Writing as a Transformative Act

The novel is deeply concerned with presenting writing itself as something that can be transformative in a practical manner. Structurally, the novel is full of various writings—interviews, police transcripts, newspaper articles, journal entries, and even entire chapters from the fictional novel The Forgotten Festival. The case itself hinges on a bit of paper on which two addresses might have been written down upon, and finding the piece of paper would have been so transformative for the case that someone (most likely Hisako) conspired to burn down an entire used bookstore in order to destroy it. Without the piece of paper, which the tobacconist’s grandson insists he spotted in the hands of the delivery driver just days before the poisoning, there is nothing at all which suggests that he was not working alone. Putting even more emphasis on writing, the piece...