The Weight
Burning Down The House
Record ~ Kawaii · Craft
THE HOUSE OF ZAN — Zan
This essay explores the creation of Cycle I: The Record ~ Kawaii Edition, from its earliest ideas to its completion. It can be enjoyed independently, whether you’ve encountered Emi or not. However, I’ll be discussing specific moments from the collection, including its ending. If you’d prefer to discover those experiences for yourself, you may want to meet Emi first.
THE CATALYST
01 // The Original Records Weren’t the Problem
When developing something that connects to my larger body of art, I don’t run with every idea that comes to mind.
That’s why you haven’t encountered an entire fanfic series devoted to John, the character voiced by John Waters in that episode of The Simpsons.
Yet.
For me, a concept needs to serve a purpose, whether for the reader or for the art as a whole.
That standard isn’t just for new creations.
For better or worse, I try to uphold it even after something has been published.
That’s why, even after what I thought were the final revisions to Cycle I: The Record, something still bothered me.
I consider the original Cycle I Records among my most intricately crafted pieces. They give me some of the greatest freedom to express myself, with just enough structure to keep me from wandering off on a tangent that consumes the entire piece.
Otherwise, we’d be three thousand words into the moral dilemma of Hank Scorpio, the supervillain voiced by Albert Brooks on The Simpsons, being one of the few bosses I’d actually consider working for.
Nevertheless.
That freedom also allows these Records to venture into more provocative territory than much of my other writing. It’s part of what gives them their character, but it doesn’t exactly make for a gentle introduction to The Zan™.
Look, man, it’s not exactly the first impression I want everyone to have of me.
The original Records in Cycle I are relatively short, but that doesn’t necessarily make them easy to approach. They use constructed literary voices to explore relationships, expectations, trust, and the ways people affect one another. They’re not verbatim confessions, but my own perspectives, thoughts, feelings, and desires are woven into them.
That’s where the misdirection becomes part of the art, you dig?
There are patches of strong language, sexual content, violence, and ideas that require more nuance than a quick read might provide.
Not to mention unchecked displays of what art can look like without a sponsorship deal to keep it from going off the rails.
That’s the point.
The reader isn’t necessarily meant to agree with every voice. Sometimes the value comes from letting that voice speak without someone stepping in to make it more agreeable.
You know, like a community gathering with a bunch of burner accounts.
I want people who recognize difficult experiences to find something familiar in these pieces, while giving others a reason to consider behavior they might never have questioned. That doesn’t mean every part of the experience is intended to be pleasant.
After a while, trying to explain the more provocative parts of these Records starts to feel like plastering a giant warning label across the entire collection:
THIS ISN’T A
CONFESSIONAL!
DON’T THINK
I’M A TERRIBLE PERSON!
I’M JUST AN ARTIST!
Perhaps I should’ve given the formatting a little more thought…
But there’s only so much explaining you can do before the explanation starts becoming part of the problem.
What bothered me wasn’t simply the possibility of being misunderstood. It was that people might never encounter some worthwhile ideas because they had no interest in experiencing the material surrounding them.
Of course, certain subject matter warrants that distance. I didn’t develop a series about the horrors of war and then decide, “That, but let’s make it super cute.”
I wasn’t interested in neutering the original Records to make them more appealing, either.
What interested me was whether those same ideas could become something entirely different while retaining what made them worth exploring in the first place.
02 // Why the Kawaii Edition Had to Stand Alone
The idea was to take the real core of what the original Cycle I Records were saying and present it in a different, easier-to-take form.
Not simply by changing the words, but by considering how someone else might encounter the material.
I started imagining different personalities and how they might interpret what was in front of them.
That set me down the train of thought that ultimately led to the question of how someone with an overall cute personality would “deal with” the content.
So, going for something more palatable was the direction.
I didn’t want to turn it into a parody or a joke.
It needed to be another piece of art that provided something worthwhile to the reader without compromising the originals.
That was an exciting thought for me because, if you haven’t noticed, everything is layered with meaning in the art I’m developing.
Once I understood what I wanted to do, I was committed to it. I put everything else I was creating aside and gave this my full attention.
I realized that the Kawaii Edition could become an important part of the larger body of art by providing another “doorway” into Cycle I’s ideas.
Of course, not everyone wants a sugar-coated personality. Some readers would prefer the rawer, more direct approach of the original Records, and that’s fine.
But the Kawaii Edition couldn’t exist simply to get someone through that doorway.
It had to be worth experiencing whether the reader ever encountered the original Records or not.
The two editions could support each other without needing each other.
Once I understood what I wanted this to become, there was no question that it would need to mirror the structure of Cycle I: The Record.
That meant twenty-six pieces, along with the Starting the Cycle and Breaking the Cycle framing pages.
It’s not the quickest or easiest thing to develop a character, let alone have them talk and “be themselves” over twenty-six or more pieces.
I wanted to create an experience where readers could spend time getting to know someone.
It retains much of the line-by-line style of the original Records, but it’s more like a person directly talking to you, sharing her observations, and exploring what she encounters.
It’s meant to feel personal and private between the reader and the creation.
I would say it’s akin to someone telling you about a movie they’ve seen that you’ve never watched, or would even want to watch, but you enjoy hearing that person talk about it more than you ever could enjoy watching the movie itself.
That’s the kind of experience I wanted to create.
03 // The Person Behind the Kawaii
The interests that shaped this character were part of my life long before I thought of creating her.
While much of my writing carries a dominant voice, there’s another side of me that’s drawn to playful personalities, expressive aesthetics, and the unapologetic sweetness of things that embrace being cute.
It’s just something I tend to express internally rather than externally, ya know?
Japanese culture has been important to me at different points throughout my life, both in fiction and beyond it.
There’s plenty I could discuss here, but I’ll stick to what was particularly on my mind while developing this character.
I’ve spent countless hours watching “walkers” film their journeys through the streets of Tokyo, Japan, passing businesses, back alleys, landmarks, and people going about their lives.
I’d find myself wondering what it felt like to call Tokyo home, with familiar faces, daily routines, and all the little interactions that make up a life.
For someone who has never been there and has experienced much of life within their own heavily localized world, watching those streets can feel like looking into another place outside time and space.
For many Western audiences, Japanese culture is first encountered through anime and manga.
While my connection to anime is strong, it’s not something I would battle Pokémon-style over in terms of my knowledge of the depth and breadth of everything produced in that space.
My interests extend to anime’s history, influential titles, and impact on Western culture, along with other aspects of Japanese life and media.
But knowing a culture’s history and appreciating what it produces doesn’t mean you understand every person who belongs to it.
That’s something I keep in mind when developing any character who isn’t me.
Richard Pryor addressed a similar distinction during an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show: the difference between writing for an individual and writing from preconceived ideas about someone’s racial identity.
When asked whether white writers could write for him, Pryor said they could if they wrote for “the human being in me,” rather than their preconceived idea of what he should be as a Black person.
He wasn’t suggesting that someone’s race or experiences were irrelevant. He was objecting to writers substituting their assumptions about those things for an actual individual.
Clearly, that distinction was lost on Cavett, who proceeded to embarrass himself by insisting he could write Pryor’s “vernacular” before stumbling into an awkward explanation involving Caribbean dialects.
I wasn’t interested in creating my fantasy of what a Japanese woman should be, or making a personality out of whatever characteristics someone might associate with her nationality.
I wanted to develop a person first, someone whose thoughts, feelings, contradictions, and choices could stand on their own.
Her cultural background and the influences surrounding her would be part of how she expressed herself, not a substitute for having a personality in the first place.
Kawaii, both the word and the aesthetics associated with it, is one of those elements of Japanese culture I’ve come to appreciate.
There was something appealing about developing a character who could embrace that side of herself without it being treated as a joke, a phase she needed to grow out of, or a performance for someone else’s approval.
I also wanted her to exist somewhere that those influences could feel like a natural part of her surroundings.
Not because every Japanese person embraces kawaii, or because that personality couldn’t exist elsewhere.
I didn’t want her cultural interests or the way she expressed herself to become the central conflict of these pieces.
The focus was supposed to be on communication between two people: how she understands herself, what she chooses to share, and what she wonders the reader sees in her.
Sure, I could have placed this character somewhere else.
Let’s say, New Jersey.
Nothing would have prevented that.
But it would have introduced additional questions about her surroundings and cultural influences, particularly when Japanese pop music and language became part of the presentation.
I wasn’t interested in spending the collection explaining why those elements were present.
I wanted to create a space where they could exist naturally, allowing me to concentrate on developing the character and her relationship with the reader.
Not the trials and tribulations of expressing yourself while constantly having to account for everyone else’s expectations.
You know, kinda like real life.
THE CREATION
04 // From Cosmic Girl to Emika Hanamori
The first piece in Cycle I: The Record is built around the idea of an introduction. It even carries “Hello” as both its subtitle and the title of its companion track.
I wanted to carry that same starting point into the Kawaii Edition, but in a way that felt true to the character I was developing.
Naturally, I started searching for Japanese songs with Konnichiwa in the title, since nothing in my own music collection quite fit what I had in mind.
There were a few results, although surprisingly few were actually Japanese. One result, however, wasn’t a song at all. It was the name of a Japanese music project called Konnichiwa Tokyo.
And that’s where I discovered Cosmic Girl.
The title couldn’t have been more fitting, either. The second phase of the original Cycle I: The Record is called Planetary Exploration, giving Cosmic Girl an unexpected connection to the very material I was adapting.
If I had to point to one thing that captures how I imagined Emi’s personality and sense of independence, it would be that song, and even more so, its music video.
It’s a remarkably simple video, but it communicates quite a bit without needing to do very much.
The camera begins behind a woman walking through the nearly empty streets of Tokyo before moving in front of her, capturing her from different perspectives as she makes her way through the city and night gradually gives way to day.
Something about that presentation helped me visualize Emi moving through the world I was creating for the Kawaii Edition.
She was someone encountering a world that already existed, taking in what interested her, and making sense of it through her own perspective.
That was the kind of agency I wanted her to have.
She could embrace something more enthusiastically than I intended, misunderstand what she encountered, or reject something outright because it simply didn’t resonate with her.
When developing Emi’s personality, I wanted her to be recognizably kawaii. That would create one of the starkest contrasts with the original Cycle I Records while giving the new collection a more approachable tone that could appeal to a much broader audience.
But I didn’t want her to become a parody of the exaggerated personalities sometimes found in anime or original characters (OCs), where a handful of recognizable traits can end up standing in for an entire personality.
I wanted her to be someone who was obviously kawaii, but who also had the agency to make that a choice.
That distinction mattered to me because I wanted readers to feel they were getting to know someone when they invested their time in these pieces.
Not another interchangeable character created to satisfy a particular fantasy, fulfill a single purpose, or exist entirely according to someone else’s expectations.
I wanted readers to feel they were getting to know an individual.
She wasn’t supposed to be some Frankenstein’s monster stitched together from every cute character I’ve encountered, or from my assumptions about what a Japanese woman should be.
When developing a character whose background, gender, experiences, or identity differ from our own, we’re inevitably approaching that person through the lens of ourselves.
That perspective has limitations, and I recognize that mine are no exception.
There are also limits to how much control I have over what readers will eventually take away from her.
I don’t see Emi’s interpretations of my material as what makes her “smart.” She’s already intelligent before she ever encounters the original Cycle I Records.
She doesn’t become intelligent because I hand her something intelligent to discuss.
And she doesn’t have to agree with me simply because I’m the one writing her.
When creating a character, I don’t approach it as though I’m some mythological god and every character exists to obey me.
I think of it more as stewardship. I’m responsible for bringing this character into existence, not simply for my own enjoyment, but for anyone who might encounter her.
That means trying to understand who I’m creating rather than making every decision according to what I would personally prefer.
In Emi’s case, she wants to be a friend to the reader.
She speaks with an enthusiasm that’s sometimes larger than the situation calls for, as though even the smallest discovery deserves a little celebration.
She’s playful, opinionated, occasionally impressed with herself, and perfectly capable of getting carried away by her own imagination. But she can also slow down, admit she doesn’t know something, or ask a question that carries more weight than her cheerful delivery might suggest.
She’s friendly, but that doesn’t mean she’s always agreeable.
I wanted that relationship to be part of the emotional core of the entire collection.
It’s where the art isn’t simply communicating something through its themes. Someone within it is speaking directly to the reader.
And the experience depends, at least in part, on whether they enjoy spending time with her.
The foundation of Emi’s personality came together fairly quickly once I understood what I wanted to create.
I didn’t spend an extended period trying to figure out who she was.
What took considerably more attention was understanding how much of her personality to bring forward, and when.
Sometimes she seemed a little too full of herself.
Other times she understood something so quickly that it denied the reader an opportunity to figure it out alongside her.
Neither was necessarily a problem on its own.
A little self-importance could be funny, and her intelligence was part of what made her interesting.
The challenge was recognizing when those qualities were adding something worthwhile and when they were getting in the way of the experience.
One area where I initially felt the kawaii element was lacking was in the presentation itself.
Specifically, the little Japanese-style emoticons known as kaomoji.
You know, the faces, animals, and whatever else people manage to construct out of keyboard characters.
Those were a relatively late addition, but I felt they gave the pieces more personality while providing readers with something visually cute that reinforced the Kawaii Edition’s identity.
There was also something genuinely enjoyable about figuring out where to place them.
I didn’t want to scatter them throughout the writing simply to announce, “Hey, isn’t this cute!?!?”
They needed to feel like something Emi would actually use.
In the end, I believe they enhanced both her personality and the experience of reading her.
Her full name was another decision that took longer than I expected.
I considered quite a few possibilities. I wanted something that would make sense for a Japanese woman living in Japan while remaining approachable to readers who weren’t familiar with Japanese names.
I also wanted her to have a shorter, cuter name she could use naturally.
What I didn’t want was something so recognizable from Japanese popular culture that readers would immediately associate her with an existing character.
So, Hatsune Miku didn’t exactly survive the first round of auditions.
It wasn’t until I was nearly finished with all twenty-six pieces that I finally settled on Emika Hanamori.
Emi, for short.
By that point, she’d already become someone long before I knew exactly what to call her.
05 // Writing Through Emi
Once I understood Emi’s personality and how I wanted her to express herself to the reader, writing the pieces came naturally to me.
Writing from my own experiences and soul can be more challenging, precisely because it’s personal.
Even when I’m using constructed literary voices, there can be parts of myself woven into what they’re expressing.
I have to determine not just what I want to share, but how I want to share it, and what happens when those experiences become something another person can interpret.
Writing through a character can provide a certain distance between you and the audience. You aren’t necessarily bringing all your emotional baggage onto the stage, even when some of it influences what you’re creating.
For Emi, that distance allowed me to express myself without feeling that I had to represent myself.
When I approach something with my rawest voice and emotions, it requires a different kind of energy.
I’m speaking about and remembering things I’ve felt, sometimes things I’ve lived with for years.
Some of that comes from dark places, things I’ve witnessed or experienced. I have to bring them to the forefront and remain with them for however long it takes to craft the piece I’m creating.
Depending on what I’m trying to express, it’s not always a pleasant experience.
Writing for Emi was different.
I still had layers of meaning in mind that weren’t necessarily as bright or cute as what she might be saying to the reader.
Sometimes it’s the things Emi, or anyone else, isn’t saying that can be the most unsettling.
After a while, you might even start wondering when she’s going to have a breakdown or something horrible is going to happen, as though all that sweetness is building toward one of those artistic “gotchas.”
I never intended to do that with Emi.
I wanted the collection to remain a comfortable place for the reader while giving them things to think about, whether those were thoughts they’d already encountered in their lives or something they hadn’t considered before.
It wasn’t intended to depend on constant excitement or a conventional story unfolding on the surface.
In that sense, I feel it shares something with the slice-of-life genre. It isn’t necessarily concerned with getting from point A to point B.
It’s about spending a moment, or several moments, with someone and simply existing within that experience.
That’s what I hope readers can find here.
The collection is substantial in length, and that was a deliberate choice. I wanted to give the ideas room to develop while allowing readers to spend time getting to know Emi.
But that doesn’t mean it was intended as an endurance test or something that needed to be consumed in one sitting.
I’d hope readers would take their time with it, perhaps even stopping midway through something Emi is saying to consider their own thoughts.
Maybe they’d consider how Emi makes them feel, and whether there are qualities about her they’d appreciate finding in the people they connect with.
Not necessarily people who present themselves as kawaii, but those who make them feel comfortable, respected, and able to express themselves.
The Kawaii Edition wasn’t intended to be a collection of cute rewrites of the original Cycle I Records.
The idea was to take what was worthwhile about those original pieces and find another way of expressing it.
Not just what the original said, but what it knew.
An original Record might approach something through a direct or commanding voice, while Emi could encounter the same subject through her own understanding and opinions.
She might even come to a completely different conclusion.
That was part of what I wanted from creating her.
The two editions could share the same starting point without needing to arrive at the same destination.
Some of the original Records communicate substantial observations through relatively few words. Others leave considerably more room for interpretation.
There was no reason to make every Kawaii piece the same length or follow the same structure, much less require Emi to discover something profound and deliver a lesson every time she encountered a subject.
She could find something interesting.
She could find something ridiculous.
She could be wrong.
She could simply refuse to participate.
The point was to let her experience the material as herself.
That became one of my most important considerations when reviewing the individual Records.
Was Emi actually responding to what she’d encountered, or was I using her to explain something I’d already decided?
If a passage felt too neat or explanatory, I’d reconsider what she might notice, misunderstand, or simply find uninteresting.
Sometimes the better choice was to remove an explanation rather than add another one.
She didn’t need to make my point. She needed to make her own.
I enjoyed spending time in the world I was creating.
My own reality wasn’t necessarily as sunny and optimistic as Emi’s, or at least as she chose to present herself.
There were other pieces and series I wanted to explore during this period, some of which might have been better suited to where my head was at the time. But my attachment to completing the Kawaii Edition was strong, and I wanted to see what I was creating become a reality.
When I create something fictional, I want to become a fan of it myself.
Not because my enjoyment guarantees anyone else’s, but because I want to understand what might make someone else feel that same attachment.
I want there to be something worth caring about, something that remains with a person beyond the time they spend reading it.
There were mornings when, after spending a long night writing for Emi and becoming deeply invested in her voice, I’d wake up with my first thoughts being:
What am I doing? Who is this for? Am I distracted from the larger art at hand?
I have confidence in myself after years of perseverance, but I still perform sanity checks to make sure I’m serving a greater purpose rather than chasing an idea that might seem considerably better in my head than it does in its finished form.
I just wanted to make sure the thing I was so invested in creating would be worth someone’s time when it was no longer just mine.
06 // Reading Between Emi’s Languages
Another layer in developing the Kawaii Edition was the language barrier.
That connects to a question explored throughout Cycle I: The Record: What if the issue isn’t access to information, but understanding how that information is being communicated?
What if everything you needed to know was right in front of you?
You could read it, mentally process it, and still miss what someone was trying to tell you.
While it would have been possible to present the entire Kawaii Edition in Japanese, that would have defeated what I wanted to accomplish for an English-speaking readership.
I’m not proficient in Japanese, unfortunately.
What I am practiced at is working with translation tools and language resources. For these pieces, I used a combination of online references and AI-assisted translation, comparing different results and cross-checking the phrasing against what I wanted to communicate.
That’s not the same as being fluent in Japanese or having a fluent speaker verify the final wording, and I don’t pretend otherwise.
The Japanese needed to express something meaningful, not simply look convincing to readers who couldn’t understand it. I wanted to approach the language with care and intention, rather than borrow its appearance to create a false sense of authenticity.
Being a different lens on Cycle I: The Record, I also decided not to carry over the original edition’s Voice Advisory and Voice Feedback.
Those are part of the art in their own right. They can appear to explain the voices and prepare the reader, while the closing feedback may seem nonsensical until you consider the messages hidden within it.
But that wasn’t what I was creating here.
Instead, I decided to give each piece a short Japanese subtitle written in romaji, an opening expression in Japanese, and an English ending that would reveal its meaning.
If you listen to J-pop, you’ll often encounter songs that move between Japanese and English, sometimes within the same verse.
This was something of my own nod to that approach, without overwhelming readers who couldn’t understand written Japanese.
But I didn’t want the language to be there simply because it looked interesting.
I wanted those elements to contribute something to the experience.
The subtitles needed to be short enough to invite curiosity, while the openings and endings could express something more substantial.
As I developed them, I began considering what would happen if the questions weren’t simply connected to their individual pieces, but also to one another.
What if someone could read nothing but the twenty-six English endings and recognize something developing between them?
The first piece would remain an introduction, carrying Konnichiwa… in its subtitle as a connection to the original Record’s Hello.
After that, the questions could begin.
For the first thirteen pieces, I wanted them to reflect Emi’s understanding of herself: what she wants, what she expects, what she questions, and how she chooses to present herself.
The second thirteen would consider what happens when someone else becomes part of that experience.
Not simply what another person thinks of her, but how they might understand her differently, disagree with her, or experience something she hadn’t considered from their perspective.
There’s an important distinction between knowing what you meant to communicate and knowing how someone else experienced it.
That’s why the question opening Record 1-14 became particularly meaningful to me:
How did it feel to you?
It’s a fairly simple question, but it changes whose perspective is being considered.
And as the collection continues, the questions become more personal, eventually leading toward the final one:
Is it really over?
I didn’t want this to become a conventional story told through twenty-six questions. Each needed to make sense within its own piece, even if the reader never noticed the larger connections.
But for someone who did, there would be another layer to discover.
The shortened romaji subtitles didn’t necessarily need to contain the complete Japanese expressions, either. Sometimes a few words could suggest a question without revealing everything it was asking.
The Japanese opening and English ending would provide the fuller expression, with its meaning hopefully taking on a little more significance after spending time with Emi.
And that brings us back to the language barrier.
The reader may not understand what Emi is asking when they first encounter the Japanese. By the time they reach the English ending, they’ve experienced the piece that gives those words their context.
Even when you can translate something correctly, understanding what someone means can involve considerably more than knowing what the words say.
Of course, there’s also the little joke in Record 1-1, where Emi begins speaking in Japanese before switching to English.
In my head, I like to imagine that she turned on a translator on her end, converting her natural speaking voice into English because she understood that was what the reader would understand.
Naturally, that raises another question about how her phrasing, humor, and personality would survive the translation.
I like to imagine she found a pretty good translator.
THE CONSIDERATION
07 // Giving Emi a Soundtrack of Her Own
When I pair music with my writing, the track becomes part of the piece’s identity, the voice speaking through it, and, in a different way, my own connection to what I’ve created.
Every track I use is something I have a connection to.
It’s not a playlist pasted over my art.
I hand-select the songs because they mean something to me and because I believe they contribute something worthwhile to the pieces they’re accompanying.
After creating the first few Kawaii Records, it didn’t take long to conclude that denying them their own musical pairings would be a mistake.
Music was already an important part of the original Cycle I: The Record, not to mention The Hidden Girl series.
Besides, my musical tastes have few boundaries, and spending time with favorite J-pop songs, along with discovering new ones, only made creating the Kawaii Edition that much more enjoyable.
For this collection, I primarily gravitated toward Japanese pop music from around 2015 onward, particularly female vocalists and groups.
That was a deliberate choice. The original Cycle I Records draw much of their musical identity from female-driven alternative rock of the 1990s, while The Hidden Girl features female artists primarily from the late 2010s onward.
I wanted the Kawaii Edition to complement both, establishing its own musical identity while maintaining a connection between the three through their emphasis on female voices.
There’s a lot of colorful, energetic, and occasionally ridiculous music in that space, with everything from bright electronic pop to sounds that aren’t quite so easy to categorize.
Which, if you’ve been paying attention, is something I tend to appreciate.
I wanted the tracks to feel appropriate to Emi, perhaps as something she might listen to while considering the subject of a particular Record, or something that reflects her state of mind at that moment.
But I didn’t want to reduce her musical identity to twenty-six variations of the same cute song.
Her personality has more range than that.
The music needed to reflect it.
Some pieces benefit from something playful and energetic. Others are better accompanied by something atmospheric, contemplative, or a little unusual.
And sometimes the relationship between the music and the writing isn’t immediately apparent.
That doesn’t necessarily mean the connection isn’t there.
Take CHAI’s N.E.O., accompanying Record 1-2. There’s something fitting about its unapologetic individuality appearing so early in a collection where the reader is only beginning to understand who Emi is.
Or NANAOAKARI’s Discommunication Alien in Record 1-14, where the subject turns toward the difference between what someone intends to communicate and how another person experiences it.
The music can reinforce an idea, introduce another perspective, or simply establish an atmosphere that feels appropriate to the person speaking.
That’s part of the freedom I enjoy when making these selections.
I also wanted the music to have some sense of progression across the collection without requiring every song to contribute to a predetermined narrative.
The earlier selections establish much of the colorful, energetic personality readers are getting to know.
As the pieces continue, there’s room for different moods and increasingly personal observations.
By the time we reach Record 1-23, Hoshimachi Suisei’s Stellar Stellar brings another musical connection to the cosmic imagery that runs through Cycle I, while accompanying a piece concerned with individuality and what happens when two people begin sharing an experience.
And then there are the final two Records.
For 1-25, I chose FRUITS ZIPPER’s NEW KAWAII.
Considering that this is where Emi explains that being kawaii is something she has deliberately chosen for herself, I couldn’t imagine a more appropriate musical pairing.
For 1-26, BABYMETAL’s THE ONE accompanies a much quieter encounter between Emi and the reader.
It’s a different kind of musical presence, one that I felt could complement the significance of sharing a moment with someone without requiring either person to explain what that moment is supposed to mean.
Those selections also demonstrate why I didn’t want the collection confined to one particular interpretation of J-pop or kawaii.
Something can be cute without being simplistic, and something can be emotionally meaningful without abandoning its sense of fun.
There are also a couple of deliberate exceptions to the general musical direction.
Record 1-11 features Turning Japanese by The Vapors, a British new wave band whose 1980 hit is about as far outside the collection’s usual musical criteria as you could reasonably get.
That wasn’t an oversight or an attempt at shock humor.
And Record 1-24 features Party! Join Us by Brina Palencia, a song connected to the English-language Shin Chan dub rather than the Japanese pop scene from which most of the other selections were drawn.
Both choices have particular relationships with their respective pieces, which I’ll discuss separately.
Promise.
The opening and closing tracks were also chosen to frame the collection as a whole.
SUMMONERS 2+’s DeCIDE, the opening theme to How Not to Summon a Demon Lord, provides an energetic introduction, while MINMI’s Shiki no Uta, the closing theme to Samurai Champloo, offers something more reflective as the experience comes to an end.
Both anime are personal favorites of mine, although they approach their audiences in remarkably different ways.
How Not to Summon a Demon Lord unapologetically embraces its fan service, while Samurai Champloo takes its characters through a self-contained journey filled with humor, conflict, and emotional turns, all while moving toward a destination.
There’s something about that contrast I appreciate.
One is unashamed of the entertainment it offers, while the other reminds us how much can happen between the beginning of a journey and its conclusion.
And neither needs to apologize for being what it is.
I wanted those musical selections to reflect something similar: the excitement of entering a world and the feeling of eventually having to leave it.
Not simply two additional songs attached to the collection, but something that could help frame the entire experience of spending time with Emi.
Of course, as with anything I create, the selections involve artistic judgment.
There might be a perfect song for one of these pieces that I’ve never heard.
I don’t know every song ever made.
I can’t exactly pressure-test my choices against music I don’t know exists.
Likewise, there are songs I absolutely love that would make terrible companions to particular Records.
I wasn’t interested in forcing those into the collection simply to assemble an impressive playlist.
Every selection needed to justify its presence within the piece, even if that justification wasn’t immediately obvious to someone encountering it for the first time.
And every song needed to be something I genuinely enjoyed.
08 // Emi Says Nope. (Record 1-11)
I would say one of the most memorable moments is Piece 1-11, when Emi addresses the reader, after all the talking she’s done up to that point, with one word:
Nope.
It is one of the most powerful turns in her character, as she’s willing to reject something her own creator has placed in front of her.
That’s agency.
The original Record behind that piece is one of, if not the most, controversial in Cycle I: The Record.
The voice is meant to illustrate predatory behavior with little context in the body of the work, except for the prominent warning that precedes it.
While the Voice Advisory and Voice Feedback are ordinarily part of the art as meta-commentary on what we trust and expect when encountering a voice, the advisory for this particular Record was also a straight-up warning.
The thinking is that either Emi looked at the warning and decided this wasn’t for her, rejecting it based on that information, or she read the piece and rejected the “voice” or the entire “experiment” itself.
Either way, she wasn’t having it.
There was nothing she wanted to take from it.
Which is the point.
For those who would never encounter the original work, that’s where I used the 1980 hit single “Turning Japanese” by the English new wave band The Vapors.
The song has a long history of attracting conflicting interpretations.
Its title became associated with a sexual interpretation that songwriter David Fenton has rejected, while the lyrics and Japanese references have prompted other interpretations and criticisms.
She could be rejecting the song for any number of reasons, too.
It’s a 1980s track from a male-fronted British band, surrounded by interpretations that don’t necessarily agree with one another, and it has little in common with the female-led J-pop curation of the tracks surrounding it.
I’m not particularly interested in establishing which part Emi rejected.
She said what she wanted to say.
Nope.
And I wasn’t going to make her explain herself.
09 // Why Emi Chose Shin Chan (Record 1-24)
Another piece that takes an unexpected direction, though not as starkly as 1-11, is Record 1-24.
The original piece dealt with the emotional destruction of a relationship.
It’s an intense piece and would likely be upsetting to anyone who has experienced that firsthand, from either side.
Instead of Emi trying to deal with the emotions of that piece directly, she switches gears and dives straight into her comfort media, Shin Chan.
I chose Shin Chan to be her comfort show for a few reasons.
I enjoy the show and its characters myself. The series has been around for a long time, with new media still being produced.
It’s not the “obvious” choice of something like Hello Kitty or some other uber-cute media property.
It carries personality and history with it.
It also gave me an opportunity to let Emi be Emi.
She can insist on her sophisticated taste and then get completely carried away by the ridiculous antics of a little boy in a cartoon.
That history also gave me an interesting musical connection.
I chose “Party! Join Us,” performed by Brina Palencia for the Funimation English dub, as the companion track for this piece.
Even without knowing how unconventional that dub is compared to the Japanese original, the song stands on its own as something happy and upbeat, while acknowledging that life isn’t always pleasant.
Someone could enjoy it without ever watching the show.
The Funimation dub, though, in a nutshell, takes a Japanese family cartoon that already has its share of crude humor and injects it with over-the-top dark humor and adult themes.
Personally, I love that version of the show, but it’s not something I’d recommend in mixed company.
In Emi’s case, the version she relates to is the original, “wholesome-ish” Japanese version, while the companion music comes from a very different adaptation.
The layered idea is about how we can relate to parts of something without embracing the whole.
Which, if you’ve been paying attention, is rather appropriate for The House.
It has a whole lot of rooms, and I doubt many people will be equally enthusiastic about everything they find inside.
I like to consider that part of the appeal.
THE CONSEQUENCE
10 // What I Found in Emi’s Farewell
When I’m creating something, it rarely ends exactly where I thought it would when I started.
Developing all twenty-six Kawaii Edition Records was an extensive process.
Even when I’d reached a point where I could reasonably consider them ready for publication, I never quite felt that the collection itself was finished.
With that in mind, I moved from completing the individual pieces into developing the framing pages, Starting the Cycle and Breaking the Cycle.
Those became their own creative undertaking.
I needed to consider how readers would be introduced to Emi, what they should understand about the collection’s construction, and how those framing pieces could contribute something without simply explaining what readers were supposed to think.
For Starting the Cycle, I wanted Emi to introduce herself rather than have me explain her personality to the reader.
She arrives with grand plans for balloons, confetti, and a spectacular introduction, only to discover that the reader is already there.
Naturally.
Through that introduction, she explains what makes her interpretation different from the original Records, how the music and language elements contribute to the experience, and why readers might enjoy spending time getting to know her.
She even offers to let them skip the introduction entirely.
Although she might be a little offended.
What mattered was allowing her personality to establish the experience. Readers could learn what they were getting into without being told exactly who Emi was or what they should think of her.
I’d rather let them discover that for themselves.
Breaking the Cycle presented a different challenge because I didn’t want it to continue from the ending of Record 1-26.
I felt that needed to remain the end.
No peek-a-boo, I’m back shenanigans.
Instead, I wanted Breaking the Cycle to concern Emi herself, what she hoped to share with the reader, and what she wanted from their time together.
The solution was to have Emi leave something behind.
An entire packet of napkins, carefully numbered and covered in her handwriting, containing thoughts she wanted to share with the reader.
Of course, one little note wasn’t going to be enough for Emi.
Although readers encounter Breaking the Cycle afterward, Emi wrote those notes before the final evening depicted in Record 1-26.
She didn’t know exactly how that final encounter would unfold. She could only hope the cake was delicious, that they remembered the forks, and that she hadn’t said anything terribly embarrassing.
That last one seemed rather unlikely.
They offer another understanding of their time together without carrying her beyond that final evening.
The notes explore something that had been developing throughout the collection: What does it actually mean to know somebody?
Emi reflects on her expectations, the impressions she wanted to make, and the difference between understanding another person and imagining what they might think.
She also recognizes that although she can choose what she wants to share, she can’t control what the reader ultimately experiences.
And perhaps most importantly, she acknowledges that she wanted the reader to like her.
Imagine that.
It might also leave some readers wondering:
Why does such a quiet farewell feel so final?
I don’t necessarily want to answer that question for them.
I believe there’s value in allowing readers to experience a sense of closure while still wishing there had been more.
In its own way, that reflects some of the connections we make throughout our lives, although those tend to be considerably messier and more complicated when they reach their conclusions.
What surprised me was how much of Emi’s emotional depth didn’t fully register with me until I reached Records 1-25 and 1-26.
In 1-25, she explains to the reader that her personality is something she chooses for herself.
She isn’t kawaii because that’s all she knows how to be, or because she hasn’t experienced anything that might make her feel differently.
It’s who she chooses to be.
And in 1-26, she spends some quiet time with the reader, letting them know how much she’s enjoyed their time together.
There’s a little cake, two forks, a hill overlooking the city lights, and Emi’s slightly crooked ribbon.
As the sky grows darker, more stars become visible.
She talks about the things they’ve shared, what those experiences meant to her, and how they might mean something different to the person sitting beside her.
And she still manages to be ridiculous.
Of course she does.
I wanted that to remain part of her, even during a moment that carried more emotional weight than I had originally anticipated.
But something happened when I first developed that ending and began reading it as a complete piece.
I felt a sadness that isn’t explicitly stated anywhere in the collection.
I hadn’t set out to write a sad ending, and I don’t believe that’s the only way to understand it.
Nevertheless, that’s how it came through for me.
And in its own way, that connects back to some of the ideas explored in the original Cycle I Records, particularly the differences between what we intend to communicate and what someone else ultimately experiences.
One possible interpretation is that Emi and the reader shared something meaningful without knowing whether it would continue.
There’s something sad about that possibility, especially after spending so much time getting to know someone.
It makes the experience feel more final than I necessarily intended.
But that isn’t what I would consider official canon.
Her future is simply outside the frame of this collection.
The experience ends. That doesn’t mean Emi does.
Still, I suspect readers of a certain mindset may encounter some of the same sadness I did.
And perhaps they’ll find an entirely different meaning in it.
That’s part of allowing a creation to exist beyond my own interpretation.
But for those who do find something sad in that final encounter…
I’m sorry.
Genuinely.
11 // What’s Next for Emi?
At the time of this writing, Emi’s place within The House is limited to the Kawaii Edition of Cycle I.
I don’t intend to use her as the reader’s correspondent for Cycle II, as that collection is being developed in a more confessional and personal direction.
I have no interest in inventing a fictional history for Emi simply to make her fit that purpose.
Her ambiguity is part of the charm.
It’s also part of the larger point of Cycle I: how we approach strangers, what we assume about them, what they choose to reveal, and how much can remain unknown even after we’ve spent time getting to know them.
Giving Emi an elaborate biography might simply answer questions that are better left open.
That doesn’t mean I have no interest in developing Emi as intellectual property within other parts of The House, where it makes artistic sense.
But I don’t want her to become a character who keeps appearing simply because I can find somewhere to put her.
Unless she makes me financially stable and genuinely famous.
In which case, expect merchandise.
For now, I consider the Kawaii Edition a complete collection in its own right, with no immediate plans to extend it.
In the meantime, I welcome fan art and other noncommercial creations celebrating her. Any broader use of the character would be something to consider separately.
She doesn’t need an endless official story for people to find something worthwhile in her.
I created a space for readers to meet Emi, but I don’t have to be the only one giving her a life beyond these pages.
You can remember her, talk about her, introduce her to others, or simply wish you’d had more time together.
Perhaps she’ll inspire you to create something of your own.
And if you’d genuinely like to see more of her, I hope you won’t keep that to yourself.
I’m not promising another collection. There would still need to be something worthwhile to create.
But knowing people genuinely want to spend more time with her would certainly give me something to consider.
After all, I suspect she’d be rather pleased to discover people were asking for more of her.
As if she needed the encouragement.
12 // What Emi Means for The House
I want readers to have a positive experience with Emi.
Sure, it’s entertainment. But I’m less concerned with what someone calls it than with what they take away from the experience.
Unless they call it trash. Or worse, slop.
Then we’re going to need to define some terms.
Did it make you think?
Did it distract you during a difficult time?
Did you find someone you enjoyed spending time with, even if that person only existed within the art?
That’s what interests me.
It doesn’t matter whether someone becomes attached to Emi or finds something meaningful in an entirely different part of The House.
I want to offer something unique that’s true to what I want to express, whether that’s something darker, grittier, and more direct, or something bright, optimistic, and humorous.
Not everything I create is intended to make someone comfortable.
Sometimes the value is in being entertained. Sometimes it’s in being challenged or discovering a perspective you hadn’t considered.
No matter what it is, it’s coming from me.
And knowing that someone found something worthwhile in it has meaning to me.
At the same time, I understand the limitations of being the person creating it.
Even if someone told me exactly what experience they wanted, I couldn’t guarantee that I’d deliver it perfectly.
And even if I could, their idea of perfection would still be limited to what they knew to ask for in the first place.
There’s an entire world of experiences we don’t know we might enjoy until somebody introduces us to them.
I can only develop the art as sincerely and carefully as I’m able, then allow people to experience it for themselves.
They might find what I intended.
They might discover something entirely different.
They might love one little part of it and have absolutely no interest in anything else.
That’s fine.
I don’t need everyone to have the same experience to consider what I’ve created worthwhile.
In Emi’s case, I wanted someone readers could gradually get to know without needing every detail of her existence explained.
Perhaps she’d remind them of themselves, someone they knew, or someone they wished they knew.
Or perhaps they’d simply enjoy her company.
Any of those would be worthwhile.
But developing Emi also demonstrated something important about the larger possibilities of The House.
Creating an entire parallel collection through a different personality and perspective wasn’t merely a novelty.
It showed me that the ideas explored throughout The Cycles could support multiple artistic interpretations without one replacing or diminishing another.
That’s exciting because The Cycles has become an increasingly expansive concept.
The Kawaii Edition demonstrated one way of expanding it. I can imagine a different kind of parallel edition for Cycle II, built around a voice of its own.
I don’t want to introduce something new simply because I’ve found another idea I could develop.
Whatever comes next needs its own reason to exist.
And that’s something I take seriously.
Almost as seriously as the voice talents of Jim Varney, best known for playing Ernest P. Worrell, who lent his voice to Cooder in the 1998 Simpsons episode Bart Carny.
You see, Cooder is a carnival hustler who, along with his son, manages to take over the Simpsons’ home after Homer invites them to stay.
Which is why I only welcome fictional people into The House.
Anyway.
Anything I choose to put into the world as part of The House, I consider art.
That doesn’t mean everything needs to be profound or difficult. Sometimes the smallest experience stays with someone longer than the grandest statement.
If you’ve read much of what I’ve written, you’ll understand that the drive behind what I create isn’t therapy.
It’s expression.
Through writing, media, and artistic design, with the intention of creating something that serves a purpose beyond my own experience.
The enjoyment and betterment of others.
And perhaps, by spending a little time in someone else’s world, a reader might discover possibilities they once believed were meant only for other people.
For other rooms in The House of Zan, return to the House Map.