Chapter 9

AFTERWORD Since the birth of Yokohama Station in 1915, it has never been without some kind of ongoing construction for over a hundred years. Some like to call it the “Sagrada Familia of Japan,” destined never to be finished. But think about that. What does “completion” mean for Yokohama Station? Is it complete when the renovation ends? Generally speaking, completion means “to reach the final state.” Gaudi drew up detailed designs for the Sagrada Familia, and it is considered incomplete because the construction work still pursues that design. But Yokohama Station has not been under renovation for a hundred years in the aspiration of any sort of fixed final state. On the contrary, the way that it has continuously and flexibly changed and renovated itself in response to the shifting landscape of the city of Yokohama and of Japan’s rail network is, in fact, the very model of a central, urban train station. Therefore, you should consider the state of always being under construction itself to be completion. This is similar to behavior seen in the natural world. We human beings receive a constant supply of food and oxygen from the world around us and expel substances of our own, but it is not in the pursuit of a “complete” form of our humanity. We eat every day to maintain our bodies. That flux is the finished state of a human being. Because of this dynamic system, our bodies maintain a constant temperature rather than allowing it to change with the outside air, fight off the never-ending assault of microorganisms with our immune systems, and repair physical wounds, to an extent. Paradoxically, we maintain our structure because we are continually changing. The end of this dynamism is the death of the organism. Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003) described the overall preservation of order through the endless flow of matter and energy as a “dissipative structure.” He received a Nobel Prize for his work on this theory in 1977. His point of view had a vast effect on scientific thought. This book is a work of science fiction predicated upon that tide of opinion. I’d like to give a brief description of how this story came about. In early 2015, I posted a theory of Yokohama Station as a living organism on Twitter, which soon evolved into a science fiction outline of a replicating Yokohama Station that covered all of Japan. At this point, it was mainly a parody of Tsutomu Nihei’s science fiction manga Blame!, but thanks to the many responses to my tweets, I spent half a year fleshing it out into a long-form novel. Reading it now, I can see a strong influence from Makoto Shiina’s Ad Bird, a story I loved in middle school. Around this time, the Kadokawa publishing company created a user-driven novel submission site called Kakuyomu. To liven things up, I submitted to their first web novel contest (science fiction category) and received the grand prize, as well as a contract to publish it as a book. I’d heard that the first winner in a newly created literary contest was critical in terms of establishing the future direction of that contest. My response to that was, “Are you sure about this, Kadokawa?” When I revisited the material to turn into a book, I realized there was too much content for a single volume, so I sectioned off the side-story material for a second publication. It will be significantly fleshed out, and should see the light of day in 2017. There will also be a manga adaptation of this narrative drawn by Gonbe Shinkawa and published on the online manga site Young Ace Up. By the time you read this afterword, it’ll probably already be up there. It’s typical for the comic adaptation of a book to start only after the novel has become a hit, but what better genre to embody a time paradox than science fiction? My point is that this book has been self-replicating beyond its author’s intent for quite a while. It’s entirely appropriate to the theme of the story. I will also have an all-new publication in early 2017 from Seikaisha called Gravity Alchemic. It’s a tale about a version of Earth that expands by three percent each year, leading to an overabundance of land. If you’re sick of all the concrete in this book, perhaps that one will be a breath of fresh air. Lastly, I would like to thank Tatsuyuki Tanaka for his evocative illustrations of this bizarre world, Gonbe Shinkawa for taking on the difficult work of designing the bipedal automated turnstiles, Dr. Endo from Yokohama City University for patiently lecturing the amateur author about the fundamental nature of a structural genetic field, Dr. Haruaki Tazaki from Gakushuin University for his early support (approximately twenty-six minutes after conception) of this book, Saito #2 for his useful critiques of android mental depictions based on personal experience, Benjamin the donkey for his life advice both deep and shallow, and everyone in the Kadokawa Books editorial department for giving me this opportunity. On an auspicious November day Inside, 2016