THE KILLING CURSE
High in the mountains above Kagoshima, an old man finds the remains of a forbidden ritual. A headless dog. Ritual kindling. The residue of a curse aimed at killing children.
So begins Naoki Sanjūgo’s Nangoku Taiheiki, the sprawling historical epic that made its author’s name synonymous with popular fiction in Japan. First serialized in 1930–31, the novel plunges into the Oyura Disturbance, the real succession crisis that nearly tore apart the Shimazu clan of Satsuma in the years before the Meiji Restoration. On one side, Lord Narioki and his concubine Oyura, wielding sorcery, poison, and political cunning to install their chosen heir. On the other, Nariakira, the reformist eldest son whose vision of a modern, industrialized Japan threatens everything the old guard has built.
Caught between them: Kotarō, a young samurai hunting the sorcerer who murdered his family. Masumitsu, a swaggering political operative who fights with a pipe, a pistol, and an inexhaustible supply of nerve. Nangyoku, a comic storyteller whose street performances mask a dangerous loyalty. Miyuki, a woman sent into enemy territory with a dagger and a mission she did not choose. And behind them all, the historical figures who would soon remake Japan: Saigō Takamori, Ōkubo Toshimichi, Shimazu Nariakira himself.
Naoki braids occult horror, swordfight choreography, Edo backstreet comedy, political intrigue, and doomed romance into a narrative that moves with the propulsive energy of serialized fiction and the emotional weight of serious literature. Volume One, The Crumbling Abyss, follows the conspiracy from its discovery through assassination attempts, factional warfare, desperate journeys, and the catastrophic death that changes everything.
The Naoki Prize, Japan’s most prestigious award for popular fiction, is named after the author. An original English translation by Vox Day, The Chronicle of the Southern Kingdom: The Crumbling Abyss is now available on Amazon for Kindle, KU, and audiobook.
Excerpt
High in the treetops, young leaves welcomed the early morning breeze and the gentle sunlight with something like the pleasure of good health. Below, in the shadow of ancient trees, the air was dark and close. Dense undergrowth and weeds still glistened with dew.
The narrow path showed nothing more than a thin ribbon of red earth through the grass. Even woodcutters and hunters passed along it only now and then. Branches and stalks pressed in from both sides, reaching to a man’s chest, to his head, tangling at him as if in sport.
Along that narrow path, above the brush and grass, two figures appeared and disappeared as they climbed. The crowns of lacquered hats, the curve of shoulders, glimpsed and lost again. The hats were lined with gold leaf: samurai, then. The man in front was nearly sixty, white-bearded. The one behind might have been a servant. He carried a wooden box slung by a cord from his shoulder to his hip. Both wore white undergarments layered with rough hemp, their hems tucked up, dark blue leggings bound tight.
The old man used a long staff to part the grass to the left and right, striking it, stroking it aside. His companion did the same, watching the undergrowth carefully as they climbed.
The old man was Kajiki Genpakusai, master of the military occult arts in the service of the Shimazu clan. His companion was Wada Nijūrō, his foremost disciple. The Gunshōzu, a treatise on victory in war, had been brought from the continent by the ancient scholar Wani, passed from the Ōe clan to the Minamoto, and from the Minamoto to their descendants, the Shimazu. Its secret teachings survived in the Shimazu house alone, and Genpakusai was the man who had mastered them.
The art was transmitted by oral tradition and closely guarded. Its foundations were medicine and prayer: a form of cursing and subjugation ritual. As a practitioner of this tradition, Genpakusai had studied pharmacology. When the former lord Shimazu Shigehide had established a medicinal herb garden, brought the Dutch-trained physician Totsuka Seikai into the domain’s medical corps, and sponsored the translation of Jonston’s herbal and other Dutch medical texts, Genpakusai had developed an interest in medicinal plants. For five or six years since his retirement, he had spent every season from early summer to autumn walking the mountains and fields.
The grass ahead swayed. Footsteps.
Genpakusai stopped, his staff frozen. Nijūrō went alert. The man who emerged was a hunter, dragging his gun, cradling something heavy under one arm. He glanced up at them with eyes that were red and grief-stricken.
The animal under his arm had no head.
The wound at the neck was clotted with dark blood. The fur was stiff with it. The hunter paused, yielded the path, and bowed.
Genpakusai looked at the headless animal, then at the hunter’s eyes.
“What is that?”
The hunter gazed down at the carcass with lowered eyes, miserably.
“My dog, sir.”
“Your dog. How did it lose its head?”
The hunter set his gun down in the grass and laid the headless dog beside it. The animal’s legs were drawn up tight, stiff as a mummy. The wound ran not just across the neck but was slashed open down the chest.
“Don’t know who done it, but it’s a cruel thing, ain’t it, your lordship. Last night, somebody was making a fire up by them rocks, and this one here found it and went barking off and never come back.”
The hunter’s voice broke. He looked down.
“Long time he served me faithful. I wanted to bury him proper, in the yard at least. That’s what I’m carrying him back for.”
Genpakusai studied the dog for a long moment.
“Give him a good burial.”
He signaled Wada with his eyes and started walking again, beating the grass with his staff.
“Be careful up there,” the hunter called after them. “Might be a tengu.”
The hunter knelt in the grass and bowed to them again.
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