A certain journalist’s memories

“Kue, you sure know a lot.”

People have told me that since I was young, but instead of acting like a knowledgeable professor, I was spacing out the whole day. People often compared me to a scarecrow when I was a young boy.

So nobody really said that I was smart, but how strange, whenever they had questions, my friends would always come and ask the scarecrow.

This was before the era of the internet.

I was known as “Ku-exa”, a convenient bank of knowledge.

Be it historical timelines, or video game strategies, I would give people the answers they were looking for as long as I knew it. But I think my favorite pieces of knowledge were trivia.

The difference between cookies and biscuits.

The difference between shovels and scoops.

Objects have names, and a story behind their naming.

Perhaps this is stating the obvious, but I felt the very depths of my soul tremble when I first came to realize this fact.

The difference between ohagi and botamochi.

The different pronunciations of demi-glace sauce.

Even if they’re fundamentally referring to the same object, there is a significance behind the difference in naming. A significance that speaks volumes of its associated historical and cultural conditions, as well as the beauty of mankind’s continued struggle to categorize and discern information.

And the world is a conglomeration of information, with etymology being a mere part of it. “Learning” something is fun.

I’ve been having strange dreams since I was small.

In those dreams, I go to a lot of different places with a camera held in hand and talk to various people.

Travel does broaden one’s horizons, and perhaps my curiosity is such that I travel even in my dreams.

I had a vague idea of becoming some sort of academic in the future, but one incident in my life made me realize that “conveying information” can also be fun.

My homeroom teacher back then encouraged me to write a series of articles for our school newspaper.

Titled “Misuse is Abuse!”, my series of articles - often accompanied by amateur illustrations - would introduce commonly misused Akitsu phrases.

I think I owe the success of those articles not to my breadth of knowledge, but rather the encouragement of my fellow classmates to contribute examples of their own.

It started off with some orthodox phrase redundancies like “a bouquet of flowers” or “an unexpected surprise”, but somehow led to the birth of powerful phrases such as “The principal of the school’s super long morning speech early in the day”, and would quickly outgrow its initial publication scope while amassing multiple submissions from other classes as well.

In my younger days, I thought that I’d discovered the jewel of knowledge.

And now I’ve learned the joys of sharing that jewel, so that it may be polished through contact with others and shine even brighter.

It is simply my natural calling to go into reporting - no, to commit myself wholly to the path of journalism.

After I left a major newspaper company, I stopped having those dreams, because those dreams had become reality.

I know for sure that I was meant to be a journalist, and not a mere tourist.

The interview with a promising para-athlete.

The shady connection between a certain baseball player and a criminal organization.

The psychology behind arsonists, whose numbers are on the uprise.

A brain injury that renders one unable to distinguish between humans and animals.

A masked man mentioned by many female prisoners in their confessions.

An antique shop that appears out of nowhere.

A mysterious ghost that throws potatoes at you.

Legends surrounding the goddess’s descent and Mount Kuze’s eruptions.

These topics certainly sound nonsensical when I list them out like that, but I am determined to fulfill my duty.

But first things first, I need to successfully complete my undercover investigation of that shrine next week. Could it be the shrine that keeps appearing in my dreams?

That would be too good to be true, huh.