Editing City Series:Volume7 Appendix (section)

===Additional Information===

So that’s what I typed up on an old-fashioned word processor 16 or 17 years ago.

It didn’t have the title of Tokyo back then. In fact, I didn’t know what title to give it.

But I do remember thinking good and hard about how to make it weird when I was writing it. These also had the advantage of being so short I could write them whenever I wanted.

In my first year of high school, I wrote a total of 35 more as a high school version.

I increased the number of characters in those, so that is the origin of You as the childhood friend pharmacy clerk, of the four winds, and of the moon. (The moon talked a lot and was something of a policeman character.) Snowy was the East Wind character, the Boss was the South Wind and a biker, Sensei was stricter, and Daitarou was a cat transformed by the moon

But even then it didn’t have a title. They were just practice stories after all. I typed them all up on the word processor and only printed out the basis for Record 45 as a test. The other 34 stories were never printed and I can’t even read the disk they’re on anymore.

In my freshman year of college, when I could still just barely read the disk, I was considering whether I wanted to write or limit myself to drawing when I decided to try writing a full novel.

What I ended up with there was a Tokyo novel. It connected together the world seen in the previous stories I had written and refined the characters. The story was about them going to the Kanda House of Time to prevent time from stopping.

In other words, it was a story that takes place after this version of Tokyo and I think I will end up telling that story eventually.

When I wrote the Tokyo novel, I linked together the different worlds – or locations really – seen in the other stories and created the city of Tokyo. That was when I learned to look at a tourist map and transit map of Tokyo and come up with a setting with its own history and whatnot.

At the time, I was listening to a wider variety of music, fighting games and dancing were big, and I was going to a college deep in the mountains. I would spend the night at the college during the school festival or the smaller spring festival and the 70km journey to and from the school meant I would often get home late at night. All in all, I think I had given my enjoyable life a power up. I really did have to cross two mountains and valleys on the way to school, but the stars are so beautiful up on the mountaintop. When we would spend the night, I would chat with the heads of the other clubs and groups (I was the head of the art club) and head to the foot of the mountain late at night for supply runs. One time we dropped a car into the paddy fields and one time we really were snowed in at school.

By mixing all that together, I created an indescribable version of Tokyo where anything goes. Since the protagonists could only do the things they did because of the city they lived in, I decided on Zenon City – Tokyo for the title.

The manuscript was 350 pages when it was complete. I submitted it to an award for a publisher other than Dengeki and it of course didn’t win, but writing that helped me come up with a methodology for writing, I was picked up by Dengeki Bunko after writing a few more things, and I ultimately got to make this very short story version of Tokyo based on the original Tokyo stories.

Wow, that was a long story.

To sum it up, the very short story Tokyo came from me wanting to write something I didn’t see anywhere else and the novel Tokyo came from me wanting to try writing something more traditional. (This eventually led to me spending the summer of my 19th year writing a novel manuscript 1000 pages long and I later learned I had made the right decision when I won an award with something I wrote.)

But to be honest, I still lack the skill needed to write the Tokyo novel. Even the very short stories were around 120 stories and had the help of my younger self, but I feel like we still haven’t seen very much of Tokyo as a city. There must be more depth there.

But making something different from other people is the way to go and it was that starting point that led to the creation of Tokyo.

If I wrote this again, I feel like I would end up with a different Tokyo.

16 years have passed since I started all this. Seeing how it’s turned out, maybe it was worth writing something so cringey back then. Then again, I’m probably imagining that!!

Yeah, this really is cringey. It’s like being shown I was always this way. Why haven’t I changed how I say things in all this time?

What am I supposed to do about this?

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