Real Life Writes the Plot

Was dragging this week but never got really bad. So fingers still crossed that the mystery bug is finally over with. Have just enough energy to start looking at reservations again to see if I can get any snowmobile and go-kart riding in. The latter turns out to be a real pain in this area. It's all electric and indoors and it is really designed around party of 24, mostly kids, staying all day to ride all the other rides and buy popcorn.

So this is the third book in the series and more-or-less finishes up the origin story, or "Hero Begning," as Half Life, Full Life Consequences puts it. So there's still this aspect of gathering the necessary tools and skills to be the full-fledged adventurer she's going to be. One of which was going to be fast-talking.

Come on, it is right in the name. The fox, which is a trickster figure in pretty much every mythology. So I had this bit in mind where Ichiro would demonstrate fast-talk at the kart rental place to get around her not having her International License.

But when I researched, it didn't seem that easy. They are pretty good on their paperwork (considering that, for just a license and a twenty-minute safety lecture they let go you go out in Tokyo Traffic with a gas-powered go-kart!) Plus it made Ichiro look callous, and just when I'm trying to heat up the relationship.

The timing was also tough. I was dreaming of a Yojimbo sequence on the Shinkansen, except there, too, there's not much in the way of dining car or other chances to get together and etiquette is pretty much against conversing with strangers during the trip. And that would happen before Tokyo, so...

That's when I finally got to the meta-question; Do I need this?

And the answer is no, even if it does kick some stuff downstream. You see, the fox -- the kitsune, more precisely -- in Japanese mythology is a trickster but it is a casual, light-hearted trickster and its real thing is shape-shifting. It is the European fox that really gets clever -- so save Reynard for the proper setting of Paris. Keep the focus of this story on mirrors, masks, blurring lines of shape (and gender, a little bit), etc.

The useful way to play this scene is Ichiro has procured the license for her (they really aren't much; there's no test involved or anything. It's more like a translation of an American driver's license so they can read it in other countries). So once again she's an imposter, in a situation that she doesn't feel she has earned or is ready for. This is after all in the context of the Tokyo sequence:

Fast cars, luxury hotels, fancy parties, expensive clothes. That's the New York Grill, by the way -- top of the Shinjuku Tower and part of the Park Hyatt Tokyo. 

I've also given up having anything particularly weird happen during the kart tour. There will be a man in a ninja costume. And, yes, I've pretty much decided she's getting the yellow jumpsuit, even though this makes problems for me all over the place. It is far too easy to tweak things to make the cinematically or thematically appropriate things happen and I'm trying not to write like that. Well, not completely like that. So that means the tour can concentrate on the excitement of basically driving too fast in Tokyo. Look; the actual tour crosses the Rainbow Bridge! Goes through the Shibuya Intersection! That's crazy enough already.

And I'm not really making the Tokyo sequence the "isn't Japan weird" part. Like I said, it will be mostly in the Hyatt and the Imperial and about the high life which is largely floating free of local culture. But there will be a big chapter in a somewhat crazy night mostly in the Akihabara.