Many do not realize Dr Frankenstein フランケンシュタイン was based on a coastal warlord of the Furuyama Clan. They were a great clan near the port where the Jesuits and other foreign traders had set up in Nagasaki. Akuishi Furuyama was a scientist, inspired by western books on enlightenment era ideas of the universe and physical world. He became obsessed with resurrecting the dead after his family was wiped out by a plague brought by European ships. A once mighty sea faring family became an island of mass graves and a lord too unstable to rule. This causes the westerners and his own people to plot on his holdings, held off only rumors of monsters and evil spirits on the island. The mad Lord Furuyama delved into books on sorcery, necromancy and grafting souls of the damned into bodies of executed heretics. The native population of the island were once living peacefully with Yokai. Traditional allies of the farmers and fishermen. They helped fisherman in peril return to port in typhoon season and always helped lost children return from the storm shrouded mountains.
This changed with Christian converts becoming intolerant to the Kami and old shrines, hunting down the harmless monsters of legend until the Yokai became desperate and feral. Eating humans at every opportunity. Like similar refuges for cats and rabbits in Japan, Yokai, ghosts and demons had this place to reside free from attacks by ghost hunters and exorcists for millennia. It took less than ten years of Christian dogma to create a climate of butchery on both sides. Many said his alliance with these creatures is what drove the Lord Furuyama to madness but it was a matter of honor. They were his oldest friends and truest allies, if his people denied his orders to coexist he chose the unearthly beings and put all dissidents to the sword. All those who abused the innocent and defenseless Kami were used for vivisection to further his science projects on restoring life to dead beings.
Swearing an oath of eternal hostility against the Christians who brought the sickness that wiped out his people, Lord Furuyama was the first to denounce Christian lords of the Kansai, take their ships, burn their castles and seize their books. This spread Furuyama’s domain off the archipelago deep into the Kyushu mountains. Seizing a third of the island from Christian landowners who sowed dissent and whispered lies to the Shogun, to set their enemies against each other. Furuyama tired to remain civil and fair, but the sabotage of Christian insurgents on his infrastructure. Mainland Ninja and traveling Ronin were cause for more distrust. Attempts on his allies lives by agents of the Shogun made it seem as if the Jesuits had poisoned his reputation as the one causing instability, as if he has some deigns on more power.
Finding bridges burned, ships scuttled and wells poisoned caused the Lord to arrest all Christian ships in his waters. Trespassing Church fathers, bands of Yokai hunters and spies from the Jesuits all ended up crucified on the coast to serve as a glaring message where this islands loyalties lie. Christianity was first outlawed in his domains, the hundred islands of the Kyushu south west. Where Cannibal Giants, Tengu and Yurei lived as equals with full property rights and hereditary claims on their ancient homeland. Furuyama wanted more than any thing to be a benevolent Lord, but disloyalty and subterfuge drove him to burning Church fathers openly, sacking their ports and giving pirates of the coast reprives form execution if they made war on the European traders.
Education and experimentation became his life long quest, beyond bringing back his parents and lost loves to life. He was obsessed with the power to raise the dead. Demonology and Solomonic black magic filled his hunger for vengeance. Bringing a Korean Christian nun who lost her faith, a Mexican scholar of the Catholic New Spanish Empire who spent his life translating the magic of the Aztecs and a bride from the Wallachian steppe of Eastern Asia. The great lord brought the invitation to a being of ancient hunger and undeath from the darkest corners of Europe, Vlad Teppish. A ageless ghoul known in western literature as Count Dracula, feeder on corpses and blood who in life was an equally ruthless warlord in his war against the Turkish invaders.
Creating distrust and open mutiny by the local christian villages, Lord Furuyama’s name was torn to shreds by rumor and murder mouths. Instead of a benevolent man of science and medicine, he was smeared as a kidnapping ghoul who stalked the coast around Nagasaki to bring torment and suffering to followers of the Christ. Some of this was true, but out of context. The sick brought their loved ones to him by boat to benefit from his strange obsession with death. He was Lord, so it was his right to claim the bodies of executed bandits, assassins and foreign invaders who brought crime to his lands. Soon the Christian invaders and their puppet Lords started a rumor of treason on the Island of the Furuyama clan, planting bodies of Ninja around the Shogun, only to take credit for killing these phantom assassins. Furuyama was declared an enemy of the Japanese and ordered to commit Seppuku with no trial or recourse.
This enraged him and miscalculated his considerable support in the non Christian lords of the region. Creating a cursed time of great upheaval where nearly one third of all Japanese were killed in the great Yokai war, where Monstrosities, Yurei and Beasts rose from the remote islands of the south and west to meet the Christians and their puppets. Akuishi was the son of the most hated warlord of the Imjin war, who drove a clan of Yeti into battle. Ultimately leaving them sacrificed for the loss of the Korean invasion, all the Yeti were executed. Creating hate in the hearts of the primitive species, but promising to call their spirits back to possess the soldiers of his clan so they could live once again. Furuyama facing defeat in his own war against the Christians and Hideyoshi Toyotomi, he raised armies from the graves of his people and drawing evil spirits to possess his enemies dead.
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
Before defeat, he called on his foreign advisors to bring forth the spirits of the greatest enemies of Christianity. This brought the spirits of Mictlantecuhtli, Huehuecoyotl, Tezcatlipoca to raise their own armies to resist the Christian warlords with a plague of zombie spirits. Unsatisfied by armies of Yeti possessed ruffians, Aztec demons, Vampire allies, Yokai he sought one last ally from the depths of western dogma, Eblis the islamic fallen angel. This enraged Dracula who had fought the enemies in life, causing him to betray lord Furuyama and his Samurai armies, siding instead with the Shogun in return for a private refuge in the north of Japan to practice his blood letting. This caused Furuyama and his allies to become cursed names, forgotten to time and dying for nothing as the Shogun’s own distrust of the Christians and their double dealing would lead to their expulsion years later. Leaving the Island kingdom of the “Lord of Undeath” once again to its original Yokai inhabitants.
Furyo sailed to this unnerving place on a ghost ship to a land always cloaked in a shroud of fog and harbored an endless graveyard always lost in thundercoulds and doom. Gunkanjima now known as battleship island once held a castle and greater landmass, blown away by cannons during the “War of the Hunger Plague.” Furyo does not sail tot eh modern island with its desolate modern urban decay and shipyards. He sails into the mists of time where the once mighty kingdom stood at the defense point to all western invaders. Long before ww2 forced labor, this place had a cursed reputation as one of the few places where an entire island chain was occupied mainly by graves. Endless tombs and fallen structures fill the remains of the archipelago that once stood there. Western battle ships reduced the proud island chain to the small Hashima seen today. Once this way not the case.
Furyo watcher as the years roll back seeing modern buildings disappear and the burned ruins of Furuyama castle rise from ghostly battlements. Once thriving forrest covered this place, abundant life and dozens of villages stood here, mournfully silent of human life due to outbreak of plague and war, but a happy home for Yokai. All manner of strange creature crawls, swims and flies here. Mr Ghost Lantern becomes too excited to wait on the ship and drifts into the fog alone. Leaving Furyo to wait for ghostly rowers to help him touch down on land. As soon as he touched down on shore, phantom Samurai ghosts in black armor rushed to take him captive. Had Furyo gone too far back in time? Is this the era where the Japanese Doctor Frankenstein, Lord Furuyama lived among the endless graves of Gotō Island chain?
Furyo was brought to a local police station where he is left in a cell full of corpses. In the hallway he can hear Yokai and Oni terrorizing other prisoners in adjacent cells. Mr Ghost Lantern has abandoned him. Furyo is greeted by a figure he at once realizes is a vampire, Vlad Teppish who serves as the interpreter. Furyo explains he is here as an exorcist of a Buddhist order on a mission to bring souls of the demented to the afterlife to be reincarnated. Dracula loves this idea and frees him at once to meet the Master of the Island. Traveling through towns of Yokai, working on mundane tasks like chopping wood, crafting armor and creating weapons. Furyo realizes this place is somewhat of a haven for these spirits and ghosts. He know eventually a horrible catastrophe will come but he is not authorized to tell these creatures of their impending doom. He thinks he was meant to land a few years later once the conflict claimed the armies here and left only Monstrosities and Hungry Ghosts.
In his castle Lord Furuyama works endlessly on his quest to raise the dead with human consciousness and a soul. Raising ravenous beasts, bodies possessed by spirits of Yeti or half human half anima hybrids is not enough. He wants his wife and family back, as it stand he is only able to raise mindless beasts, perfect for war but incapable of conversation. Dracula thinks all this is foolish, wish only a few drops of blood he could raise any fallen human being into a state of undeath. This is not what Furuyama is looking for. He yearns for lost days of his youth, before his western books and ideas came with terrifying blood pathogens. For now Furuyama is content with his experiments with the atom, giant cockroaches, grafting lion heads onto eagles and working to create more intelligent Ghouls who can take orders.
When Furyo explains his quest and what will befall this place, he already knows. It seems this bloodshed has played out 1000 times before and he holds no ill will or claim over the Yokai. They are free to leave. Furuyama knows how this place will be incinerated, reduced to nothing more than windswept rocks to be abandoned for centuries until industrialization bridge coal mines and shippers. He is resigned to his fate and wishes Furyo well on his quest. Allowing him to gather Mr Ghost Lantern and any Yokai willing to return with them. Furyo feels like this time and place will be an important ally in his own war, and asks if Lord Furuyama would help him when the time came to take on the Akuryō-kai and Yajū-gumi? Lord Furuyama doesn’t want to decide yet and asks Furyo to come again when the time comes for open war. Furyo feels sorry, but also like his ancestors had some part to play in the doom of this place.