To: YAkatsuki@Kokusensha.co.jp
From: ************@Kokusensha.co.jp
Date: April 7, 2004
Subject: Dinner pre-brief,
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I was hoping to have this done earlier, but there’s still a few weeks until based, on the latest schedule. There will be four people in attendance. Oshiro, Yamagata, and Mori are the same board members you met last year. The guest, Lt.. Sagara is new.
Kokusensha hasn’t changed the ground rule that all but the guest of honor must be expert in a different genre. History, Supernatural Horror, Mystery, and Science Fiction are on the menu this year. Funny though that the Lieutenant doesn’t cover mystery, but life is full of surprises.
Per your instruction, I've tried to find one secret about each one. ********'s minion tried to warn me off talking to ********. Perhaps in addition to his favorite genre, he is the fairy godfather that ensures puerile mundane chick lit is so heavily promoted by my employer. Someone must be reading “Peach and Plum” after all. Or maybe he just gets bribed with high end liquor. Either way, keep an eye out should she ever see fit to invite you to the family home.
The second secret is one you already uncovered. You once showed me a video tape of Sagara and said you thought he worked for ********. ************ ******** ********. ************ **** ******** **** ******** **** ******** **** ********. That said, I don’t think his presence here is about you. Since that’s something you clued me into, here’s a bit more. He wears a wedding band but his wife left not that long into the troubles. She’s a head nurse at a free clinic and I’ll confess that given the neighborhood I didn’t want to go check her out to learn more.
I do love Oshiro of course, but I think his secret is that there is a bulldog in his family tree within the past two generations. Your cliffhanger hooked him so much that he keeps poking at me for “just a hint or two what’s going next. He seems to expect a darker turn. I’ve put him off as best I can but you’re probably going to have to give him something sooner or later.
Last one was the hardest, he’s a bit of a recluse and our only address for him is a PO box. In desperation I gave him a call with some nonsense form he had to sign, but I was lucky he didn’t say fax or email it, just bring it right over. His house is seriously vintage, but with a lot of photographs, mostly international travel one, but that famous shot of PM. Asanuma in his parlor. I guess it’s like music anything that was around for his childhood, no matter how creepy, is great. Anything after is terrible. Mori wanted to check who the guest writer was this year, I mentioned a few names, including yours. He seemed unsettled, so I twisted the knife, spoke about your having another book coming out and your growing popularity. His mounting discomfort was exquisite. He signed the forms and ushered me out, but that’s my final secret. He’s afraid of you.
<TTFN>,
********
--
Audiences know what to expect, and that is all that they are prepared to believe in.
We will be straight with you. This was the least censored monitoring report we saw this month that wasn’t utterly banal. It was this or something about some sort of society election. Not like conspiracy at the heart of the Japanese government sort of election, just voting rules and the like. Hope political science is not your thing. we believe the subject being monitored is the Council of Mysteries author. We haven’t seen anything on <J.K. Rowling> but give it time.
So a bit on the censoring. This is a paranoid organization, one that would rather deliver dozens of scraps of useless information than accidentally let something slip. That blacked out middle sentence is probably about them rather than the subject. Some of the processors will just black out every name, no matter how banal, except the subject. I don’t know if this is even useful with context. Maybe the spider at the center of this web just likes incomplete logic puzzles, four names, four genres, four secrets. Hope it helps.