Catacumba, Part I

Thursday, May 21st, just past midnight. On the last eve of the sunshine’s three-day reign, the clouds, seeing that the winds now favored their camp, mounted a charge on the Satsuma skies, capturing them out from under the Great Luminaries in a decisive Nimbal victory. Now, if one looked up at the nighttime sky, all one would see was a dreary, milky blanket above one’s head, speckled only now and then by the glimmer of some light, maybe not even a star, shining through a gap in the clouds’ defenses.

It is truly strange that, while three days straight of clear skies may be seen as abhorrently long, by other standards, for other epochs whether up in the heavens or down on the earth, three days is absurdly short. In Japan and Satsuma, “three-day reign” was even a phrase thrown around to highlight such absurdities—such absurdities as warlord Akechi Mitsuhide’s brief claimancy to the title of Shogun of Japan in-between assassinating his lord, Oda Nobunaga, and getting crushed in battle by his former brother-in-arms, Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Were the powers that reigned in government, the so-called “men under heaven”, constantly changing in and out, again and again all in the span of a week or a month or a year, the people might never find peace.

And yet, up in the heavens, this is commonplace, nay, even expected. The sun and the moon trade places every twenty-four hours. The clouds come and cover the skies, sometimes bringing rain, and then relent, and the cycle repeats. The moon waxes and wanes every thirty days. In the span of three hundred and sixty-five days, the sun’s course in the sky slowly sinks, cooling the earth, before rising again, bringing warmth and life.

The stars, the heavenly host, likewise follow courses according to the sun—except for the wandering stars, the luminaries, among them the sun and the moon, but also those five stars which travel freely, on a fixed course but unbounded by any other body in the heavens. In the West they were once thought, including the sun and the moon, to be gods or angels. The people gave their names to the days of the week, the elements, and myriad other things. In the East they were thought to rule over the Five Phases, and thus over all of creation. And, of course, the sun and moon were the great yin and yang, mirrors of the cosmic duality of all things.

Perhaps the true meaning of duality is thus: that none but the One can rule over this world forever, or even for long; something must always come and counteract. Sun and moon, light and shade, summer and winter, storm and drought, Mars and Venus, birth and death—were even one of these things to tarry or to vanish, it would spell sure disaster on earth. Even a single star leaving its course might be a portent for cosmic change, as prophecy oft decrees.

We know this now more than ever, that all things celest are bound together by a great force and act upon the earth with that same force; that the seasons, the tides, the cycles of waking and rest, the menses, are governed by the motions of the sun and the moon. Why, then, do we not act in acknowledgement of that?

True, true, beyond all doubt: that up above is like that down below.

* * *

Karen Kirishima had no time to ponder such things, as she walked the length of a wall bordering a long-since-closed dirt road. The city of Kokura shone on the horizon, through the canopy of trees, but here there was no light; only a smattering of ruined stone buildings and other odd structures, dotting the forested landscape. But this place was connected to the city of Kokura in a most intimate way: here were buried many of its dead. Karen stared nervously down at her feet as she walked, making certain there were no bones under them, human or otherwise.

Kokura, situated at the very northern tip of the island of Satsuma, was a city scarred by war, beginning with Satsuma’s breakaway from Japan at the turn of the seventeenth century. Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s forces had invaded the island’s north, threatening Shimazu Yoshihisa (spelled in Satsuman Ximadzu Yoxifisa), whose domain of Satsuma covered the rest of the island following his victories over the Christian lord Otomo Sorin. Yoshihisa seemed to stand little chance, until the Portuguese made him a lucrative deal: the recognition of Satsuma as its own nation, with him as Emperor, in exchange for the conversion of the island to Christianity and opening of trade to Portugal and Spain.

Yoshihisa gladly accepted, becoming Emperor Miguel I upon his baptism, and would begin his repulsion of Hideyoshi’s forces with a decisive victory in the Battle of Funai. But Hideyoshi would not relent; in Kokura he made a stand, and a battle even bloodier than that in Funai ensued. Emperor Miguel’s victory could only be counted as pyrrhic, and the fields were so dense with bodies that most of them were hurriedly thrown by the Jesuits into mass graves.

For centuries afterward, Kokura was one of many cities operated as a colony of the Portuguese; Kokura chiefly because it depended on the naval protection of the Portuguese fleets. But when, in the nineteenth century, the abuses against native Satsumans in these cities reached a breaking point, riots broke out. In Kokura, an already-heavy military presence meant civilian casualties numbering in the thousands.

Eventually the emperor, Domingo III, stepped in, pulverized the Portuguese forces, and reclaimed the cities as Satsuman soil. In Kokura, this only came to be after the casualties in the conflict had doubled, and their bodies were subsequently interred with the two-hundred-year-old samurai remains.

Kokura was spared during the War of the Seto Sea at the turn of the century, just before the First World War, but only a few decades later would play a crucial role in the Second. Basilio Sacomidzu, now Shogun and Supreme Chancellor, launched his land invasion of Japan from this city. He was successful all the way up to Kansai, but once the United States and Republic of China intervened this was all undone. Sacomidzu only raised the white flag after the American-Chinese-Japanese coalition landed on Satsuman soil, turning Kokura into the Normandy of Asia.

By this point the mass graves outside the city were overflowing. The Jesuits whose monastery still sat on that land were unable to maintain it. The Republic of China made a formal complaint after the war, when reports came back of Chinese troops who had been distressed to the point of physical illness upon seeing the exposed human remains in the forests. Sacomidzu, taking a page from the West, ordered the construction of a tunnel network beneath the monastery, in which would be laid the remains from the graves, creating the Kokura Catacombs.

Sacomidzu’s plan had been to expand the tunnels miles long, connecting them to the St. Michael Cathedral in the city, but before this could be completed he was assassinated in 1957. The project was formally abandoned after the Democratic People’s Republic of Japan invaded and annexed Satsuma the following year, with the Communists destroying the monastery and desecrating many of the ossuaries.

For over sixty years, even when Kokura and the neighboring city of Fukuoka were shelled in 2006 during the culmination of the Chugoku War, the catacombs had remained undeveloped and closed to the public. The only point of entry was a passageway in the ruins of the Jesuit monastery, which the government had no interest in restoring.

It was this same passageway which Karen now struggled in the dead of night to find. Her escape from Noe Numasaki and Leonor Yang had been slightly botched; the Kimon teleportation, which was meant to land her within the catacombs, had instead dropped her in the middle of downtown Kokura. She tarried for a few hours there (grabbing dinner, though she would not admit that to the “boss man”), and then made her way, on foot, to the city’s outskirts. Finding the ruins of the monastery had been an ordeal in and of itself; picking out the passageway to the catacombs among them might prove impossible.

She pulled out her phone, turned on the flashlight. This only had the effect of making the eerie bits of stone still standing in the forest all the more unsettling. Quickly she turned it off. She checked her shoulders. Yes, her backpack was still there; wandering all this time in the dark, combined with the natural compulsion to sleep, had nearly made her lose the sensation of it. If it truly came down to it, she might just lay here, use the backpack as a pillow (it served no other use now that her tablet was broken, after all), and wait until the morning, praying she wouldn’t get eaten by a bear or a hawk or something.

Just then, her eyes forced her to adjust to a sudden increase in light. She looked up, curious about the source. The moon! Yes, a break in the clouds finally revealed a crescent moon. On the archipelago, they had another name for it: mikazuki or micadzuki, the “third-day moon” (though it had actually been four, going on five days since the new moon). Here, for the open-minded, might be another portent: tracing back the moon’s phases, one would find that the first of the solar month, and the midway point between the spring equinox and summer solstice, had been a full moon. A sign of growth, of flourishing? Perhaps. The question was for whom.

Before Karen, the moon revealed another sign; the twinkling reflection of a beam caught her eye. She looked back down, turned on her phone’s flashlight again. Yes! Finally! A little stone shack with a thick metal grate—surely that must be it. She walked over, peered inside. An old staircase leading underground. No light from within, but that was to be expected; Karen had never actually entered nor exited the catacombs normally, though she had been here many times before. Time for the moment of truth.

She presented a hand and knocked on the gate. And knocked again. And again. And again. And seventeen more times, making twenty-one knocks in total. Finally, to top it all off she gave a quick triple-tap. Every one of these raps could be heard as they bounced their way through the catacombs’ corridors; layering, phasing, warping for what felt like a little eternity. When, at length, the echoes died out, the grate began to glow a soft azure hue. Between two of the vertical bars, the crosses shrunk and vanished. Then the two halves compressed, forming nigh-solid gates. Karen inhaled sharply through her nose, letting the damp, musty essence of the forest reach every inch of her body. Then she carefully stepped inside.