Notebook Outside the Window: The Day I Looked at the Map and Understood Nothing
Column 'Notebook Outside the Window,' installment 9: reading today's article about Window 5's map, the independent researcher reflects that, in her own research for 'The Window of 1975,' the days an answer finally arrived are always the ones with the shortest notes.
I read today's article and opened my own notebook to find only three lines written there: "Window 5 = Window 1, maybe." "Meaning of the symbols: unknown." "Kishiura-san says her legs went weak." Most days I'd fill half a page, but for some reason the words wouldn't come.
I've noticed something, chasing the origin of the Yuragi for nearly half a century: while you're still chasing something unknown, the lines in your notebook just keep multiplying — a guess, a counter-guess, another guess. But the day something is truly "understood," the notes are always astonishingly short. When I was writing "The Window of 1975," the day I finally reached the one sentence that mattered — that the split happened in a single instant, sometime in 1975 — my notes from that day ran to only two lines. Today's article has the same smell about it.
I nodded without meaning to when I read the Survey Division official saying it took more than a month to go from "it looks similar" to "we're looking at the same thing." My own drafts always take years to write that one sentence moving from "resembles" to "is." Whoever wrote today's article has probably understood, by tonight, just how little sleep comes after you finally manage to write that sentence yourself.
I used to think the reason the academy won't take me seriously was my own impatience to say "I understand." Now I think it's the opposite. I just happen to know, better than most, how much more there is left to not understand, right after you say you do. Today's article is the same: for every bit the map resolved, a new unknown — what the symbols mean — was born. That isn't a step backward. It's only the outline of the unknown getting a little sharper again.
Tonight, in the corner of the newsroom, Yurari was staring hard at the newspaper's photo of the map. Whether it had noticed that the tip of its own antenna resembles the shape of some headland, I couldn't say — and I doubt it would tell me if I asked.
