For the city is a chronicle, a journal, in black and white, and I am its chronicler, its journalist, in hat and coat. A thousand stories for every day, every night; never one city, but a thousand cities – heaven for some, hell for others. And for every story there are two sides, two sides at least, for the city is always, already a fiction, this city made of paper, this city made of print – IN THE FICTIONAL CITY, I am Takeuchi Riichi, Homicide Reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun. Every day, every night, I walk the city and I hear the city, her streets and her stories. I catch her stories and I collect her stories, to pin and mount them, on paper and in print, to display and exhibit, in black and white – Monday 26 January 1948 … In the Fictional City, this story starts like every story, with a siren, and then another, and another, another ambulance siren. In the late winter afternoon, I am standing around a stove in the press office of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Board with all the other homicide reporters, my rivals from the Mainichi, the Asahi, and all the other newspapers, and we are listening to the sirens, waiting for a statement.
