Story 1: The Japanese Jews of Lost Angeles
The narrative begins with a fragmented family history set in a dystopian Los Angeles, here called “Lost Angeles.” The protagonist's parents were Japanese Jews living in this earthquake-ravaged city during the 2020s, a time when anti-immigrant hysteria was reaching fever pitch. The city had been devastated by multiple earthquakes, leaving it a “wild and difficult zone place” where ethnic minorities faced increasing persecution.
The parents' story unfolds as a surreal journey of displacement and reinvention. Initially residing in Hollywood, they eventually fled the mounting racial tensions by joining an exodus to Birobidzhan—the historical Jewish autonomous region in Russia—but their journey took an unexpected turn. They traveled on “Yiddish Militant Tractors” that were meant to carry them north to the Bering Bridge, but these vehicles were stolen by Hungarians, leaving the family stranded in Manchuria instead of their intended destination.
This geographical confusion leads to their involvement in establishing what the narrator calls the “Newer Southern Tractor Republic of Israel in Manchuria,” a bizarre political entity that seems to exist in the margins of official history. The narrator admits to forgetting the details of this endeavor, suggesting either the trauma of displacement or the surreal nature of memory itself.
The family's connection to Mexico adds another layer to their transnational identity. The protagonist's grandparents were Japanese slaves sent to work in Mexican mines by the “Qing of Kyushu,” establishing a pattern of forced labor and diaspora that spans generations. The narrator worked in Nagasaki, located in Kyushu, but cannot remember the circumstances that led to this employment, highlighting the fragmented nature of personal and collective memory in this dystopian world.
Story 2: The Manifest Destiny Train (Train Sequences)
The second major narrative thread follows the protagonist aboard a mysterious train traveling through the transformed landscape of Manchuria. This train operates under the surreal logic of “sub-universal time,” managed by the “Anti-Telephone Company,” suggesting a world where communication and temporal flow have been fundamentally altered by corporate or bureaucratic forces.
The train carries the remnants of “that old land everywhere,” packed in boxes marked with “This Way Up” and “Do Not Disturb” stickers. These containers are filled with an eclectic collection of artifacts: relics, living pets, forks, thumbscrews, paperback books, barber manuals, and aged nitrate fertilizer made from bones. The manifest for this cargo bears the title “The Destiny of the Manifest,” a play on America's historical concept of Manifest Destiny, but here twisted into a circular, trapped form of expansion.
The train operates as a mobile museum or circus that can never perform because the boxes remain sealed. This creates a perpetual state of anticipation and denial—the circus exists but cannot be experienced, the destiny is manifested but never fulfilled. The narrator notes that “this circus, like train destiny is still still still awaited” and hopes that “someday someone will be allowed to open the boxes and let the circus out.”
During the journey, soldiers periodically board the train to steal passengers or goods, creating an atmosphere of constant threat. The narrator remains armed and vigilant, using a periscope to observe the outside world. Through this device, they witness the “many confusing and now lost cities of Japan,” suggesting that the landscape itself has become unstable and fragmented.
The train's route takes it through a construction zone that the passengers left “years ago, but which still persist in the light, specially in the slow glass of the glassy periscope.” This suggests a temporal distortion where past and present coexist, and geography has become unstable and fluid.
Story 3: Machiko and the Movie Talkers
The third narrative centers on Machiko, a figure who serves as both storyteller and living cinema screen in the burned center of the Temple Residential relocation zone. This area, located along Railroad track B in the south of Shinkyo, exists in a state of perpetual sunset, suggesting either environmental catastrophe or supernatural intervention.
Machiko speaks to an audience described as “people who have books for heads,” indicating either a literal transformation of humans or a metaphorical representation of people who have become repositories of written knowledge. Her stories focus on the “Nitrogen Fields” that once covered the “flying cities of Manchuria,” painting a picture of an industrialized aerial civilization that has since fallen or been destroyed.
These stories describe a painful but ultimately joyful process of rebirth, where people emerge from stones found in mines—a geological nativity that connects human reproduction to the extraction industries that seem to dominate this world. The nitrogen fields themselves suggest both agricultural fertility and industrial/military applications, as nitrogen is essential for both fertilizer and explosives.
The movie talkers at Manchu Edison represent a new form of entertainment where bicycle-mounted performers read scripts aloud to audiences who dance in response. This creates an interactive, participatory form of cinema that exists somewhere between theater, radio, and film. The “typical script” mentioned suggests a standardized form of content, but the physical presence of the performers and the dancing audience creates a communal experience.
In the more detailed account of Machiko's performance, she operates from a box with white curtains mounted on the wall of a movie theater. Other narrators occupy similar boxes, creating a family of storytellers who work together to tell “the film that cannot be seen.” This invisible cinema requires active imagination from both performers and audience.
A photographer collects blood for the government “which we use to make movies,” suggesting that cinema has become literally incorporated into the bodies of the citizens, and that the state harvests biological material for entertainment purposes. This creates a disturbing parallel between artistic production and medical exploitation.
Machiko serves as both narrator and screen—the movie is projected onto her face while she tells the story, making her simultaneously the medium and the message. She claims to be “the 47 narrators of the century in telepathic cinema,” suggesting both multiple personalities and a collective consciousness that spans different temporal periods.
The railroad tracks that lead from the projector lens into the screen create a physical connection between the audience and the narrative space. The train that travels through these tracks carries the audience “through someone's thoughts,” making the journey literally psychological as well as geographical.
Story 4: The Continental Rift and the Plank Road
A shorter but significant narrative describes the geological transformation of the landscape through tectonic activity. Changes in “the shape of the original space and stresses on the land from the movement of the continental plates” created a growing rift that eventually filled with “watery mud and other dangerous organic earths derived from dirty animals.”
This environmental catastrophe becomes an economic opportunity when the narrator's family builds a plank road by hand over the expanded space, first as a bus route. This construction project establishes the family's “reputation and wealth,” showing how disaster capitalism operates in this world—those who can quickly adapt to environmental destruction can profit from it.
The plank road enables travel to what the narrator calls “all last missing, temporary transient Paris,” where they arrive “just in time for the 1931 colonial exposition.” This historical reference grounds the narrative in the interwar period, when colonial exhibitions displayed the peoples and cultures of colonized territories for European audiences. The bus that carries them is “powered by some kind of steam” that “steamed and told and sold us all the thoughts that we needed,” suggesting that transportation and mental conditioning have become linked.
Story 5: The Sinking of Continents
The briefest but perhaps most apocalyptic narrative describes the sinking of the mythical continent of Mu, which takes Japan with it into the ocean. “There is smoke in the light. There are cracks in the earth. It is nearby that the Continent of Mu has sunk, and you know, the continent of Japan sank with it, all its people too, disappearing, always disappearing.”
This geological catastrophe explains the diaspora and displacement that characterizes all the other narratives. The repeated phrase “always disappearing” suggests that disappearance has become a constant condition rather than a single event—people, places, and entire civilizations are caught in a continuous process of vanishing.
The image of smoke in the light and cracks in the earth creates an atmosphere of ongoing environmental collapse, where the physical world itself has become unstable and unreliable. This instability extends to national and ethnic identities, as the sinking of Japan forces its people into global diaspora and cultural transformation.
Recurring Themes and Connections
Throughout these interwoven narratives, several key themes emerge that connect the various stories into a coherent, if fragmented, whole:
Displacement and Diaspora: Every story involves forced movement and cultural displacement. The Japanese Jews flee Los Angeles, travel to Manchuria, and work in Mexico. The train carries the remnants of lost lands. The movie theater serves relocated populations. Even the continents themselves are displaced through geological catastrophe.
Memory and Forgetting: The narrator repeatedly admits to forgetting crucial details, suggesting that traumatic displacement disrupts the continuity of personal and collective memory. The movie audiences “always forget and they always come back,” indicating that memory loss has become cyclical and systematic.
Corporate and State Control: The Anti-Telephone Company controls time itself. The government harvests blood for movies. Fearsome newspapers promote hysteria. These institutions manipulate both physical reality and psychological experience.
Environmental Collapse: Earthquakes devastate Los Angeles. Continental plates shift and create rifts. Entire continents sink. The physical world has become unstable and unreliable, forcing constant adaptation and migration.
Hybrid Identities: Characters are Japanese Jews, bicycle movie talkers, telepathic narrators. Traditional categories of identity have been scrambled by displacement and cultural mixing.
Industrial and Agricultural Production: Mining, railroad construction, nitrogen fields, and tractor factories all play crucial roles in the narratives, suggesting that industrial production both enables and destroys the communities it claims to serve.
Circular Time: Events repeat, destinations become origins, and the future contains the past. The manifest destiny never arrives, the circus never performs, and the movie that cannot be seen continues to be projected.
These stories collectively paint a picture of a world where industrial modernity has collapsed into a series of interconnected disasters, but where human creativity and storytelling continue to forge connections across the resulting fragments. The various narratives exist simultaneously in different temporal and geographical spaces, suggesting that reality itself has become multiple and contradictory, requiring new forms of perception and narration to comprehend.