Well, two of these people are interested in the job.
Exciting news! Starting September 12, we’ll be posting The Butterfly Koi as a serial novel. Sign up now to read for FREE from the beginning at https://syphoncontinuity.substack.com.
Hatsumi has entered the ring.
The sensible reaction.
For anyone stopping by and wondering what this account is about – it’s a novel that we’ve been working on! Here’s a short description:
Japan’s magitech industry is taking off, leading the world in the production of personal devices that never require something so mundane as electricity. But Eika Fujiwara feels like the only person worried about the dark side of this technological revolution: magic doesn’t work for everyone. As heiress to a mining empire and a household name, she’s read the heart-breaking letters describing her family’s corporate misdeeds and seen how technology can cause harm to humans and the environment alike. Filled with a humble hope to change the world, she decides to thwart her family by funneling her trust fund, her fame, and her personal connections into a charitable initiative, Replenish.
Eika’s best friend, Misora Toyama, is a brilliant magitech researcher driven to prove that she’s more than the reluctant heir to her father’s criminal empire or a decorative red carpet accessory for her boyfriend. Together, Eika and Misora have concocted a groundbreaking innovation that could change the industry forever: the next generation of magic, this time accessible to all.
The two will find their progress helped and hindered by a diverse crew: an American magitech engineer forced to relocate after the US bans magic; a journalist wrestling with both her temper and the tangled web of the Tokyo underworld; a charismatic Korean actor who might be working for the competition; and an acerbic and magically-limited criminal more interested in unearthing valuable information than help from idealistic Eika.
But when the project hits a development roadblock, the pressure is on to use any tool, legal or not, to continue the work. Eika and Misora will face a moral quandary: what trade-offs are they willing to make in order to keep the Fujiwara family from pulling the plug on an invention that could change magic forever?
This story is supposed to be a puff piece, eloquent prose to permanently elevate the people behind the Daejeon Magical Accords to the top shelf of the shrine of history. Transform unruly pines into heroic bonsai form, any deviation from the abstracted ideal carefully clipped away.
And the truth is it did happen more or less as you would have heard, with the Chiyoda Affair, the IAME white paper, and the Night of Ten Thousand Flowers. We changed the lives of billions, an impact so large I can’t comprehend.
But the truth is also that we didn’t know what we were doing. We were selfish, short-sighted, and focused on the wrong things for most of the time. We fell together. We fell apart.
The truth is that it was a slow-motion tsunami of cascading trainwrecks from beginning to end.
The first of those, the one that really made the news, was the overdose.
