The Tale of the Crane Princess
The Tale of the Crane Princess takes place in Timeline 1287 left sub 6. It is the same timeline into which Yukiko Yamaguchi "fell" in 2050 when working on a rack of singularity control equipment that had, unknown to her, opened a rift in space-time.
These are random notes, added post-publication.
A sort-of mini review, from Discord:
So I got the Crane Princess The first part- I needed insulin, but I have a sweet tooth, so ut's all good. Second part- great action, but I wish it really had been Amaterasu. All in all, great job! (That's the kind of story I love to read. Sweet tooth, as I said.)
I responded (after thanking the reviewer, of course):
FWIW, in that particular timeline, just about anything could happen. The whole nine yards of the Yaoyorozukami (8 million kami) could exist there, regardless of how this book ends up. There are...issues...with that timeline. Besides which, Yukiko only assumes she knows what was going on behind the scenes. She might be wrong. The only outside person whose identity is concretely established is the katanakaji.
The whole time I was writing Tale (and really, while I was writing The Cross-Time Kamaitachi, too), I was thinking Timeline 1287 left sub 6 is an odd place. It seems to allow for any number of things to happen that we humans might consider supernatural. And in my response, I didn't mention the appearances to Tsurue of Empress Mayumi or of Hina, Akira's late first wife. (Or the "near appearance" of Hina to Akira in the next to last chapter, either.)
My working hypothesis is that there is something wrong in the "settings" for that timeline. It broke off to handle the introduction of Yukiko into Timeline 1287 in the first place, and it's possible there is an unintended "abstraction layer"[1] that acts as the area Tsurue describes as "behind the veil" -- and perhaps both the home of the kami (Takamagahara) and the afterworld where the spirits of Mayumi and Hina dwell actually do exist in that timeline. (They might even be the same thing -- "beyond the walls of the world" as Amaterasu tells Tsurue.)
So the idea that "Amaterasu" is really Ariela Rivers Wolff, the Lion of God, from Timeline One via Timeline Zero, is based almost entirely on Yukiko's assertion at the end of the book. Even Tsurue can't say whether she really saw Amaterasu's eyes change or not. Which brings up the thought that "Amaterasu" in Timeline 1287 left sub 6 is congruent to the Ariela Rivers Wolff of that timeline. Ariela was, after all, born in 1988, long before the Plague, and even given that she was likely to have contracted lupus by then, she might still have lived through the Plague. Or not. And maybe "or not" is why she became a goddess, again, "behind the veil."
Notes
- ↑ Remember, the entire space-time continuum in Timelines was originally nothing more than a computer simulation. So using computing terms to describe how the Timelines universe works is fair game.