City Series:Volume7 Appendix

The Origins of Zenon City – Tokyo

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.

Story 1: Spring

The cherry blossom front is on the rise.

You hear that phrase on the news all the time recently.

But the cherry trees near my house are still withered.

Maybe the cherry blossom front hasn’t arrived yet.

They said on the news Tokyo’s cherry blossoms would bloom by tomorrow.

If so, the front would be moving past us tonight.

On that night, I opened my window.

–The cherry blossoms must be falling in Kyushu right about now.

I sat on the windowsill and thought about that.

The moonlight as dull.

–Is it cloudy?

I looked up into the sky and saw a pink cloud moving by several meters overhead.

On closer inspection, I decided it had to be a clump of cherry blossoms.

They passed by.

The cloud of cherry blossoms fluttered in the wind and passed by.

After seeing that, I gasped and shut my window.

I ran out of my room, raced down the stairs, kicked open the door, and left the house.

I saw the cloud slowly descending.

I ran there and saw the cloud of cherry blossoms vanishing.

And in its place, the withered cherry trees were in full bloom.

“So that’s how it works.”

Story 2: Summer

I went to the beach for a training camp during the summer.

And when I say the beach, I mean a small island where the beach really is all there is.

But that’s better than nothing, I suppose.

The beach was white and the ocean was a breathtaking blue.

“Man, the lack of pollution sure is nice,” one of the others said while taking a look around. “Is there anything we could take back as a souvenir?”

“How about taking back the seawater?” I suggested.

Everyone else exchanged a glance.

“I don’t think that would work.”

“We’re going back by boat and train, after all.”

I scratched my head and pondered the issue.

“What if we solidified a portion of the ocean in gelatin?” I suggested.

Everyone else exchanged a glance.

“That could be interesting.”

We ended up pooling our money, heading back to the port town, and buying some there.

“Now we just have to wait a few minutes.”

We waited for the next day to arrive with the 40cm cube sitting on the table.

“Oh, no! It’s a typhoon! The waves have broken through the embankment!”

“Yikes! The seawater is already getting in here!”

We gathered up our luggage and withdrew to the attic.

The wind blew outside and the inn shook.

The next morning, we woke up to find all the water gone.

And our portion of the ocean had vanished from the table.

Story 3: Autumn

We have our cultural festival during autumn.

I know it sounds like an excuse, but we were heading home late after preparing for the festival.

But it wasn’t a big deal.

Heading home late didn’t matter at all.

Well, except when it did.

A chilly wind was blowing.

We were riding our bikes down the straight road alongside a field.

“It’s freezing,” one of them said. “Come to think of it, when’s the full moon again?”

“Wasn’t it a week ago?” I replied. “I ate dango that night.”

“It’s called tsukimi dango in that case.”

If memory served, it had been rainy that day.

I looked up into the night sky.

“The moon isn’t out today,” said my friend, also looking into the sky next to me.

“But the sky is clear, so we can see all the stars,” said another.

–Why was that?

I thought about it and lowered my head.

I saw something falling to the road.

We passed by it since we were riding our bikes so fast.

The object glowing with a dull brass-colored light vanished behind us.

“What are you looking back at?” someone asked me.

“Well, the moon fell back there.”

“The what?”

I ignored that voice and faced forward again.

After careful thought, I asked my friend a question.

“Hey, do you think the moon is made of tin?”

Story 4: Winter

Once night fell, I opened the window.

It wasn’t that I wanted to see the stars in the sky or the stars falling from the sky.

It definitely wasn’t a reason that’s so cool I’d be embarrassed to admit it.

No, it was because I heard a sound in my room.

Only my best friend in winter – the space heater – understood me.

I rested my elbows on the windowsill and stared outside.

The white lights of the streetlights illuminated the road.

I heard a car in the distance.

Then it passed by.

After a while, my shoulders got cold, so I reached for the window.

That was when I noticed someone standing below.

I looked down to see a man decked out in a black tuxedo and silk hat.

“I do hate to disturb you at this late hour, but could you lend me a flathead screwdriver?”

He removed his silk hat, looked up at me, and made that request.

“Eh? Um, sure,” I replied and soon went to him with the requested item.

He was standing in front of my house.

He accepted the screwdriver, bowed, and walked down the road.

I followed him mostly out of curiosity and he stopped in front of a black gas lamp on the side of the road.

“When did they build this?”

He reached for the gas lamp’s support pillar and began unscrewing one of its screws.

“It has remained unlit in recent years, so snowfall in this region has been delayed. I am terribly sorry about the inconvenience.”

After a while, I heard a gas flowing through the gas lamp.

“That completes maintenance on this region. Your cooperation is much appreciated.”

The man handed me the screwdriver.

The gas lamp lit up and I watched him leave.

After a while, it started snowing in this region.

Story 5: Graduation

I ran up the stairs.

I didn’t need to get a solid foothold on each and every step.

I just had to run on up.

The less cold air of spring’s arrival blew my hair back.

I checked my watch while I ran: 4:18 AM.

In another 4 hours, I would be standing in another school’s schoolyard.

I peeked into the hallway using the emergency exit’s window and saw myself wearing a brand new uniform.

That me appeared to be talking with someone, but did he notice me watching him through the emergency exit’s window?

He looked toward me, so I quickly resumed running up the stairs.

I peeked in through the next emergency exit’s window too.

I saw a somewhat bigger me there.

His breaths were visible while he climbed toward the roof.

I could already see some light in the eastern sky.

He placed his hands on the fence and stared in that direction.

Then he turned toward me, but turned back toward the eastern sky after a bit.

He apparently couldn’t see me.

He must have only been able to see the versions of me from even further in the past.

Just like when I was him 3 years ago.

He quickly started down the emergency stairs again.

He had left behind the friend who was accompanying him.

I remembered exactly this happening, so I tried to suppress my laughter.

Then he turned my way even though he supposedly couldn’t see me.

He opened his mouth and said the exact same thing as me.

“Don’t laugh!”

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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