No longer feel wonderful. Don't feel horrible, though, so that's progress. I was of course hoping to plough through a couple of chapters this weekend but of course I didn't.
I actually need to do some of my reading. I'm about half-way through the book on the Takarazuka now, but I also really need to open a Lonely Planet Tokyo and get a sense of the big structure of the city. I'd like to keep the action limited to a few locations but...
The problems for me stop the moment Penny steps off the shinkansen. Where does she meet Kit? Where does Kit teach? What is the fancy hotel she'll be at? Where is this big gala thing (and what is it...a gala, a fundraiser, an auction, a dance, a buffet, what?)
Well, I have a leading contender for the hotel. Shinjuku, which is good and bad. Tokyo Takarazuka is in the Ginza, and from the number of ballet studios around there I'd say this was where Kit should be as well. And the Hikikomori Night is going to take place mostly in Akihabara. But the Yamanote Loop should get me to most of these places (I was only in Tokyo for 2-3 days but it is starting to come back to me).
Anyhow, the top floors of the Shinjuku Park Tower, the weird triple-tower skyscraper facing another Kenzo Tange construction, the "Minitrue" like Metropolitan Government Building, contain the luxury Park Hyatt Tokyo with its New York Grill -- floor to ceiling glass and live jazz.
Just the thing I needed when I'm so desperate to finish this, though. More stuff to look up. That's the thing about Japan; it really is a foreign country. A non-western nation, for all that has changed. So you can't assume; a simple scene of a character hailing a cab and going downtown to shop for clothes could be thrown off by, "Oh, they don't have cabs here." Or whatever it was you assumed was there but are sadly wrong about.
So, down the road, if I really do write more of these, I either have to relax my standards a lot (and start doing Dan Brown geography), or I need to plan a few more overseas trips!
No comments:
Post a Comment