Cases like this are why I keep on coming back to Dullahan-written fanfiction. If I put my admiration into words it'll lose meaning in the translation from feelings-into-opinions, so all I can offer is a heartfelt "Good job, and may there be plenty more of it in the future."
My Fanfics. Read 'em. Or not.McJon01: We all know that the real reason Archer would lose to Rider is because the events of his own Holy Grail War left him with a particular weakness toward "older sister" types.
That was American Psycho I saw in there.
I adore Touko's amoral conviction. There's little else to say in that regard, other than to mention how pleased I am to see the less savory aspects of her character unfolding in perfect symphony with her social graces.
Last edited by Frostyvale; November 8th, 2016 at 07:09 PM.
If she's lying about one thing, she might be lying about others. Perhaps Touko's insistence that 'it never hurt her and never has' is a lie as well, both to herself and the readers.
Or maybe we're putting Draco in Leather Pants and I should shut up already.
when I say 'lying', you seem to be thinking in terms of things in the narration being purely true or false
as if she would be crude enough to report things exactly the opposite of what she actually felt
she's not aRepublic serial villain, Dantsundere
it's also possible to lie by omission
MGSV tweeeest
Last edited by Dullahan; October 2nd, 2015 at 09:06 PM.
Holy fuck that segment on Kilgardie's work was so fucking fascinating even though I felt like I was gonna hurl a few times reading it. Good fucking job. This is some good-ass Touko.
The prose is so purple is outdoes Sakura, nay it reaches out to grasp the form of purple. The nougat of philosophizing pleases me greatly, as in all your works, Dullahan.
Now if only I felt like I actually retained each paragraph after reading.
Originally Posted by Seika
F/GO SUPPORT
Oh man, should've read this much sooner than I did. Hopefully, it doesn't count as a necro post.
I don't remember if I've said it before - hint: MIAL please, - but your prose is absolutely fascinating. While it may be purple at its height, it also makes me green with envy (I feel like I mentioned this in One Week, but I dont care). This is what I've strived to achieve in my early attempts to satisfy my inner writer, but failed - in Russian of course, but that's beside the point. I pointed out long ago that your style is close to Russian prose that got sculpted by Dostoevsky. Absurd amount of description; inner monologue that captures not only mind of the protagonist, but also the reader's attention. Kilotons of text spent on five minutes of the dialogue/inner thoughts, and a short passage of text depicting Touko getting from one location to another.
It was true in MIAL.
It's fucking quadrupled here. And I'm loving it. And I hate it.
Here's the catch. Russian classics may be a fascinating read, but the descriptions there tend to get... overwhelming, to say the least. They're not entertaining, nor do they serve any point other than to describe the shit out of place. And so it's easy to skip through long passages of text without losing much of the context - unless, a cool Russian Literature teacher catches you on not being able to remember some sort of a detail that didn't catch your eye, argh. Your style? It's impossible.
I mean, I'm honestly lost from time to time. Some walls of texts are so... chok full of super-compressed information, that it's not so hard to drown in it. And I can't skip them because I will be lost in the next text-wall. I don't know how you make it work, but you do. It's like magic.
Further, it's even more impressive because I'm pretty sure no one got into Touko's character as deeply as you did. It's amazing, full stop. Actually, scratch that, don't stop.
On a not so unrelated note, are there any books on psychology/sociology you'd recommend?
Four days is no necro. Relax.
MIAL is returning. One day, hopefully before the end of the year, it will make like Backstreet and be back, alright. C50 is planned out in a lot of detail, in fact; the real obstacle in actually writing it is dealing with the accumulated hype of over a year without updates. The absolute last thing I want to do is put out something that will disappoint people after all this time. It needs to be more than an average MIAL update; it needs to blow the reader's mind right out the back of their skull, leaving an ichorous trickle of pulverised cerebrum to slowly filter out along the ruined canals of their braincase. This is difficult to pull off.
I know I've previously referred to this story as 'overwritten' in le ironic terms - OR WERE THEY - but I personally don't really consider Touko narration to be all that purple. I can do 'purple' - that's what that Kirie narration segment in One Week was. This is an attempt to derive the kinds of thought processes that sit behind a person who speaks and acts the way Touko does in KnK. You'll notice she's a lot more collected than Lio ever managed to be in MIAL. The chronological distortions also aren't quite as extreme; Lio being a superhuman who can think in bullet-time, it's not quite as easy for her to match his feats of fitting thousand-word rants in between individual lines of a conversation. The key point that joins them in having these very detailed inner monologues is that they're both basically introverts, who generally prefer to spend time with their own thoughts rather than other people. Of course, in Lio's case his own thoughts are other people, but that's just a technicality.
My propensity for walls of text is something I don't think I'll ever be able to fully address. Readability's always going to be an issue, especially in a fandom that's built up around people (myself included) who read translated VN prose, with its single-sentence paragraphs and love affair with em-dashes. However, you may want to consider a software solution. See, I write in OpenOffice, in size 12 font on A4 pages with big margins. This means that, compared to how my paragraphs appear on forum posts, they're a lot longer, but also thinner. I always find my work a lot more readable in OpenOffice than on the forum. I think it may be the increased horizontal dimensions they have when you read them on the web page that make them harder to follow. Try reading them in a smaller browser window - or copy the text into a word processor - so that the paragraphs are compressed, much like you'd find in a printed novel. Might have an effect.
This is probably not the best time to mention that literally every single detail in that gallery scene with Chouanji holds deep importance, all the way down to the precise wording of certain lines and the design of her kimono.
The rabbit hole keeps going down from here. This story functions largely as an explanation for two things that are canonical in KnK: firstly, how and why Touko 'degenerated' from the Magus Araya knew at Clock Tower, and secondly, the conversation she has with Alba shortly before his death, in which she explains her puppet reincarnation system to him. The latter is the deepest look into Touko's character we ever get in the original work (I don't care about anything in Mahoyo,I can write her backstory better than Nasu anywayit's an alternate timeline so whatever). She explains that she doesn't see any difference between herself and her puppet copies, and - and this is extremely important - Alba, an accomplished Magus in his own right, thinks this is completely insane. Touko is far from normal, but her mindset can't be the same as that of an ordinary Magus either. The purpose of this story is to explore that in full.
PM me. You'll have to explain what it is exactly you're looking for.
Last edited by Dullahan; October 8th, 2015 at 01:27 PM.
2+i/Asymptotic
And then, all of a sudden, it was time to go.
Six-twenty. Over the Kamo once again. There I was, settled into the air-cooled cabin of a taxi – recalls the clean smell of upholstery, steamed linen, the inner-ear throb of an engine in motion – watching the weft and warp of the city pass by. The sight of the mountains in the east: forested hillside crawling up the windscreen like a mass of summer insects...the rim of Kyoto's bowl, so to speak. The sky, then, formed a second bowl laid upside-down over it, pockmarked here and there by faintly golding arcs of cirrus, paled in the west with haze torched up by the sinking sun. The light that poured down onto Kyoto now did so like water over a washboard held at a steep angle, racing itself in rivulets down a gridded surface, mindlessly seeking the paths of least resistance. You could see it curl in long and licking shadows around the trees on either roadside. There I was, finding through glasses my face in glass windows, and in my glassed face finding the sights of Nijo Street, having crossed the southern approach to the Heian Shrine through Okazaki Park – the huge torii over Jingu Road passing, as the tourist guides would say, just to my right. Ahead and to the left, the park's prominent baseball field; opposing it across the street, the stoic Showa countenance of the Kyoto Municipal Art Museum. Everything in order, everything in place. Lines, crossings, paths and passings, right angles, grids...structure, seen and unseen. Locks and sluices. Artifice. Subordinated, to the seventh decimal place. Structure everywhere, everywhere deep. A grid enclosed by two bowls. An exceedingly rational system.
“Rational.”
Let me tell you something a very wise man once told me. A man who had, so to speak, seen further than others. Who had seen clearly such things as others might be blinded by. Many years ago, when I was no more than a child, he called me to his side and gave a small disquisition on exactly what he thought was rational and what was not.
It's often said that humans are rational creatures. It's also often said that they aren't. While it's true that humans are all endowed with a certain capacity for thought, whether this thought is in any given instance rational or irrational, sane or insane, is ultimately left to the court of popular opinion to decide. No-one is ever rational or irrational in isolation. The line can only be drawn in company, and is drawn differently depending on the company you keep. If you have a bunch of friends who agree with you, you can swallow any absurdity; if you have a multitude, you can sometimes get a tax exemption for it. The term 'rational' and its antonym are in this way deficient and rarely worth using seriously. I would permit it of mathematicians but no-one else. If the only way to tie those signifiers to a referent is to call for a show of hands, for ayes or nays from the peanut gallery, I'd rather not speak at all.
But then there is 'madness', a term often not far behind the aforementioned, yet one well worth rescuing from the merely social definition that afflicts them. If you look into the etymology, and if you're willing to go back very far indeed, to shady reconstructions of an ur-tongue many centuries dead, you will find 'madness' bound at its core to the idea of damage, of wounding. To be mad is to be injured. One may imagine being driven mad, enraged, due to an injury; but think also of the madness of the Norse berserkir that impelled them unarmoured into battle. Madness reacts to injury, madness invites injury. And injury is a solitary business. If you are wounded you are wounded no matter what the crowd has to say about it. Indeed, it's very much the character of wounds that others can't share in them. So too with madness. Just as all humans are endowed with a certain capacity for thought, all humans are likewise capable of thinking their thoughts to the point where their thoughts begin to hurt them. Most will go no further. Most can go no further. Doing that is for the mad folk. Madness is really a kind of love. It's a state of being in love with one's own thoughts, being unable to bear parting with them, and thus thinking them even beyond the point where they have begun to hurt you.
So I was told. And as I grew older and came to more fully understand what he had meant it became clear to me that what made a Magus was precisely that love he had spoken of: the love of one's own thoughts which would lead one to follow them even if they began to hurt. And as I grew older still and matured into the Magus I am now, it became clear to me that what made me an exceptional Magus was that they didn't hurt me.
Let me be clear. I'm a thinker, an intellectual at heart. I've always been one. In many ways I have always been in love with my own thoughts, unable to bear parting with them. Had my thoughts ever arrived at the point where I began to be hurt by them, I would have kept thinking them without hesitation. I would have passed into madness as smoothly and faultlessly as a bird taking flight, and my wounds would have deepened, would have multiplied, and would have killed me in the end. As wounds do, if left untreated. But it didn't happen. That point never arrived. No matter how far I thought my thoughts, they didn't hurt me. And so I kept thinking. I thought and I thought, further and further, until eventually I reached the point where I was thinking such thoughts that only I could endure them. Thoughts that in the mind of almost any other would not so much wound as destroy them entirely.
For example.
One night not even three weeks ago, I took a straight razor to my throat. With practised ease I cut skin and cartilage and severed the common carotid artery. Brain death ensued within seconds. I saw the lights go out. The pain, such as it was, that I felt as I made the incision was on the order of a mechanical response, something paltry and finite, calculated beforehand and entirely within expectation. I knew I would not die.
Just what was it that was exceptional about my achievement? The technical side, the manufacture of the artificial body I now inhabit, should rightly be called a work of genius. I will not deny that, nor cloak it in feigned modesty. For although like my colleagues I stood upon the shoulders of giants, my own stature in the field is now comparable. My impending designation for Sealing was quite thoroughly earned. But even so, a technical achievement is a technical achievement. Given time, given resources, given effort upon effort – it's not impossible that another could have done the same. The odds are resolutely non-zero, though I may be forty or fifty years ahead of the next-best among my colleagues. But supposing they did prove able to build what I built, to flawlessly replicate themselves in the way I did, could they have taken that final step? I think not. Even if they forced themselves to that moment of lying face-up on a slab with a razor to their throats, even if they were enough in love with the thought to follow it that far – even then, there would be that last infinitesimal seed of doubt.
Will it really be me, they'd ask. Will I be the one to wake up? Will I look out from those eyes as I look out from these?
In the moment of their hesitation, all their technical understanding of the process, all their reasoned assurances would turn to ash. The anguish that would grow from that seed of doubt would be beyond comparison. The thought would hurt them too much. They would stop, unable to bear parting it with it, unable to bear following it any further. So afraid. So uncertain. From then, one of two things would happen. It might be that with infinite reluctance, with infinite resignation, they would turn back from the precipice. Or it might be that love of their thoughts would suffice to push them over it. The process would work, of course. They would wake up as entirely themselves as they were before. But the wound incurred from their thoughts would remain and would fester. The thought that perhaps 'they' truly died there on that slab, and that the person they are now carries on as a ghastly simulacrum of the original, a fake wearing a dead man's shoes: that thought would be ineradicable. Because they would be too in love with it to let it go, they would keep thinking it. Because they kept thinking it, it would keep hurting them. For the rest of their lives.
That would be madness.
What makes my achievement exceptional is that even now the thoughts that led me to the slab and the razor do not hurt me. For me, it was no leap of faith. I did not linger at the edge of the dark in fear and in trembling. I knew. Just as one knows the answer is four when told to add two and two: precisely that kind of cold, mathematical certainty. I knew I would not die, in every sense, and because I knew that it was easy. It didn't hurt at all. When I woke up on the next slab over and blinked my unfocused eyes like a newborn and directed musculature never used before to incline my head so as to look across at the naked bloodied remnant that lay there – and when I saw it and I thought of the twenty-five years of life that had been cradled in that flesh, that unmoving husk – I felt something even I have difficulty putting into words. A deep and featureless elation. Over what I cannot quite say, nor can I say precisely what was won, but nonetheless it felt like triumph. A conquest.
And yet even though I am in love enough to have followed them this far, and even though I have never once been hurt by them, I feel now as I felt dimly the moment I woke up born anew on that slab –
– that I have no thoughts left to think.
* * * *
Hours earlier, back in the hotel room – I thought then in the taxi, in much the same way as I think now of that thought then in the taxi – there had been some detective work done after towelling off. To think I wouldn't do my research. In the cool dimness of my hotel room, burning through cigarettes like sticks of sandalwood at some Himalayan ashram, steadily macerating the innards of my skull into a fine mist of nicotinic agonists, I put a call through to the concierge and read from Freckles' note in a tone of casual inquiry. It didn't matter what adjectives they hung on it; the affectedly conspiratorial tone the reply came back in was all I needed to confirm my suspicions. Not quite a verbal nudge-and-wink – that, I suspected, would be reserved for guests asking after only the very highest class of brothel – but a raising of the brows, a Mona-Lisa smile for those in the old capital's capital-K Know. And all that over a landline, too. Not for nothing do they pride themselves on service here. Anyway, it was much as I had expected. Regard our precious little rich girl, flaunting insider status. Freckles had deliberately chosen somewhere which took care not to appear on tourist maps. A place that could not be found except by those who already knew where it was, and their plus-ones.
“I wonder if you've any information concerning the details of their menu. I am given to understand it is a Chinese restaurant; what cuisine could I expect, if you might know? Cantonese? Hainanese? Szechuan?”
“Most regrettably, Ms. Aozaki, we have no information in that regard. The menu is not distributed.”
Most regrettably. Clearly anything else would not have been as regrettable. The loss of a limb or child, say. So: an occulted menu, an air of mystery. Could be a risk. Doubly so if it was table d'hôte. If Lady Luck favoured me not, who knew what many-angled horrors would be simmered in black bean sauce for my delectation? Best case scenario, they'd be dead before reaching the table. I supposed that the proprietor's assumption was that any would-be diners, or at least one in a party, would already be familiar with the menu. These are the places that keep two kinds: with prices and without. For the paying customer and the...date...respectively. Ah, well. If the gods be merciful, it'll be Szechuan. That there would be even one item with a capsaicin level marginally sub-lethal – for a quick exit, in lieu of a window seat.
I replaced the phone receiver and then sat down on the bedside. Sheets neatly made up, faint smell of lavender accompanying. Fabric softener. With a finger I drew a circle in the linen by my side. This would have been at about four-forty, quarter to five. I spent a while drying my hair and studiously avoiding any thought of the woman I'd met in the gallery earlier today. By this point the dinner, the complex of thoughts entailed by the precise phrase 'six-thirty reservation', had attained a certain felt inevitability. A kind of fatalistic self-mythology, if you will. The path leading to the restaurant, to dinner, to this seat and this table and this place I am, present tense, now – to precisely the same extent that my traversal of that path is inherently inexorable in the very act of retelling it, so did it feel at the time. As if I was to be pulled along by a string. That is how I recall feeling, of course. How I retell that recollection. At around five, there on the bed, I sighed. Not for the first nor for the last time. My eyes, for a moment, darted over to the closet where I had installed my bags earlier that day. A thought occurred to me. Flickering through my mind, slipping like quicksilver. Thought of something cold and sharp. I paused and turned away.
Freckles. I then thought about Freckles. Much as it had, I imagined, for her childhood bullies, it was losing meaning from repetition yet sticking all the same. Turning the word over and over in my head, not even speaking it, it came to decompose into its component syllables, and from there into a brief chain of bioelectric impulses modulating intakes and expulsions of air. Stupid nickname, borne from the stupidity of children.
Yet what else was I to call her?
It was around then, looking back, that it first dawned on me that her real name had completely slipped my mind. I was troubled for a few minutes. I had not previously expected to need that particular morsel of my semantic memory any time soon or indeed ever again in my life, but it nevertheless irritated me that I was proving so thoroughly bereft of even a hint at such a small and simple detail. Come now. Really. No matter what elephantine dimensions the nickname had assumed in school culture, surely I remembered. What was it? What was her name? I felt – I felt then, in the taxi, both what and that I had felt then, in the hotel room – that it was something unusual. An uncommon name, one or maybe both of them. Yet also a name that was unmemorable, or perhaps merely less memorable than 'Freckles'. Certainly not a simple Tanaka, Toyoda or Hayashida, which rather smacked of the timeless countryside. No. Something more urban, more urbane. More aristocratic, at one or another level of mimesis. A Satou, a Katou, an Itoh? No...no, it didn't seem likely, though I was hardly certain of that. I couldn't even remember if it was short or long, simple or tongue-twisting.
I must have seen it somewhere at some point.
In fact, it must – it must – have been written somewhere at the gallery. No avoiding it. There would have been a list of the exhibits somewhere in the lobby, and on that you would have the names of the works and neatly printed nearby the names of the artists. Failing that the artist's name would usually have to be indicated somewhere around the works themselves. Not on them, of course, not in this case. A painting or photo print you could sign, but glasswork was different. I thought about the plaque with the Flaubert quote. That I had examined quite closely, and there certainly hadn't been anything else printed on it. Had there been another label on one of the other pedestals, at an angle I hadn't seen? Or perhaps on the wall near the entrance to the room?
“Shit.”
In my frustration-
“No...it wouldn't be.”
-I looked around for the list of names Doctor Faustus had provided in Rome. Families to keep an eye out for.
Fuse – 布畝 – Hybrid ancestry. Karasugadake vicinity.
Kawara – 河原 – Hybrid ancestry. Kamigyou/Nakagyou wards.
Ii – 伊井 – Necromancy. Yamashina ward.
Izukunzo – 焉 – Specialist contractor. Nakagyou ward. (This is the one you want, Aozaki.)
Mitae – 三妙 – Hybrid ancestry (?), connection w. Enryaku Temple. Mt. Hiei/Lake Biwa vicinity.
Musoyoe – 六十四栄 – Active onmyou talent. N of city to Kifune Shrine.
Oodorui – 大土塁 – SW of city, Nagaokakyou/Fushimi ward. Former onmyou talent. Dormant.
I had read it a few times before, and the contents hadn't changed. On the whole Faustus hadn't contributed anything too informative. Sarcastic comment aside, the impression I got was that most of these names referred to fairly large clans and the given locations referred to the general areas where they lived or worked. Whatever it was they did.
“...no, didn't think so.”
None of them rang a bell. I would have been very surprised if they had. Had Freckles been an envoy from that side of things, I would have noticed back in high school. There are signs, so to speak. Otherwise I would have been informed ahead of time. So, no, nothing of that kind of backstory for her. She was as ordinary as anyone else. Solid all the way through. Still, that didn't help my memory any. After a few more minutes of fruitless guesswork, I gave up. Quite bitterly, but I had to. By that time my hair had mostly dried, so I began disemboweling my luggage in search of something to wear.
'Wear something nice' – how the skin crawls at such a request. Being in itself the obviation of a printed dress-code, by circumscribing formality informally it constitutes one of the most lethal insults imaginable among civilised company, all while remaining entirely deniable. It is human language raised to the heights of such coldly sadistic misuse as locomotives were on the one-way line to Treblinka. One can only speculate as to the fey and reptilian thoughts that maddened the mind of its creator. I like to think they quietly hanged themselves in an Swiss sanatorium circa 1880, their mummified cadaver discovered weeks later partly eaten and caked in guano. The human race in this pre-post-industrial age is so thoroughly over-socialised that it is simply impossible to up and ask what precise definition of 'nice' any given eatery, drinkery or miscellaneous place-of-goal-directed-clothes-wearing happens to subscribe to. Rather, you must be subtle. Like a fox. You must obtain an idea of the median property values in their part of town and then calculate backwards, accounting while you do for all sorts of coefficients – prevailing fashion trends, the currency's purchasing power parity, the present state of the hemline index, local temperature, humidity, precipitation, wind speed and direction, and lastly but certainly not least, the desired effect on target. It seemed the case that I had been invited out to Givenchy territory, but fuck me if I was going to take that bait. An oft-forgotten corollary of dressing to kill is that dressing to get away with it requires more finesse. More practicality. No heels, for one. In the end a lack of extensive choice forced a certain degree of creativity on my part, and I was able to assemble something weather-appropriate I was happy with, or at the very least not sickened by. See it now, in my dim reflection in the taxi window. Boatneck, steel-blue. Waist belt. Beige capris. You'd never see a pretty girl in it, but nevertheless, 'nice'.
I then mulled over the infinite series of irony that now summed itself to a paltry snickering finitude at my use of the phrase 'dolling up'. Believe me, I was laughing on the inside.
By half-past five I was more or less ready. Once I'd found the number for a suitable taxi service in the guidebook that had come with my room, all that was left for me was to kill time until it was time to go. I thought about checking my maps – these were mostly surveys of spiritual land, conducted secretly by proxies or direct agents for London over various and variously-sized parts of the country in 1593, 1598, 1609, 1630, 1861, 1902, 1908, 1928, and 1930 – to try and isolate some locations ahead of my meeting with Izukunzo where I might be inclined to set up my workshop, but I didn't really feel in the mood for it. In some small capacity I had become aware that I hadn't eaten anything all day, but that was one of those bodily responses I'd long learned how to suppress, so it didn't bother me much. I looked around the room for a bit. Inspected the mini-bar. Mostly soft drinks and beer. Shochu filling out the rest, as well as exactly one (1) whisky miniature. Domestic, of course. Yoichi Single Malt. I don't much care for alcohol myself; the notional appeal of inebriation has always more or less escaped me. My memories where the topic is concerned tend to revolve around the predilections for the stuff held by others. Yoichi whiskies, to be specific, were a favourite of my late grandfather. Back at home he had in his study this very ornately carved drinks cabinet from Denmark, made from walnut and crystal glass. It had belonged to one of his professors when he had been studying in Europe as a young man; the story went that he had sufficiently impressed or otherwise become close to his now-late teacher to have merited a mention in the will to the effect of some antique furniture. God only knows if that was actually true. However it was acquired, I remember that drinks cabinet very well because I spent a lot of my childhood in that study, reading or what-have-you, and within its windowed compartments filled with bottles of every shape and colour one could always spot the dark honeyed glass of something from the Yoichi distillery in Hokkaido, always – and this was key – about half to two-thirds full.
Funny story. There was a weekend when I was seven, and my grandfather was away somewhere, when I became convinced that the order in which the bottles were arranged held some kind of hidden meaning. I thought this because I was a very attentive child and I had noticed the great precision with which the cabinet's owner removed and replaced items from within it, always taking care to see that bottles were put back in their original positions, lined up neatly with labels displayed to the front. Ordinarily this would have turned out to be a simple case of overactive pattern-matching in response to a mild obsessive compulsion, but because this was him I was completely right. After a few false starts it became clear that the first character of each distillery's name, converting to Japanese in the case of foreign imports, formed a sentence when written out in the order in which the bottles were arranged on the lowest shelf. That sentence was Shouldn't you be working, Touko?
The joke was on him. I'd already finished what he'd given me to do while he was away.
While we're pointlessly digressing, here's another story. A few years ago I discovered when I was doing research in Scotland that the Kilgardie estate outside Dundee had been converted into a distillery by the good Doctor's descendants. They were still around, still fairly wealthy. Investments and so forth. But the Kilgardie name was now that of a well-regarded producer of fine Scotch; they'd won a few regional awards in recent years. Trophies proudly displayed at the offices, that sort of thing. I drove up to see them on the chance that there were any papers of the old man's that had remained with the family instead of being buried in the Clock Tower annexe in Edinburgh. Of course, it had been a few generations since the line went extinct. I found that only one person there even remembered that the Kilgardies had once been Magi: this sad-eyed, wizened retiree of about eighty with cataracts like dim pearls and a handsome tartan-capped face in the photos of pheasant shoots from the 1950s that were framed above the fireplace. He had two sons who ran the distillery day-to-day. His own father had been the Doctor's son – the last Kilgardie born with Magic Circuits. When I asked him about his grandfather's papers he paused for a moment as if struggling to remember, then leant back in his armchair and told me with a sliver of satisfaction: first, that there had been a great many of them left in a set of cabinets in the old house's cellar, and second, that he'd burnt them all years ago.
I was fucking speechless. Might as well have told me you'd burnt an original Rembrandt or something. When I finally worked myself up to asking why, precisely, he'd done that to research which was inspired, which was unique and of inestimable value, which was the product of a brilliant man with an innovative way of thinking, he laughed. It wasn't much of a laugh – he wasn't in the shape for howls or peals or tears – but it was a laugh all the same.
“I always knew,” he said, “one of you people would be along after it someday. You're all the same, you are. You know, of course, what he did in the service of those papers.” And he gave me a singularly disgusted look. “That's not a human being what does that. That's a monster. I were sixteen he died; I went on his deathbed. I saw him, I knew it.” He sighed deeply. “That look in his eyes, it's madness. He killed all those women. So many he didn't even keep count. He killed his wife...he made my father a cripple trying to pass down that Crest of his. And at the end all he said to us was: my papers, my work, my legacy. Keep them safe. That's all he said. He didn't care about us at all. He didn't care a whit for everything he'd done to us. He had already become completely inhuman. Now Da never had the heart to go against what he said, in life or in death, so we hung onto the stuff. But after Da passed away you can be damn sure I found every last scrap the bastard wrote and I burnt the lot of it. Had he yet been there I'd have burnt Granda with it.”
“I still don't understand.”
“Of course you don't. Hell en't deep enough for him, let alone the rest of you. Get out of my house, girl. I ever see you here again, I'll be fetching my rifle.”
* * * *
A bit before quarter past six I finished things up in the room and padded down the hotel's carpeted hallways to the elevator. I rode down alone, enfolded within the unsilent mechanical silence of every large modern building. Stepping out of the lobby downstairs, once more into the heat and humidity – though the lowered angle of the sun had by then alleviated the worst of it – I crossed the exterior courtyard to the road and hailed a taxi on Kawaramachi Street, just opposite the City Hall. I gave the address Freckles had given me, and then we were off. Soon we crossed the Kamo. Once we were on Nijo Street, this chapter began. Along Nijo we continued all the way to its eastern terminus, where it joins Shirakawa Street in an angled T-junction. Turned right there. Around this part of the city we were moving equally among broad modernist concrete amalgamations as we were among tall weather-stained wooden fences and townhouses of both residential and commercial use with one foot in the present and another in the Edo period. Power lines snaked over slanted, furrowed roofs; A/C units abutted bamboo-shuttered windows; alleyways busied with side doors and parked bicycles were broken at their junctions with the street by storefront strips of rock-garden. Clean white ovoid pebbles. All of this, as Kyoto would have it, quite low-rise. Rarely more than two stories. Here and there some buildings showed signs of recent repair work. Earthquake damage. Shirakawa Street curved gently until we were heading due south. The sinking sun shone through the window on the other side to mine, casting the taxi's interior in light at an incline. Particles of suspended dust glinted in the empty space above the next seat over. Their motions were oddly tranquil, ignorant of the motions of the taxi they were held within. After a short while we came to a large junction where Shirakawa joined onto Niomon Street. Instead of following it we turned left, again heading east. Next to some vending machines by the roadside a large stone stele – the word seems inappropriately archaeological in tone, but I don't know how else to describe it – informed me that this was the way to Nanzen-ji.
Nanzen-ji I had actually been to before, though even if I hadn't I would have been able to recognise it. It was one of the choice locations depicted on that tourism poster at the train station earlier today. I don't know if you could rightly call it the most famous Zen temple in the land, or even in Kansai, or even in Kyoto, but it'd have to be up there. What approaching Nanzen-ji meant was that we were closing in on the mountain. The vast verdant mass of Daimonjiyama, paled in summer haze, piled up in my field of view like a tsunami. As if the yet-unseen form of the temple complex in its foothills was a dike that miraculously held it back from breaking. The Buddhas save, indeed. As we headed further east the road quickly acquired the aspect of a mountain road. The surroundings became forested, the sunlight dappled by treetops, the townhouses supplanted by the austere frontages of traditional buildings. On the right-hand side of the street the city had dissolved entirely; there was nothing there but a band of vegetation behind a short retaining wall that separated the street from a long thatched barrier that continued far into the distance. Behind that wall would be a few minor temples affiliated with Nanzen-ji. Cloistered, as it were.
The last time I was here I was sixteen. I'm sure you can guess why. A school trip. One of those inevitable ones. Reien being Reien, no expense was spared. Our whole class group went: freshmen, second-years, seniors, all. We stayed in a top-class ryokan and over the course of five long days saw almost everything there was to see in the old capital. The intent of our school being to produce young ladies of culture, it was self-evidently vital to the administration that we should be shown precisely what 'culture' was. Unwilling to subject such impressionable young flowers to the variegated vicissitudes and vulgarities of actually existing culture (as if the seniors weren't already more than informed, the sluts) they chose to take us to Kyoto, where the culture of people viz. aristocrats who had fucked and killed and intrigued and safely died centuries ago was preserved as if trapped in amber. Presumably the people who actually live here must do something with their time, and some of what they do could arguably fall under the label of 'culture' – though I must say the impression our class trip left us with was that 'culture' was a synonym for 'architecture' – but in the eyes of the rest of the country, this trapped-in-amber quality is really all Kyoto's good for. I don't recall that I had much of an opinion about Nanzen-ji when I was there nine years ago. It was a Zen temple like many other Zen temples. Some rich, some poor. Some Rinzai, some Soto. Whatever. By then I was sufficiently invested in my own personal path to enlightenment that what the competition had to offer utterly failed to move me.
And, of course, Freckles wasn't there that time. Different class group, if you recall.
The gate of Nanzen-ji was still hidden behind a bend in the road up ahead when my taxi slowed and drew to a halt. The block we had arrived at presented itself to the street as a high wall made of dark timber topped with jade-green sloping eaves. The wall was broken in the centre by a large pillared opening surmounted by a much more ornate set of sloping eaves with ornamental dragon heads at the corners. Joining the two pillars below the eaves and above the stone path that lead within was a wooden surface emblazoned with the restaurant's name. Characters done in gold paint. Just those characters; nothing even to indicate that it was, in fact, a restaurant. There were electric lanterns at intervals along the outside wall and the gateway, but the sun was still up and they weren't lit yet. Through the gate I could see the stone path continue directly inward, hemmed in on either side by wooden posts which supported the beams of an angled roof that followed the path as far as it went. Beyond the wooden posts there was vegetation – ferns, decorative plants. A garden, then. At the end of the path I saw stairs which ascended about a metre up to what looked like the door to the restaurant proper. The bulk of the building itself was invisible from the road, concealed behind the wall and the garden. If you were passing by idly you might confuse it for another temple, even. I paid my driver and got out. The taxi headed off empty further down the road, vanishing behind the trees ahead. As if seeking enlightenment up there at Nanzen-ji. It was six twenty-eight in the afternoon, local time, on Friday, August the eleventh, AD 1995.
For a while, I stood at the mouth of the restaurant. There were no pedestrians around here. Vehicles too were absent. The sound of my taxi receded to annihilation in the aimless whispering of the city – a whispering that itself seemed to here be subdued. The sound of trees in wind fell in above the distant voices of cars and people. The natural calmness of the place seemed to invite a chicken-and-egg question: was it an effect of the Zen temples nearby, or were they built here in, I don't know, the twelfth century or something, because that calmness had been present beforehand? Hard to tell at this point. Too much history. To my right I saw the shape of the mountain prominent over the rooftops. To my left I saw the sun, hazy and brilliant, descending into the hills to the west. Probably about twenty minutes to sunset. The heat I had felt earlier in the afternoon lingered, inherent in the masses around and below. It radiated off every surface. Yet a slight breeze had settled in as the day came to an end, and after the initial shock of leaving the domain of the taxi's A/C had worn off the weather was not altogether too bad. Reminded me of Singapore, that one time.
I stood there. A minute passed, a minute passed.
I stood there and I did not move.
* * * *
I have been thinking about what I said at the beginning of this story.
Now, I am here being very particular with my words. When I say 'have been thinking', I deploy the present perfect continuous tense just as the blade of a guillotine is deployed into some hapless aristo's neck – with great precision, a satisfying thunk, and a higher purpose. From the top: I have been thinking – which is to say that at some point in the recent past I began to 'think', whatever that means, and that this process has continued smoothly up to the present moment – about what I said at the beginning of this story. To be perfectly clear, the present moment is what it has always been. I am, presently, where I have been all this time: seated at the very restaurant table implied in all narration hitherto, directly opposing Freckles. The aforementioned dinner date, for dire want of a better term, is happening at this very moment. Time is passing – present continuous, is passing, is currently passing, is passing right now in all that that implies, the unceasing torrent of sense-impressions – in her presence, in this seat, at this table, at the restaurant she chose a stone's throw from Nanzen-ji whose name I have not deigned to remember...iterate that as needed. Pile context upon context, if you like. It is in fair Kyoto where we lay our scene, and the scene has been laid for a while now. The point: that the promise twice-made of a six-thirty reservation is here and now fulfilled.
And yet the tale drags its feet. It's yet to, as it were, catch up to where I am now. Moments pass in the present like the viscous trickle of honey – like the proverbial minute with one's hand on a hot stove – and in those moments my thoughts are in the past. In the taxi, for example. Or in my hotel room. And now it's those thoughts themselves I've come to think about. What I mean to do with this aside – the product of my oh-so-grammatical having-been-thinking – is draw attention to something that has been implicit from the beginning of this fine comedy of errors. Back then, I framed the account that followed as an explanation, explaining myself to myself. This story was supposed to be...something that laid out a kind of causal map, a flowchart terminating in my present misfortunes. I could more accurately have called it 'rumination'. In any case, that was the intention. The admitted intention. And yet, though it's the most extensive instance thus far, this has not been the first time I have – unnecessarily – interrupted the flow of past events with some vague intimation that things are happening, as if on the sly, up here in the present tense. Why, one may ask? In answering, in being honest, I must clarify that this is not what has happened at all. The very terms I just used – 'up here in the present tense', as if I stand (present-tense) on some kind of Juliet balcony observed from below by the me-shaped creature who lives in the past – serve both to hint at and obscure the true situation. My occasional references to the present situation in the restaurant with Freckles have not been isolated intrusions into the otherwise straightforward continuum of this story. Maybe it looked that way from the 'point of view' of the past tense, but that point of view is an illusion, something wholly engineered from the present.
The past tense is the present tense's plaything – that is why you can't trust narrators.
As I said earlier, memory is fickle. Seen rightly the story has been more like an old carpet – a very broad and ornate one, perhaps in the Persian style, detailed with geometric figures and miniatures of apocryphal scenes thrown together in an order altogether arbitrary – that has been thrown over the rough and unvarnished floorboards of the present moment, yet reveals them here and there through tears or worn-away parts. At the beginning, I denied that this story was something to idly pass the time. I'll still deny it. Were this story a pastime, telling it would by definition be filling empty or unoccupied time. Right now my time is far from empty, and is very much occupied: occupied, in every sense, by the seated figure of Freckles at the distance of a table for two. Her glass-eyed smile. Pretty and never beautiful.
Yes. The thought occurred – has been occurring – yet still occurs to me. That this story is a kind of escape. It is not a thought I have much taste for, but still it occurs to me, and occurs all the more in the attempt to dismiss it. That the purpose of this account which proceeds in disorder, jumping forward and backward in time as it pleases, focusing in to clarify certain elements while glossing over others in seeming accord with its own internal logic – is not to explain the present moment, but to remove myself from it. To withdraw from this undesirable immediacy. This awful concreteness – a reality suffused by a certain deafening tone or perhaps overlaid with a kind of film grain, a texture, timbre, to the very present presence that is here and now. Like a splinter in my eye. Against the sense of being-here – against being a thing embodied here, a mass of compacted and faintly palpitating flesh woven inside with countless paths and channels entangling organs in their function-driven forms and enclosed without by some pale smooth expanse punctured at those irregular intervals conducive to the innards' survival and seated sitting straight-backed properly just as it was raised to do and in this seat and this place and in the sight of her –
– what does Touko do?
She turns inward, to the theatre of her mind, and re-enacts the past with the aid of small puppets.
Well.
Whatever.
I bring this up because it may pose a problem of the Tristram Shandy kind. As my story approaches where – when – I am now, its protagonist must in proportion come to align with and finally be identical to her narrator. That being me. As the present moment nears – or, more accurately, as my retelling, my internal re-enactment of what led up to this moment catches up to this moment – I will find the person whose story is being retold herself becoming more and more like myself in her willingness to withdraw from the moment, from the concrete and immediate. She will, quite amusingly, I think, begin to display a marked tendency to internally re-enact what led up to what was the present moment for her at that time. I suppose at some point I will have to narrate myself narrating the beginning of this story. And so on. Ad infinitum.
Yes, I know. It's a terrible mess. Rather recalls the famed paradoxes of Zeno, doesn't it? This ouroburos, I'm afraid, has me by the teeth and tail...
God.
What the fuck am I doing?
I ask that. I think about that. I am, of course, a thinker. I think at my own risk, which is no risk at all because my thoughts do not hurt me. I think about my thoughts, and those thoughts of thoughts, those stories of thoughts I too in turn begin to think about. And I think about that as well. In making this aside at all I have at once identified that my thoughts themselves are recursing to what will soon be the point of incomprehensibility, and myself become thoroughly complicit in that same recursion. Magus, vivisect thyself.
So I sit here, sit in my chair silent and sullen like a scolded child, and I think. And my thoughts spiral and spiral, they loop into themselves, one-sided strips or bottles without volume. Intellection circling the drain. Thoughts like snakes swallowing their own tails.
This, I think, is not what I had wanted.
This, I think, is something that cannot continue.
And in this present, present moment, Freckles eyes me all the while. Eyes with eyes of dark glass.
This is wrong. Coming here was a mistake.
I don't want to be here.
I don't want to talk to her.
* * * *
Eventually, I'd had enough. I took the step, I crossed the threshold. I passed the parting of the walls, and began making my way down the path. The garden did not quite attain the ordered artificiality, the hyper-naturality of a Japanese formal garden; it was a bit too lush, a bit too wild and unkempt, yet unkempt within strict limits. Not a geisha but rather a party girl barely kept in check by her parents. I reached the stairs and climbed them, meeting at the top with the floor level of the restaurant proper. I crossed a short section of verandah lit by electric lights fixed to the beams of the eaves above. A set of double doors – heavy wood, opaque – set themselves in my way. It was indicated that they opened inwards. I reached out to push them.
There was, in any case, no turning back at that point. Or rather the option was there, but it was not taken. I had made up my mind hours ago, and had continued making up my mind ever since. I knew why I was here. Earlier in my hotel room I had burnt through half a pack of egregiously rare Taiwanese smokes to calm down, to order myself, reassert control over myself, to repair – no, to construct – a paper doll around myself that would endure Freckles. A facade that would render velvet the grip of hatred irrational beyond recourse, which I had in any case smoked down to a more stable local minimum relative to what I had felt earlier. In short, a posture, an attitude that would prevent the kind of reaction there had been at the gallery. Poised and cool ice-queen, that was the ticket. Had to be, rather. The alternative...it's such pathetic weakness. It had to be that. Something that would...engage her. Speak to her, at the very least.
Yeah, I knew why I was here.
I came here to hurt you, Freckles.
I stepped inside the restaurant. The air was cool. The interior was sparse, brightly-lit and seemed entirely hewn from wood. Wooden floor, wooden walls, wooden beams above. A wooden reception hall with waiters awaiting with wooden expressions. Very neatly dressed, both of them. A getup that was all angles and lines, black and white and nothing in between. They each gave a professional bow at the sight of me.
“Good evening, Miss,” said one of them. “Have you an existing reservation here?”
Miss, again. Good to know I'm still a Miss.
“I do. My name is Aozaki. I believe someone's expecting me.”
“Aozaki...” he repeated, eyes flickering down to an open file. “...yes, here we have you. At six-thirty, in the Liu Tiao Room. A reservation for two. Miss Aozaki Touko,” he said, looking up at me, “and Miss Sotou Reiko, who is already here.”
What?
“What?”
A bemused expression.
“I'm sorry, Miss?”
This wasn't right.
“Excuse me. Could you repeat that? The other name on the reservation.”
He was too well-trained to crack a smile. Not even a slight one.
“Miss Sotou Reiko.”
“Sotou...Reiko. That's her name?”
“That is correct, Miss.”
I blinked.
No, it's not.
The other waiter now took his turn to speak.
“Shall I show you to the Liu Tiao Room, Miss?”
That's not her name.
“Yes, thank you. Right away.”
Even if I had completely forgotten what it was, I was more confident than ever of what it was not.
'Sotou Reiko' was not Freckles' name.
“Very well,” said the second waiter. “Please follow me.”
I was put off-balance by that. I should have anticipated that I would discover Freckles' name at the restaurant in this way. Perhaps I did anticipate it. What I did not expect was that the name would be one I was absolutely certain could not be hers. The moment I heard it and heard it tied to her existence, it hit me, like a bullet to the head, that it was wrong. Absolutely, completely, utterly wrong. Even I could not fully measure the depth of my certainty on that point. It wasn't her name. It just wasn't. I would have bet anything on it. Did she lie? Did she give a fake name to the restaurant? I wouldn't put it past her, but I couldn't think of any reason why she might have done it. Did she change her name? Doubtful. That would suggest a certain temperament, a willingness to sever the ties of blood that one's name implies to those who gave it and share it. Freckles wasn't the type. Not in high school. Not now. She hadn't changed at all. Did she get married? No. Decidedly improbable. That would have in any case only explained the family name, and as I saw it Reiko was precisely as wrong as Sotou.
I had to return to the original question. If not Sotou Reiko, then what was her name?
I was led down a wooden corridor that branched away from the reception hall. The sides were lined with sliding doors. Also wooden. Everything was bright and minimal. Elegant, I supposed. The overall architecture of the place owed great debts to classic Chinese and Japanese design, but the debts were clearly being repaid in some very unfamiliar currency. I suppose that's what post-modernity means at the level of floor plans. Our footsteps were dull and did not echo. I noticed no sounds of eating or conversation from any of the rooms we passed. It was early in the evening. Not even sundown yet. Conceivably the place was entirely empty, apart from her.
“The Liu Tiao Room,” the waiter announced, indicating the door we had reached. The very end of the hall. I stepped forward and placed my hand on it. I stopped. Hesitated. I heard nothing from inside. I looked back to face him. “I will return with the menus momentarily, Miss,” he said. I nodded. He bowed, turned and walked off down the corridor. I returned my gaze to the door. I took a breath. I pulled it to the side and stepped through into the room.
Only then did the thought occur to me. Only at that moment.
When I encountered her in the gallery today, what exactly had she been doing? Why had she been sitting alone at her own exhibition on a day when almost no-one had come to see it? Surely she had other things to do, other places to be. The photographer who made the works on the floor below hadn't been there to attend their own exhibition. Why would she? To field questions from the public? Why? In all likelihood you'd get the same ones over and over. Incredible. How'd you do it? What's it for? What does it mean? Was she there just to look at the statues? Again, why? She made them. She must know them inside and out. She must have seen them in every way visitors to the gallery never could. She must know them well enough to be sick of them.
So what had she been doing?
She had been sitting there for who knew how long. Perfectly still. Unmoving. Until my entrance broke it, the spell of her stillness must have been absolute. Imposed over everything in the room. The moment I entered, dark and glassy eyes turned to meet mine. As her eyes turned, her face too began to shift. Her blank expression slowly animated. Her posture relaxed. Subtly, so subtly one could almost miss it, the myriad tiny movements and tics and twitches of muscle and skin that make us human returned to her, as if she was remembering them, drawing them up from the depths of some reasonless amnesia.
Like a puppet coming to life.
Doll-girl. Puppet-girl.
“Touko.” She smiled. Like a cat, I thought.
“Freckles.” I smiled right back, and slid shut the door behind me. “So sorry. I must have kept you waiting.”
-----------------------------------------------------------
surprise, bitch
bet you thought you'd seen the last of me
(Special thanks to Glow who bullied me into finishing this chapter)
Last edited by Dullahan; November 8th, 2016 at 03:13 PM.
かん汗ぎゅう牛じゅう充とう棟
Expresses the exceeding size of one's library.
Books are extremely many, loaded on an oxcart the ox will sweat.
At home piled to the ridgepole of the house, from this meaning.
Read out as 「Ushi ni ase shi, munagi ni mitsu.」
Source: 柳宗元「其為書，處則充棟宇，出則汗牛馬。」— Tang Dynasty
!!!!!!!!?????????!!!!!!!!
Linger: Complete. August, 1995. I met him. A branch off Part 3. Mikiya keeps his promise to meet Azaka, and meets again with that mysterious girl he once found in the rain.
Shinkai: Set in the Edo period. DHO-centric. As mysterious figures gather in the city, a young woman unearths the dark secrets of the Asakami family.
The Dollkeeper: A Fate side-story. The memoirs of the last tuner of the Einzberns. A record of the end of a family.
Overcount 2030: Extra x Notes. A girl with no memories is found by a nameless soldier, and wakes up to a world of war.
Finished up. Good shit, not much else to say about that. Glad to see you back writing again.
Linger: Complete. August, 1995. I met him. A branch off Part 3. Mikiya keeps his promise to meet Azaka, and meets again with that mysterious girl he once found in the rain.
Shinkai: Set in the Edo period. DHO-centric. As mysterious figures gather in the city, a young woman unearths the dark secrets of the Asakami family.
The Dollkeeper: A Fate side-story. The memoirs of the last tuner of the Einzberns. A record of the end of a family.
Overcount 2030: Extra x Notes. A girl with no memories is found by a nameless soldier, and wakes up to a world of war.
I'm getting the vibe of Grade-A Nasubullshit about that unrememberable name.
goodness, don't leave us ever again
Took you long enough, ya bastard.
"Sotou Reiko isn't her name."
Oh, you motherfucker.
You got me good, there. You got me real good, there. Welp, don't keep us waiting too long on that upcoming "battle" "of" "wits," now. I've missed cerebral Nasu-esque work.
My Fanfics. Read 'em. Or not.McJon01: We all know that the real reason Archer would lose to Rider is because the events of his own Holy Grail War left him with a particular weakness toward "older sister" types.
Ah, it ain't so bad. What's in a name, after all? Even if you learnt her name, you would not know who she is.
Suffice it to say that she's definitely not.Sotou Reiko卒塔麗子
かん汗ぎゅう牛じゅう充とう棟
Expresses the exceeding size of one's library.
Books are extremely many, loaded on an oxcart the ox will sweat.
At home piled to the ridgepole of the house, from this meaning.
Read out as 「Ushi ni ase shi, munagi ni mitsu.」
Source: 柳宗元「其為書，處則充棟宇，出則汗牛馬。」— Tang Dynasty
Freckles be Freckles, after all.
What's important is that it throws Touko off her game and leads to a continually interesting encounter down the line. Element of her being, well, not all the way in her element opens the door for new angles to potentially pursue in this pseudo-character study of said woman.
My Fanfics. Read 'em. Or not.McJon01: We all know that the real reason Archer would lose to Rider is because the events of his own Holy Grail War left him with a particular weakness toward "older sister" types.
Can't frequent this place without hearing adulation of Dullahan writing, but I'd ever actually seen it in the wild. I'd thought about looking it up but am especially lazy in ways and didn't want to necro in others. When I saw this on the front page of Fanfic forum, I asked Leo if he knew what it was about. He told me, so being on a KnK kick I eventually clicked it. I was surprised that it was in first person. For some reason I didn't expect that from Dullahan writing, but then I realize that this is a closer imitation of the original KnK novel style than any other person-choice. I don't think I could actually say anything substantive if I read it all then commented, so I just wanted to point out some of my favorite phrases from the very first section -i/Our Lady of Reien.
And yet it happened. Very quickly, too, like a kind of catalytic change, a phase transition. Supercooled water flash-freezing at the first disturbance.
[...]
Start investing dangerously, snarling at the furniture, miscegenating with the Deep Ones down Innsmouth way. Call it zeitgeist, then. Trickle-down insanity.
[...]
...we are talking about future Lady Macbeths here, cooing black-widow types who'll later henpeck their once-idealistic politician husbands through the sordid corridors of power with sociopathic abandon between shopping trips at Issey Miyake and coffee with the Girls. Sasuga.
[...]
All of these quotations picked out without any particular comment other than dang. Maybe "well done."A city is nothing more than a machine for generating stories, most of which are (a) redundant and (b) uninteresting.
[...]
Like every other pair of girls who promised friends-forever on that day and never saw one another again, we two – who were never friends, and made no such promises – were surely utter non-entities to each other by the time the diplomas were all handed out.
[...]
Nostalgia, memory, sadness, love, fate, mourning one's lost innocence, the impermanence of all things – have we not a veritable thematic laundry list along which every possible permutation of this conversation has been laundered to gleaming white colourless blandness?
And then, there's this one:
Boom. All at once and quite cheaply after all that investment in the rest of the above beautiful prose, I realized I'm definitely interested and kind of love what I read so far. However, I won't read all of it right now and comment. I want to digest, and if I have further comment will share later. Anyway, I liked it so far.August, 1995 – I met her.
Imagine that the world is made out of love. Now imagine that it isn’t.
Imagine a story where everything goes wrong, where everyone has their back against the wall, where everyone is in pain and acting selfishly because if they don’t, they’ll die.
Imagine a story, not of good against evil, but of need against need against need, where everyone is at cross-purposes and everyone is to blame.
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Spoiler:
No surprise that my stuff is difficult to see these days; I've been very bad about updating things for the past two years. I would actually not recommend that you read any of my other stuff. MIAL in particular because (1) the early parts I really dislike and (2) it's 450k words long and still unfinished. Everything else is all dead threads. If you do read and comment a PM or VM will let you avoid necro'ing, but the better option is probably to avoid the stories.
On reflection I probably should have tagged [Kara no Kyoukai] in the thread title, but then again, this story has a cast consisting of OCs, OCs, more OCs and exactly one (1) character from KnK, so people might feel they'd been had
The first-person thing wasn't originally intended to imitate the KnK novels. First-person they are, by and large, but God knows the prose style in the original is far and away different from mine. Anyway, I have previously written in both. First-person, for all its flaws, I find very well-suited to characters who are (as Touko is, and Lio in MIAL is) to varying degrees narcissistic. It lets me foreground Touko's in-universe propensity for lengthy monologues - and thus do funky self-referential things with it - rather than hang everything on an anonymous third-person narrator.
I'm glad that you did. And I hope you continue to like it as things develop. I'm looking forward to whatever comments you might have in future!
かん汗ぎゅう牛じゅう充とう棟
Expresses the exceeding size of one's library.
Books are extremely many, loaded on an oxcart the ox will sweat.
At home piled to the ridgepole of the house, from this meaning.
Read out as 「Ushi ni ase shi, munagi ni mitsu.」
Source: 柳宗元「其為書，處則充棟宇，出則汗牛馬。」— Tang Dynasty
No no. I mean, Prix read that gazebo excerpt, so MIAL is definitely must read.
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