Bell, book, and candle

I love and hate discovery writing.

So I wrote the Giant Crab scene, and did Osaka Castle right up to when the ninja leaps out.

I needed something to hang the scene on. A way to set up the physical environment for the coming fight, and a way to justify this being Osaka-jo, as opposed to any other spot in Japan. And the fun answer was to have her do one of her lectures there.

Yeah, but Osaka Castle? Pretty much famous for getting burned down. Twice. And a few more rounds of destruction but it is the two big ones that matter here. Once at the death of Toyotomi Hideyori in the final act of the wars that brought the Tokugawa Shogunate into power. And once during the Meiji Restoration, and a key incident in the final defeat of the last Tokugawa.

The first period being something I'd already ended up with a history-drop on when I did some background of the ninja in history and myth. The second being a major visual at Toei Eigamura, from the Meiji part of the park right in front of the entrance hall, to the popularity of the shinsengumi.

Which means I've been setting up a ton of history bracketing the Isolation Years, the period of the Tokugawa Shogunate, when the archaeology that might actually come into play is around the Genpai Wars four hundred years earlier. Plus, you know, extremely early, kofun and "time of the gods" stuff.

While at work I listened to an otherwise not terribly good podcast on kusanagi no tsurugi, which had a couple of stories I hadn't run across before about the sword. I'd been planning to wave the idea of the sword as a red herring but concentrate on either the mirror or the jewel...but I'd already laid in stuff on the jewel with both a kofun tomb and a jade necklace on a minor character...

And half-way through that podcast I realized I wanted to do all three. To have the purpose of the cult be unclear in the unfolding web of games and masks and lies, but to have it consecutively appear to be about first the jewel, then the sword...and finally be revealed as the mirror.

Which means among other things Mishima is back on. The silver pavilion is in Kyoto. But more than that, all the stuff about the shinsengumi and the Tokugawa Shogunate and the shinsengumi can fit into a suspicious leaning towards militarism, with the cult's possible aims being connected to, well, the sorts of politics one of its real-world models is connected to.

Except it is all still a false trail. And so is the one that points towards the jewel, the yasakani no magatama. And all the stories from Amaterasu in the cave to the battle of Dan-no-ura to whatever men of former powerful clans or renegade priests are around in the present-day of the story, are all dropping hints that lead towards the final what-it-was-really-all-about.

It's gonna make my job harder. But I already needed to make some complicated skullduggery to fill out the middle of the novel. It also, though, may end up making it longer.