This is still a work in progress, so don’t get excited. Well, sure, get excited, but have patience while I write about four more chapters.
I haven’t talked much about this book, which is foreshadowed in Chapter 16 of The Tale of the Crane Princess (page 198 of the print edition which probably nobody has but me):
“Here is an interesting tidbit,” remarked Terada, the next day at battalion headquarters in Imabari Castle. He handed a report to Akira, who read it, then arched an eyebrow.
“Hontō? I always wondered what happened to tourists and resident foreigners after the Plague struck and they were marooned here. There are so few gaijin – or I suppose I should say, identifiable gaijin – in Japan today, I think most people believe they simply died out. Though there are some rather chilling rumors about how foreigners were targeted by the survivors, simply because they were foreigners.” Akira sighed, and sat back, rubbing his eyes. “Of course, there is no way to prove the rumors true or false, at this remove.”
“Apparently a group of Americans were in Iya Valley on a tour in 2020. They simply hid until after the worst of the Plague, and then stayed there, afraid of what might happen if they showed their faces. Our people there seem to taken pity on them, protected them, and have remained silent until now. Truly good people, if so.”
“Assisted by the fact that Iya is one of the most isolated places on Shikoku. Nobody would be going there after the Plague. I suppose it’s not particularly hard to get to, per se, but people had better sources from which to scavenge without going deep into the mountains.”
I’m currently 16 chapters in on the real story of what was going on in the Iya Valley at that point. Needless to say, there is a pretty girl (for some reason I like strong female characters, sue me) who is the first person the JIDF troops run into on their way into town, and who is the main protagonist of the story. People who will be familiar to you from previous forays into Timeline 1287 Left Sub 6 will pop in here and there, in particular Yamaguchi Yukiko, who becomes a mentor to the young protagonist. The back cover blurb currently goes like this:
Over 200 years ago, a Plague overran the world, and 9 out of 10 human beings died.
In a small Japanese village on Shikoku, a group of American tourists found themselves stranded — and in grave danger of being murdered, merely for the sin of being 外人 (gaijin).
Luckily for them, their Japanese hosts took pity on their plight, and took them in as their own.
This is the story of their descendants — who still, more than anything, wish only someday to go home. That is . . .
. . . if they still have a home to return to.
At any rate, this is the first of two books that will eventually continue the story I was in the process of telling at the end of The Tale of the Crane Princess.
It has been a very interesting piece of writing, because of the research I’m doing continuing to surprise me about the potential capabilities of a small community that has self-isolated in an area that is already very hard to access in the middle of Shikoku. For instance (and I am talking about my 23rd Century characters, not the 21st Century actual inhabitants, so take some of this with a large grain of shio):
- One of the biggest surprises I had is that they don’t grow rice, at least not in any great quantity, because the mountainsides are literally too steep to terrace. So rice gets replaced by millet, which is farmed up the sides of the mountains using rather unique techniques. They also have a local potato varietal, and they grow soybeans and other garden vegetables. There probably isn’t much beef because there is no pasture land to speak of — I postulate that my 23rd Century inhabitants have a small herd of cows for milk and a bull or two to service them — but the area also has wild boar and deer in sufficient abundance that, pre-Plague, it was known for its hunting. I presume they also have chickens and other such small food animals, e.g., quail. And they get tasty trout (amego) out of the Iya River and apparently out of local fish-farm hatcheries. So they eat fairly well.
- There is [pre-Plague] no high school (or junior high school) in their closed-area. They had to rebuild the one that was apparently torn down in the early 21st century so they could teach their children. Which they do rather well, for reasons you’ll find out in the book.
- They still have a lot of modern conveniences, because after the Plague died down, and before they closed themselves off (for reasons which will become apparent in the book), they sent out expeditions to scrounge the countryside for things they would need in the future.
- They spend a lot of time clearing bamboo and kudzu. Particularly bamboo that sprouts in the middle of the under-used roadways that regular pre-Plague traffic and road maintenance normally took care of. But also kudzu that grows up the power poles and everything else.
- They are extremely dependent on two nearby dams for hydroelectricity (but that’s why they have electricity, 200 years on). And those dams are highly-dependent on a massive pipeline system running the length of the Iya Valley that seems to bring water from one reservoir to the next to provide sufficient water for the generators. I would love to find out more about this, but so far I have found nothing useful about the system, which probably dates from the 1920s or 1930s. There are sites in both English and Japanese that talk about the dams — apparently there is a niche collector hobby in Japan where you tour dams and get your dam card stamped or whatever — but not about the intriguing tunnel system that supplies water to their reservoirs.
There’s probably more I could write about it, but this post is overly long already and most of it is covered in the book anyway…
