On the first day of NaNoWriMo 2008, I racked up a nice, solid 2,143 words for Tokyo Inferno. My initial hesitancies about how difficult it was going to be and whether or not I would get mired down in topical details have more or less melted away. It's a first draft, and getting to the finish line / rounding all the bases / [insert metaphor here] matters most right now.

I'm gunning for a total length of about 120,000 words or so, although I don't mind it coming in a little shorter than that. I'm more concerned with making sure the right tone and substance are all present. So far, they are there, and all the ingredients are obediently lining up and allowing themselves to be made present.

Now if the @#$%&* NNWM website would just let me log in and post an update ... (Yet another argument for cloud-base hosting. Between hard drives dying and the power in their data center going out, I'm expecting an eighteen-wheeler to come crashing through the wall of the hosting center and grind the server into tinfoil.)

Update: I'll have the most recent word counts posted via Twitter.

The first draft for the cover image for Tokyo Inferno is live. Check it out...

Cover images, BTW, are by Heiwa4126@Flickr, and are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Because so much of what I'm doing with Tokyo Inferno requires research and documentation, I've been building a bookshelf of titles to keep close at hand while writing the book. Many of the things listed here I've mentioned before, or reviewed separately, but I thought it would be instructive to have them all listed here in some form. (Check back here for updates.)

• Seijun Suzuki's Taishō Trilogy of movies—Zigeunerweisen, Kagero-za, and Yumeji—evoke the atmosphere, morals, moods and also the terrors and pleasures of the era, too. The DVD transfers are subpar, sadly—these films absolutely deserve to be seen in theaters for the best possible impact—but grab them as rentals from NetFlix if you're not up to dropping $40-50 for the whole set.
  
• No discussion of the Taishō/Showa era's atmosphere and mood would be complete without at least some Edogawa Rampo, right? Black Lizard is probably your best place to start with that if you haven't already -- in fact, I'd wager it's the single most accessible book I'll put on this list, so it deserves the top spot. Go grab it if you haven't already; those of you who are mystery / thriller fans will have a rollicking old-school good time with it.
  
• I still haven't written a review of Yasunari Kawabata's achingly beautiful novel The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, unavailable in English until only a few scant years ago, but at this rate I won't be able to until after I finish writing this book -- every time I sit down to talk about the book I fall into random babbling fanboy gushing instead of a proper discussion. But as far as Tokyo Inferno goes, Asakusa was instrumental in cementing a good deal of my fascination with that moment in time after the 1923 earthquake.
  
• Another aesthetic influence (and another one that I haven't discussed yet) is Izumi Kyōka's In Light of Shadows, an author from the Meiji/Taishō period who worked in the Japanese equivalent of the gothic tradition. I ought to pick up the other book of Kyōka's work available in English (simply titled Japanese Gothic Tales), but that will most likely happen after November is done with.
  
• I was actually trying not to list manga here, if only because it's a bad idea to do any kind of historical research with them -- you might as well try to pass the bar exam after watching a few seasons of L.A. Law. Still, I'm including Nightmare Inspector not because of any historical accuracy, but because it's got the mood and tone of its period down pat, and it looks nifty. [More reviews]
  
• Herbert Bix's biography of Hirohito serves as a good way to establish historical background for the period, although I think I'll need to dig up some more specific information on the Russo-Japanese War (which is partial prelude to the goings-on in the story). Most of the book focuses on the emperor himself rather than the country at the time, but it is still valuable.

I spent most of the last two days highballing NyQuil and wishing I didn't feel like red-hot pokers were being shoved into my eyesockets. That's right -- Con Crud (or Con Staph, ha ha), which is rather surprising since I felt more than fine after I left, followed pretty scrupulous self-sanitization measures, and haven't gotten a case of serious consickness since about 2003 or so.

So I dosed myself, and slept -- or tried to -- and was plunged into a fever nightmare the likes of which I hadn't experienced in a long time. The good news is that fever dreams are, for me, usually a source of inspiration.

The dream was set in Japan's Taishō Era -- sort of the Roaring Twenties of Japan, but also suffused with a heavy dose of dread and deathly decadence. Kawabata's novel The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa and Edogawa Rampo's detective thriller The Black Lizard both do a great job of encapsulating the aroma and flavor of the era -- the former in a more literary way, and the latter in the guise of pulp fiction.

My dream, though, revolved around a young man who was caught in the Kantō Earthquake and finds himself curiously "unstuck in time". He journeys to the past before the devastation of the quake, and finds comfort there in things he remembers, but that comfort soon turns out to be short-lived -- everything that was familiar and happy there quickly turns strange and terrible. He returns to the present, but there finds himself pursued by hellish apparitions bent on consuming his soul. He finds some shelter with a spirit medium, but even she isn't able to help him. The only answer lies in the future ...

... and if I start talking about how all that works out, I'll ruin one of the best reasons to read it when I finish writing it. Which, by my best estimates, will probably start sometime in, oh, November. Hint, hint.

One key thing is the look and feel of the whole work, which is hard to put into words. My closest point of comparison would be the art of Suehiro Maruo -- he of the phantasmagorically evil Mr. Arashi's Amazing Freak Show, the brilliant if also vile Ultra-Gash Inferno, and many others that will probably never see print in the U.S. at this rate. His nostalgia for the Taishō-era look and feel comes through in all of his works -- even the ones that are allegedly set in the present day -- and so does an all-pervading sense of unease, something else I want to capture in this thing when i write it.

I even have a tentative title: 関東地獄 Kantō Jigoku, or Tokyo Inferno. Kantō is the Eastern part of Japan that contains Tokyo, and there is a certain cachet associated with using that word, although in English "Tokyo" carries more of a meaning than "Kantō", sadly. Hence the substitution.

I'll be tagging posts about this and setting up a separate category for it before long.