Preface

The Great Hanshin Earthquake of January 17, 1995, was, for the Japanese people, a nightmare repeated. Whatever we were doing, somewhere in our hearts we had kept an unconscious radar operating, straining to detect the warning signs of when another earthquake on the scale of the Great Kanto Earthquake might once again strike the Kanto region.

Yet tragically, that nightmare repeated itself in Kobe. The year 1995 happened to be a Year of the Boar according to the traditional zodiac.

In fact, the Great Kanto Earthquake of Taishō 12 (1923) had also occurred in a Year of the Boar!

The first volume of the original edition of this book, Teito Monogatari, was published in Shōwa 59 (1984), a little over ten years ago. It was conceived as an occult urban-disaster novel structured around the “Year of the Boar,” a crucial keyword foretelling the occurrence of a great earthquake. The reason was simple: the author—himself born in a Year of the Boar—began writing it as his first novel in Shōwa 59, itself said here to be a Year of the Boar.¹

In the first volume itself, there is a scene in which Hirai Yasumasa, appearing as the last onmyōji, risks his life to divine the year of calamity and leaves behind a prophecy that the Imperial Capital will suffer a great disaster in the Year of the Boar.

That the story should now come full circle and be revived once again in Heisei 7 (1995), another Year of the Boar, together with a newly produced film, can only be described as an uncanny twist of fate.

Teito Monogatari may perhaps also be called the first Japanese novel to introduce the ancient geomantic art of feng shui, which is deeply connected with earthquakes and other changes in geological strata and topography. Today, feng shui is enjoying what might even be called a boom, but at the time it was virtually unknown among the Japanese public. In the film Teito Monogatari, directed by Akio Jissoji of Ultraman fame, Katsura Sanshi gave a passionate performance as a feng shui master. At the time, many people asked me:

“What kind of divination does the practitioner played by Sanshi actually perform?”

Looking back now, even those questions fill me with nostalgia.

Through the vengeful spirit of the sinister Kato Yasunori, Teito Monogatari dramatized the idea that modern urban policy itself—in recklessly scarring and trampling the earth in the pursuit of a new, civilized urban order—had become a major trigger for the catastrophe. Feng shui, by contrast, had formed the basis of an ancient approach to urban planning that respected the life force of the earth while also taking the environment and the beauty of the city into account. The names given to the ancient capitals tell us what kind of cities feng shui sought to create. Heian-kyō, for example, was built as a spiritual capital intended to be “peaceful” (at peace) and “healthy” (safe).

Teito Monogatari was also, in the fullest sense, a supernatural fantasy novel that proposed feng shui as a strategy for urban redevelopment.

Now, as citizens of this country, we are coming together to make what modest contribution we can to the reconstruction of Kobe. I believe that the meaning of this humble novel being republished in the fateful Year of the Boar lies there as well.

To all who love cities, and to all who hate them, I offer once again this novel of the spirit world.

The Author

March 13, 1995