Editing City Series:Volume7 Appendix (section)

===An Origin That Feels Like an Excuse===

I know this is sudden for a project page, but Tokyo wasn’t originally Tokyo.

Near the end of my 2nd year in middle school, my friend asked me to write something in the notebook he was making. This all goes back to the few very short stories I wrote in there.

At the time, I had ended up with a word processor as a standalone machine (something I doubt kids these days are familiar with) because my parents didn’t know how to use it themselves. It had the skinny-sounding name of α10 and I used it to write all sorts of things while struggling to buy the 1000yen-a-pop ink ribbons.

At the time, Ahead and Edge had the opposite names and I was writing an Edge scenario that would become the foundation for the current Ahead story. I was also making TRPG rules for Genesis all while helping out around the house and doing dumb stuff at school.

Just for fun, I wrote some short stories based on the Forth setting, but I just wrote those however I liked, without thinking of the line count. But things were different when I was writing in someone else’s notebook.

I decided to limit myself to 6 lines per story, but I had never written anything that short before, the ink ribbons were expensive, and I wanted to write even more.

I ended up settling on having each page be a different story.

I drew a picture at the top and wrote a story of about 30 lines on the bottom of the page. (The ones printed here have the illustration removed for design purposes, but I still feel the pain of showing off my old work like this.)

I think the idea was based on picture books and Kenya Boy.

I wasn’t sure if it was possible to tell a story in only about 30 lines, but I realized that song lyrics and old ghost stories were basically that. For the former, I referenced 80s pop music. For the latter, I went to the library.

I still listen to a lot of those songs. At the time, I listened to Watanabe Misato, Psy-S, Zabadak, Yusa Mimori, TMN, the Blue Hearts, the Barbee Boys, Unicorn, Personz, and Anzen Chitai. I could go on, but I listened to them all on a daily basis when I lived in the limited world of a middle schooler. I couldn’t rank any of them above any of the others.

When my cram school got out at 8 in the evening, I would always spend about two hours riding my bike around the city along the riverbank, and visiting bookstores before heading home.

I would see unlit roads, the starlight casting shadows on the road on the moonless nights, clouds illuminated from below by the city’s lights, trains vanishing into the darkness after passing through the train crossing, strangers passing by in the shadows, and pieces of mystery objects littering the road. It was also uncanny how I would always find someone I knew near the train station or at a bookstore, which probably helped my late night wanderings last longer.

I would listen to music with headphones connected to the old cassette player in my bag. Oh, and they didn’t have auto-reverse in those days. This was the 80s when there weren’t even very many convenience stores around.

When I would get carried away and make my way up onto a tall hill, I would see houses with their lights still on late at night. When I would listen to music in the cold winter weather, I would get the feeling there was something inhuman in those lights.

I feel like those circumstances would make anyone think something was up.

While humming the lyrics to take in so many “short stories”, I finally arrived at the idea of ghost stories. The ghost stories of the time weren’t as over the top as the ones nowadays. They were mostly just a story about something strange happening and I think they generally included ghosts (obviously), monsters, mysterious phenomena, or urban legends. Anyway, the people who liked that kind of thing generally knew all the good ones.

The interesting thing about those stories is how they end:

“Some people say she was in fact an Iso Onna.”

“But the strange sounds did not end.”

“It turned out no one knew who the man they had passed on the road was.”

They tend to have an open-ended ending without a clear resolution. The idea is for them to relay the story of something that “actually happened” and leave the truth of the matter up to the reader’s imagination (and thus make the reader feel more closely connected to it), but I wasn’t able to analyze the structure to that extent as a kid. I just thought the abrupt ending was one way of writing a short story and I liked how it sounded.

“You aren’t saying any more than necessary. Makes you sound cool.” (We didn’t say “cool” back then, though.)

So instead of carefully writing out everything, I just wrote the parts I liked and skipped the rest. So you could say I created a really irresponsible writing method.

I ended up writing six stories, including the ones printed here. I managed to dig up copies of these five back home.

I know I’ve made a lot of excuses for these now, but I do hope you will read them.