The Last Carnival

Book excerpt: In the Spring of 19- I took a sabbatical from the University of C-, over-the-seas branch, Kawagawa, Cipan where I had been working towards the postponement of a doctoral degree in the dual fields of comparative histrionics and cryptophilology. The cause of my departure: that I would pursue an ancillary degree elsewhere, although some may have observed that I had rather quietly suffered a nervous breakdown. The simple, more economical pretext, however, was that I was maddeningly overworked and shamefully underemployed. Repatriated, I finally took a job in S. Hollywood with a talent agency founded by a wealthy, enlightened Japanese autodidact of Western Culture, or "Sei Bun" as Kennichi-"Ken" to his friends-Chibita-"Chibi" by the same friends-liked to call it, who claimed, but could never quite document, a connection with his own royal family. Ken had entered the film business with the intention of "Making Movies That Make The Differences And Represent A Goal Of Universal Culture," a letterhead slogan that fell just short of the felicitous. He idolized the silver-screen impresario Alexandr Korda, and would have emulated him. Accordingly, Kenchan had acquired a reputation for his readiness to buy, at cut-rate prices, the rights to stories or, should we say, fragments of stories, incomplete or in a state of hopeless disarray, ones such as other agencies would have refused as unrepresentable. In principle we operated much like corporate marauders, but in the reverse: We bought up under-producing literary properties and then reassembled them into "marginally" profitable entities.