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The Phoenix in a Foreign Labyrinth	By : LaurentCDubois Category: zMisplaced Stories [ADMIN use only] > manga Views: 2494 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own “Croisée in a Foreign Labyrinth”, nor the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story. See full disclaimer in Chapter 1.

Chapter List
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Chapter 21 – The Great War and After

Yune had not long recovered from Alice’s death, or so it seemed to her, when war came. Even though the enemy army was quickly beaten back to a reasonably safe distance from Paris, food and many other daily necessities became increasingly scarce. When rationing was introduced, Claude would always insist that Yune ate her full share of their entitlement, but she would brush it off with her usual ‘Oscar-sama always did say I ate like a sparrow.’

Iron being in short supply both because of the amount needed for the war and the restrictions on supply caused by the enemy occupation of much of France’s iron production capacity, they found it difficult to keep the business running as it had been. There was still a steady stream of repair work, but they could no longer take new commissions. Despite this, with no rent or staff to pay and just the two of them to support, they managed.

Then, in the winter of 1916, Claude fell ill with the flu, which had by now reached almost epidemic proportions in the city, with its population weakened by the privations of war. As happened all too often with this particular strain, it rapidly developed into pneumonia, and in less than a week he was dead.

Yune accepted Claude’s death stoically. Although some of the old French revolutionary fervour had always burned within him and so he had never much been one for attending church, Yune still made all of the public arrangements according to Roman Catholic tradition. In private, though, she followed Japanese tradition, moistening his mouth with water just after his death, burning incense by the bedside, and placing the six small coins to pay for his crossing of the river separating this world from the afterlife in his coffin before it was closed. After the funeral she retreated to the apartment above the shop, where she spent the rest of the war, hardly ever venturing outside.

The following spring, having no remaining ties to Europe, Yune resolved to return to Japan. Despite her wealth she travelled inconspicuously, staying in a long succession of modest hotels that she could have bought for cash had she wanted, and so it took some months for her to reach her home country and her home town. Once there, she bought a small house on a hillside covered with kiri trees that overlooked a river valley just outside of the town, and placed her most treasured possessions, an old, faded colour photograph and a letter written on Japanese paper, in the house’s altar.

Hoping to be able to redeem their debt, she tried to find out if any members of her family were still alive. It seemed, though, that they had all died years before from disease or abuse, her precious sister Shione somehow having been the last. Yune knew that in order to save any unnecessary expense, their bodies would simply have been thrown into the sea, and like Alice, they would have been washed away by the ocean. But what of those who had caused their suffering? Certainly she had more than enough money to have arranged for their slow, agonising deaths had she wished, but instead she trusted to the immutable law of karma that their actions in this life would bring them ample suffering in their next one.

One thing she was able to do, though, was locate the long-neglected grave holding Oscar Claudel’s remains, so she had them re-interred in the cemetery of the Roman Catholic cathedral that was slowly being built in the valley.

From then on, she generally led a simple life, gradually distributing her money anonymously to the poor and between the many shrines and temples of the region. However, during the first summer, the town’s old irezumi master would pay her many clandestine visits. Yune had shown him the photograph of Alice to serve as a guide for the design he was to create on her own back, but despite his utter amazement at seeing his very own work back from when he was young, he knew better than to talk carelessly about past clients and so said nothing.

Notes:

Nagasaki’s Urakami valley still has wooded hillsides. Given Japan’s rapid industrialisation in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, it is likely though that the valley would already have been more developed than is implied here.

The Roman Catholic cathedral of Saint Mary, Urakami, was built starting in 1895 and completed in 1925.

Irezumi tattoos typically took a long time to apply. They were very expensive and so people would often have themselves tattooed in small stages each week as they were paid, sometimes over a period of years. The toxicity of some of the traditional inks used also limited the amount of tattooing that could be performed on a person at any one sitting.
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The Phoenix in a Foreign Labyrinth