L. Navid Osbert (東京)
27 July, 2009
Part Six of Chapter One is up.
I re-read my entry from two weeks ago and am embarrassed at its melodrama. I’m an historian, more or less, working on a historical research project. An amnesiac historian, sure, and a bizarre research project, but them’s the breaks. I think I just needed to spend a little time outside.
It’s tsuyu season, so it’s been really rainy lately. I’ve taken some walks, spent sunsets standing idly on the big pedestrian overpass next to Shibuya station, watching the lines of taxis bump each other along through the pickup loop, the black umbrellas on legs scurry endlessly in and out of that anthill, and the neon come to life. Tokyo’s grotesque and beautiful in the rain, if you can ignore the swamp heat, the monsoon humidity. The rain runs black down cracked and graffiti-spattered concrete, and the pillars holding up the expressway overhead seem almost victimized by that same modernization that begot them.
I’ve finally started to rummage the boxes a little, to peek at the other documents and notes lying in weight — wait — for me. Some of what’s there is bite-sized and standalone, serves to put the Daitokai Epic in better context. Not historical context, but internal context. I might post some of those in a bit alongside the continuing updates of The Epic. My predecessor did a lot of work… if what’s already been done has failed to yield even a chrono-geographical range of locality for this period, I wonder if it can be done.
I’ve also been wondering more and more about this predecessor of mine. I don’t know a thing about him or her. I would like to be able to speak to them — it seems impossible it wouldn’t make the task at hand at least a little easier. But, I guess, what could they have to tell me that isn’t already in one of these boxes for me to read?
More later.
