder.

The blind seer of the village groped her way out the door, wiggled on the road supporting herself on a cane and shouted with a strong voice in direction of the store where her daughter-in-law worked. She sold all that her husband, the fisherman Tatsu, brought on by-catch and what could be preserved by drying, especially brown algae, sea cucumbers and sometimes even abalone.

"Natsu-chan, come quickly. Something just happened. Come on! Hurry up! "

Then she spoke in a lower voice to herself.

"Ohohoh, I feel it. I feel it so strongly. "

Her daughter pushed the curtains in the entrance of the store aside and came out with haste. She, too, had heard the unusual concert of panicking birds and was troubled.

" Oka-san , what's that? "she cried, as she ran across the street and offered the old woman her arm as an additional support, something that her mother-in-law otherwise would have rejected. Not this time. Hard she clutched with wiry fingers the forearm offered to her.

"Listen to the birds! They are afraid, they say! Something big and bad is coming up. Oh, my bones ache as if  I were buried under rocks. Daughter, I know that feeling. It does not bode well. Where is Tatsu! "

"He has put up with Habu for night fishing. They want to catch squid. "

At this moment a tremor shot through the earth, then the air boomed.

"What do you see?" asked the old woman, ripping her milky eyes wide open.

"Nothing! Nothing! "

"Look after the Unzen. Tell me what is there! "

Natsu looked up to the summit of the volcano as her mother had told her. First, no words came from her lips. Then she screamed just yet. The old woman stared in the same direction at the fire mountain with her dead eyes. She seemed to see more than her daughter as her face petrified. The pinnacle smoked and trembled, then it rose, as if the whole mountain was drunk and wanted to try to get up from its throne of rocks. But invisible chains held it there. From a distance debris avalanches became recognizable, pouring out of rock bumps and silently gliding down the slopes. After a short pause, the summit began to wobble and its tip drew a circle into the sky. The old woman whispered all to herself, while her daughter screamed frantically in the rousing chorus with the neighbours who had meanwhile hurried out of their homes on the street.

"Oh, you Gods of the Earth and the Skies, stand with me! Something terrible is coming up. Something terrible! Destruction and doom! I do not know this strange spirit. Please, help me! I'm afraid. "

Suddenly she sat up, her crooked back tensed, she grinned with her toothless mouth, turned slowly on her axis and began to scream horribly.

"Hara hara hara memosama! Sukkurebusu gogamu, sukkurebusu Abaddonu! Sukkurebusu kollokami! "

Horrified, the daughter stared at the spastic dance and the neighbors looked confused back and forth between the mountain and the crazed old woman. No one understood her words. They were not Japanese. Her dance got wilder as she repeated the dreadful verses louder and with a screeching, inhuman laugh. Then her prophecy entered fullfilment and the work of destruction began. The rocky dome of the old fire-mountain Unzen collapsed, the summit sank slowly in a throat opening. The landscape, for a hundred generations familiar to the people, changed in a few breaths its face forever. Smoke rose from the mountain. The old woman collapsed, fell unnaturally twisted into the dust and died shivering. Nauseating fumes crept slowly into the valley.

Many weeks passed. Meanwhile, tremendous masses of magma were cooking up in the caldera of the truncated Unzen. With increasing frequency, the fire mountain spew ashes and fountains of liquid stone which flowed down like vomit on its craggy slopes. Thus began the quakes, quietly but steadily. After dark, screaming ravens fluttered in panic through the night. People were pale and exhausted. The evil whispers of the earth didn’t let them sleep. At night they were laying on their futons with eyes wide open, pressing their ears again and again on the ground in feverish attempts to understand the message of the Kami in the depths of the mountain. The roof of the old volcano having collapsed, the good Kami who had lived there under the top until then, had been dropped down into the crowded dungeon of hell, where they were now at the mercy of their evil counterparts.