Story 1: The Floating Ships and the Straits of Magellan
The narrative begins with a fantastical voyage through time and space. Five boats sail across the Pacific without touching water, floating just above the waves yet rocked by the ocean's rolling motions as if rooted in the water itself. These mysterious vessels pass through the Straits of Magellan, their passengers waving and shouting to people gathered on the beaches of the past.
The journey takes place within a “time mist” - a supernatural phenomenon where acoustic shadows can be blasted into the temporal fog to reveal glimpses of ancient shores. Through this mist, the travelers can see beaches of “antique pre-alluvium, post-alluvium, and currently alluvium continents” where strange-shaped people who have probably never existed before gather and wave back at the floating boats.
These beach-dwellers emit a collective breath of whispered syllables that creates a wet, sad-smelling wind powerful enough to blow the floating vessel off course in the Central Pacific. The ocean itself becomes described as “a solidification of time,” where swimming is possible through temporal currents using techniques like the “dog paddle” or “raccoon paddle,” depending on how evolution has progressed.
The story establishes themes of temporal displacement, impossible geography, and the intersection of past and future that will echo throughout the collection.
Story 2: The Displaced Jews and the Telepathic Israel
A complex historical-fantasy narrative emerges involving the Spanish expulsion of Jews and their subsequent journey eastward. When the Dutch arrive in Nagasaki in the 16th century (though time itself seems fluid here), they discover that displaced Jews from Spain have already traversed the Silk Road and joined with Mongol-Hungarian families from the Lost Tribes.
These groups have established a “telepathic Israel” among the volcanic mountains of southern Japan, aided by Hungarians who learned various skills during their exile in “Amur Pest.” These Hungarians arrive on transit visas forged from lost postage stamps and supermarket advertisements they discovered in letter boxes during “visits to the future.”
The displaced communities work in construction trades in Nagasaki, building whatever is needed at low or no cost. The narrative suggests a convergence of Jewish, Mongol, Magyar, and Khazar peoples, all somehow connected to the Lost Tribes of Israel, creating a multicultural telepathic society in an alternate version of Japan.
Story 3: The Great Emperor Taisho and Manchuria
A surreal imperial narrative centers on the Great Emperor Taisho of “Lost Japan,” who suffers from encephalitis and somehow becomes multiple emperors simultaneously. This singular-plural figure rules Manchuria, conquers worlds, and serves as honorary president of the Manchu Edison Film Corporation, cycling through 49 different incarnations of the Taisho identity.
The Emperor governs through motion pictures created by the Manchu Edison Film Corporation and spends his days traveling by car through Shinkyo. On special occasions, wearing former Imperial costumes, he conducts sacrifices for Go-Daigo, the Lost Japanese Emperor who resides on the “Missing Line of the Pure Land Motion Railroad.”
During these ceremonies at the Flower Castle, the Emperor receives his nearly infinite extended family. All his other selves participate as visitors, along with adopted children from the Manchu Edison Film Studios. They tell him stories which he repeats back to them, creating a loop of narrative exchange where everyone marvels as if hearing the tales for the first time.
This Emperor, described as healthy in all incarnations, originally arrived “by electrical methods” from a non-existent country. Some claim he came in a sky-boat that flew over the earth's edge. This vessel became his castle, the Flower Hotel, built on ruins of the former Salt Tax Castle in Shinkyo's old section. The building replicates the former summer home of the historical Emperor Taisho, which burned on Christmas Day 1926 when the original Taisho's thoughts were televised for the first and last time.
Story 4: The Underground City and Mount Parnas
A description of a fantastical underground city emerges, centered around Mount Parnas and its volcanic eruptions. The mountain contains royal entrances to coal and uranium mines that extend throughout the volcanic city below. In this subterranean realm, roads are paradoxically longer and wider underground than above ground, and the underworld grows larger each day.
The city above ground features mushroom-shaped buildings and arrives around the train port along hedge lines and tree formations. Birds run through while people march and sing because it's “cinema day.” The entire metropolis is under construction in preparation for flight - a great new city lined with sunlit trees and “motion picture forms” that synthesize the movements of all collected people into mountainous stairways.
Plans for the royal mine airport have been drawn repeatedly, destined to become the core of the “Shinkyo space port” in future years. The narrative suggests this flying city represents a convergence of cinema, transportation, and urban planning in a world where cities can literally take flight.
Story 5: The Spanish Expulsion and Sister Jesus
A complex religious-historical narrative involves the 1492 expulsion of Jews from Spain and the character of Chay-yim (or “I am”), a figure who follows the expelled Jews eastward under orders from Jesuit superiors. His mission: trace those Jews searching for the Lost Tribes of Israel.
Chay-yim pauses among the “Red Knights of Iraq” and serves as court astronomer in Baghdad before following the Silk Road toward Kaifeng, the supposed capital of the Eastern Jews. After suffering a head accident, he gains the unwanted ability to travel through time via “silent mind speech,” allowing him to perceive a “gelatinous, hidden world where words create alternative history.”
Through this ability, Chay-yim establishes cross-time telepathic communication with conscious words themselves. Years later, in another time, he arrives in Kaifeng with Catholic Jesuits planning Church expansion in China. Among Japanese merchants, he learns of a Torah hidden among indigenous Japanese Jews that allegedly contains written proof that Christ was the “erased Messiah of the Jews.”
This Torah supposedly predates Christ and includes his name (possibly with a “Z”) as the Jewish Messiah. The Jesuits believe all European Torahs are palimpsests from which Christ's name has been erased using “unusual erasures that leave no mark and shift words to hide hidden spaces.”
The narrative reveals that the world is ruled by descendants of the “Columbus Twins” - the Lost Kings of North and South Spain, children of the Tribe of Dan who arrived in Spain from polar regions a thousand years earlier.
Story 6: Columbus and the Lost Tribes
King Columbus emerges as a central figure who arrives in Samarkand and meets “Sister Jesus the Astronomer,” described as Queen of the Lost Tribes. Together, they travel to Manchuria beyond the Amur River to the “Hidden River Kingdom,” which some claim is the true earthly Jerusalem.
Crossing the river, they encounter Hebrew-speaking Mongols who believe themselves to be the Lost Tribes, along with Magyar and Khazar tribes. These groups proclaim Columbus to be the “Monk-King,” husband of Sister Jesus, proxy ruler of Manchuria, and Prince of the Lost Tribes. Hungarians and Mongols intermarry with Spanish Jews, and telepathy is transmitted to their children.
Columbus later arrives in Japan with Spanish Jews at Nagasaki, where they're greeted by “Solomon of Kyushu, an American.” With the Jews' arrival, Nagasaki becomes “Toledo-no-Nagasaki,” and when the world reforms, it becomes Shenyang, the second city of Manchuria. Columbus is buried there.
The narrative reveals the narrator as born in Toledo, Japan, working as both Jew and Jesuit for “Our Mother of the Laughing Fox” as a Sino-Talmudic scholar. The belief emerges that somewhere in the East exists a single Torah naming the Messiah as “Sister Jesus,” and that every Jew reading this book would convert to Sister Jesus's religion.
Story 7: The Flying City and Gelatinous Space
A surreal aerial narrative describes being in clouds high above a vast, abandoned city. The narrator and companions can move in many directions while flying but paradoxically cannot move at all, though fingers can wiggle. Looking down, they see a city with walls of broken glass, filled with small colorless smoke puffs in spaces of unclear dimension.
The dark structure of the old city consists of many small exposed interiors at “the edge of nothing,” where railheads merge into a single line with a caboose parked on it. The narrative occurs in “Shinkyo, the railroad city” where a river runs through and tracks exist but cannot be seen.
This space is described as “mysterious gelatinous space, Jell-O brand gelatin embedded in teeny moats” floating through a “worldly, wordy word world.” It's the place where telepathic thoughts are recorded and embedded in objects that can no longer be found because the searchers exist in the clouds.
The narrator recalls being able to fly by holding arms out and flapping like wings, ascending like drones while shadows follow their flight through “voids of vim and vigor.” They fly using the “Telescope of Truth,” which is revealed to be the “fishbowl of deception.”
Story 8: The Manchurian Transformation
The narrative describes arrival at “chapter M10-13” in the center of Manchuria, surrounded by horizons of mountains hollowed by trade tunnels. Hidden entrances are covered by clouds of soy nitrogen drifting from fields, creating giant ground-covering clouds broken by turrets of “invisible, quivering factories filled with electrical voids.”
These turrets are reflected in mirrors placed on every corner of the everyday city, aligned toward the central train station where “movie talkers” work in the planetarium cinema, telling void stories to audiences of “previous people” (not present people like the reader) sitting in parked trains.
On the darkened roof, mosaics show broken planets dancing like hydrogen pronouns on iron paths in the sky. Steam machines are rumored to have caused all this, placed on tracks for the “fishbowl of deception” where shadows run.
The underground system features roads that are longer and wider beneath the surface than above ground, with the underworld growing daily. The city prepares for flight mode, with plans for a royal mine airport that will become the core of the Shinkyo space port in future years.
Story 9: Cromwell and the American Exodus
A historical fantasy describes Cromwell sending Jews from England to Massachusetts, marking “the end of the unknown world.” Admiral Columbus of Ohio (one of the Columbus Twins, often indistinguishable from each other) leads Jews out of America just before the continent's destruction.
They leave behind a million copies of a mimeograph attached to local trees, containing a decree written by Ferdinand and Isabel with an “electric engraving pencil” held in their chained-together hands. This decree acknowledges their ignorance and intent to send people far away, representing a mysterious technology existing before electricity.
The Americans are prophesied to become “a nation of conquerors” who will be “illiterate,” “afraid of alien ideas,” and admirers of weapons, transforming America into “the poor ignorant has-been.”
The departing Jews seek water flowing over the earth's edge, where one can fall with the water and land in Manchuria where “the Lost Tribes submarine lived.” They build a fleet capable of surviving the fall, flying through the sky to arrive “with a terrible noise at a flat piece of ocean near the coast of Manchuria.”
Story 10: The Material Particles of History
A philosophical-scientific narrative describes a world where traditional communication has evolved beyond recognition. The inhabitants have been “sentenced to speak in vowels just about forever,” but everything changes when consonants, dissonance, and “slacker trons” must be added to connect “worm-like fools that are other anxious, vanquished letters.”
These letters are no longer letters but have become electrodes, necessitating the replacement of electrons with “material particles of history.” This change represents a simplification that is “always the nature of observation,” though it causes everything to become “knotted up.”
The narrative takes place in underground veins of the “Ringworm world” where the sky is near but might be illusory. The ceiling is visible, liminal, unlimited, and unreadable. Former cryptographers who were vanquished or executed before a counter-revolution had obtained quantities (not qualities) of these particles, which they used to send secret thoughts to “ascended masters” living in the brains of famous Bolshevik functionaries in nearby cities.
This parasitism proves providential but produces unexpected results. The inhabitants transfer themselves in “hip hop form” through the guidance of the “pretty hop doctor toad who knows the nematodes.” The narrative warns to wash hands before shaking hands with an “acoustic mode” and describes modems as singing devices, like electric kazoos found in German giraffes at shrinking zoos.
These surreal technological-biological hybrids represent the convergence of communication, consciousness, and matter in a world where the boundaries between physical and mental reality have dissolved entirely.
Conclusion
VolumeR presents a complex, interconnected mythology that blends historical events with fantastical elements, creating a unique narrative universe where time, space, and identity are fluid concepts. The stories move between different periods and locations while maintaining thematic connections involving displacement, transformation, telepathy, and the search for lost origins. The collection suggests a world where technology, spirituality, and geography operate according to dream logic rather than conventional reality, creating a surreal alternative history that challenges linear narrative expectations.