Z2 - The Fair
The suburbs of Shinkyo represent a fascinating experiment in mobile urban planning. Originally constructed for the 1954 Shinkyo World's Fair, these residential structures were designed with a remarkable feature: they rest on sturdy wheels and are repositioned once every year. The ambitious world's fair for which they were built was mysteriously canceled for unknown reasons, leaving these mobile homes without their original purpose.
Today, this wheeled suburban development has been transformed into the Mappo 900 Studio Paradise. Each apartment unit comes with guaranteed amenities including central heating, a radio antenna, and employment opportunities in the Manchu-Edison factories. The annual repositioning of these buildings creates a constantly shifting neighborhood, where residents experience their community from new perspectives each year. This mobile architecture represents a unique solution to urban planning, where the very foundations of community are literally in motion.
The cancellation of the 1954 World's Fair remains shrouded in mystery, leaving historians to speculate about what international or political forces might have intervened. The legacy lives on in these rolling suburbs, where the temporary has become permanent, and the experimental has become everyday life for the residents of Studio Paradise.
Z3 - On the Train
The narrative begins with an examination of railway tracks laid out upon the floor, creating an immersive transportation experience. As observers move forward to study the track construction, they find themselves gradually accelerating until they become part of the train itself, moving across a characterless landscape.
The transformation is gradual and dreamlike. The walls of a railway carriage slowly materialize around the passengers, followed by the appearance of windows on these walls. Through the dark glass of these windows, travelers can observe an Asian landscape passing by outside. The journey takes on a supernatural quality when a dark castle shape appears, reflected in the window glass and superimposed over the moving landscape.
Within this reflected castle, shadowy figures can be seen moving about the walls, though they remain difficult to discern in the weak, reflected image. As dawn breaks over the rushing landscape outside, the rising sun gradually erases the shadows and apparitions inside the railway car. This train journey represents a liminal space between reality and reflection, between the solid ground of the tracks and the ethereal world of reflections and shadows.
The experience captures the meditative, almost hypnotic quality of train travel, where the rhythm of the rails and the passing scenery can induce a trance-like state where reality and imagination begin to blur.
Z4 - The Knight
In the Glass Railroad, a peculiar spectacle unfolds featuring an armored knight who conceals a startling secret. Beneath his Spanish armor lies not flesh and blood, but a complete skeleton. This nude skeletal warrior performs before paying audiences who come specifically to witness his fiery battles and supernatural combat.
The knight's most disturbing feature is his phantom limbs, which are filled with colorless blood flowing through veins that grow directly from his severed stumps. When this spectral blood spills, it transforms into flying knots that hover in the air around the battlefield. The knight's performances involve actual flight, soaring through the air while the background scenery rolls past like a theatrical backdrop.
The climax of each performance involves a dramatic fall of exactly 2,790 feet to the Yalu River below. Upon impact, the knight suffers head trauma, loses blood, and most significantly, temporarily loses his telepathic memory abilities. However, these supernatural powers return in time for the next scheduled performance, suggesting this cycle of death and resurrection is part of the entertainment.
The knight exists in a realm where death is temporary and pain is performance. His skeletal nature and recurring resurrection speak to themes of mortality, entertainment, and the commodification of violence. The paying public's appetite for witnessing this supernatural combat raises questions about the nature of spectacle and the price of immortality.
Z5 - Bamboo Monk
Chayyim emerges as a figure of resistance and destruction within the Manchu Edison corporate empire. Operating under the disguise of a tall straw hat that completely conceals his head, he takes on the identity of the Bamboo Monk. This criminal monk is literally constructed from bamboo chunks and possesses the unusual skill of playing the shakuhachi flute.
The Bamboo Monk's criminal activities extend beyond simple sabotage. He co-organized the Missing Orchestra spy ring alongside Father Kolbe of Nagasaki, working in service of the mysterious Static Emperor. Father Kolbe held a significant position as the administrator of the heavy water franchise from Lourdes, operating out of Nagasaki during what the narrative describes as “pre-diluvial” times.
The Bamboo Monk's story reaches its tragic conclusion in a prison setting. Led from his cell down a corridor into a prison courtyard, he faces execution. At precisely 10:20 in the morning, the trapdoor slams open beneath him, and he drops into empty space. This execution represents not just the end of an individual rebel, but the silencing of resistance against the corporate-imperial complex.
The character of Chayyim/Bamboo Monk embodies themes of resistance, artistic expression (through his shakuhachi playing), and the ultimate price of opposing established power. His construction from bamboo suggests both flexibility and brittleness, while his musical abilities add a poetic dimension to his revolutionary activities.
Z6 - The Murder
This haunting narrative unfolds through the perspective of a witness to a supernatural assassination. The observer sees a floating, disembodied hand carrying a gun. When this spectral weapon fires, it creates a hole in the side of the narrator's brother, Togo. The wound becomes supernaturally powerful, sucking Togo's arms and legs into itself until he disappears entirely, absorbed into his own heart.
The aftermath reveals a nightmarish landscape where holes appear in every direction of the sky, which itself has become hungry and consuming. Ghosts congregate in this altered reality, feeding on blood clots that they clean from the very air. The surviving brother experiences a terrible form of psychic overflow, where his brain becomes filled with crimes that other people have forgotten.
This creates a torturous situation where the narrator becomes a repository for the forgotten guilt and violence of others. He expresses a desperate wish: if he could either remind the original perpetrators of their crimes or kill them, then they wouldn't lose their memories and he wouldn't be forced to carry the burden of their forgotten sins.
The story explores themes of memory, guilt, and the way violence ripples through reality. The supernatural elements suggest that murder tears holes not just in individual lives, but in the fabric of reality itself. The narrator's curse of remembering others' forgotten crimes speaks to how trauma and violence can be transferred and inherited.
Z7 - Boiler
Deep within the infrastructure of the Manchu-Edison Film Corporation lies an extraordinary architectural marvel. Located in the country of Manchuria, on the studio lot of this powerful corporation, stands a concrete volcano with a sound stage built directly into its interior. The studio's layout includes multiple layers of nested locations: a chair positioned within a boiler, which is bolted to a railroad car, stationed on a siding behind the sound stage.
This complex arrangement exists within the basement of a mountain at the zoo in Shinkyo, creating a series of embedded spaces within spaces. A train track runs directly into the sound stage, where a flat car with an attached boiler sits waiting. This boiler serves as home to the Woman of Steam, a being composed entirely of clean, ordinary hot water, featuring steam arms and steam hair.
The narrator describes personally opening the door of the boiler and climbing inside, suggesting an intimate encounter with this steam-being. The Woman of Steam represents a fusion of industrial technology and feminine presence, embodying the power and mystery of steam itself. Her residence within the boiler creates a domestic space within industrial machinery.
This story captures the intersection of technology, performance, and the supernatural. The nested architecture suggests layers of reality and meaning, while the Woman of Steam embodies the animistic potential of industrial equipment. The train track leading directly into the performance space emphasizes the connection between transportation, industry, and entertainment.
Z8 - Steam Trains
The Manchurian National Steam Church of Sister Christ represents a revolutionary fusion of religion and transportation technology. This unique religious organization conducts worship services with the aid of massive iron boilers shaped like Buddhas, constructed by the Pure Land Motion Railroad. These boilers serve a dual purpose: they function both as mobile churches for religious services and as engines for intercity train travel.
These Train Churches are understood to be the physical body of Sister Jesus, with the steam itself representing her country, known as Pure Land. The steam serves a purifying function for the entire nation, suggesting that travel and worship are intrinsically connected activities. The mobile nature of these religious vehicles means that sacred space is constantly moving across the landscape.
The concept of Pure Land Buddhism is reimagined here through Christian imagery and industrial technology. Sister Jesus exists not as a traditional religious figure, but as a distributed presence embodied in steam-powered transportation. The steam that powers the trains and heats the churches becomes a theological element, representing divine presence in material form.
This religious transportation system suggests a society where spiritual and physical journeys are unified. Passengers don't simply travel from place to place; they participate in moving religious services, making every journey a pilgrimage and every arrival a spiritual destination. The Pure Land becomes not a distant paradise, but an immediate experience available through steam-powered transportation.
Z9 - Go Daigo
The Nestorians of ancient times preserved an enormous twenty-foot pearl within their Shadow Church, its surface covered with intricate maps and markings. These scratched markings told the story of the pearl's discovery off the coast of Isai, though some accounts claim it was found off the coast of East Isai. Legend suggests this massive pearl was actually the child of the lost sword of Antoku, connecting it to Japanese imperial history.
The story of the sword involves the baby Emperor Antoku, who took a grass-growing sword and leaped from a boat into the waters below. Beneath the waves, the severed hand of Jesus crawled toward him in a haunting underwater encounter. Yoshitsune witnessed this scene and considered following his emperor into the water, but instead chose to flee to Manchuria, where he became the legendary Super Yoshitsune.
Meanwhile, in Estonia, a woman named Klaatu failed in her written application to serve as a lady-in-waiting for Queen Victoria. Abandoning her position in the singing choir, she joined her family's criminal enterprises and traveled to Manchuria carrying family secrets: specifically, the methods for extracting shale oil and petroleum from rocks found beneath Estonian soil.
The twenty-foot pearl now resides in a secret room in Shinkyo, specifically within the Temple of the Friendliest on Electric Street. The maps carved into its surface serve as both roadmap and train schedule, providing a day-by-day itinerary for the mobile tomb of Diego Go-Daigo, the lost Spanish King of Kyushu.
Diego Go-Daigo ruled as the Southern King until his death, after which all his friends were killed. His body was placed on a sled that now travels through the Arctic regions, following a predetermined schedule. Worshippers can use the pearl's inscribed timetable to visit the moving tomb on a regular basis.
Movies depicting Go-Daigo's life show scenes culminating in a polar landscape, with his body resting in a glass tomb on the sled. This tomb is pulled by a steam engine across a river of red ice, creating a perpetual funeral procession through the frozen wilderness. The mobile tomb represents death in motion, with mourning and remembrance becoming a scheduled, trackable activity.
The story weaves together elements of Christian mysticism, Japanese imperial history, Estonian industrial secrets, and Spanish colonial legacy, all centered around the mysterious pearl that serves as both religious artifact and practical transportation guide.