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An Intriguing Discovery

It was around April of 1916, as I recall, that I first conceived the idea of writing the Hanshichi Casebook. I had been reading Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories here and there for some time but had never read them straight through from beginning to end. One day, having occasion to visit the Maruzen bookshop, I bought three volumes — the Adventures, the Memoirs, and the Return — and read all three at a single sitting. A keen interest in detective fiction welled up in me at once, and I found myself seized by the desire to try my hand at the form. I had read Hume and others before, of course, but it was Doyle who truly struck the spark.

I was not yet free to begin, however. I went on hunting down more of Doyle’s writings and set about reading The Last Galley, The Green Flag, The Captain of the Polestar, the Round the Fire Stories, and various other collections of his short fiction, one after another. But I had my own work to attend to: I was preparing a serial novel for the Jiji Shinpō at the time, and my reading did not progress as quickly as I would have liked. From when I had started it took roughly a month, and it was late May before I finished the lot.

When at last I sat down to write, what struck me was this: no one had ever written detective fiction set in the Edo period. The tales of Ōoka and Itakura were fundamentally adjudication records, concerned with trials and judgments rather than with investigation, and it seemed to me that a story built around detection itself would make for something fresh. There was a further consideration. Writing detective fiction set in the present day carried the constant risk of lapsing into imitation of Western models, whereas committing to a purely Edo-period mode might yield something with a flavor all its own. I was fortunate in possessing a reasonable working knowledge of Edo customs, manners, and statutes, as well as the world of the city magistrates, their constables and inspectors, and the network of private thief-takers.

Read the rest at Castalia Library…

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Natural Partners

This natural partnership between India and Israel helps explain why the entire tech industry in the USA has been enjeetified, and may even predict where one of the flashpoints of the 2050s and beyond will be.

For Israel, India represents a steadfast ally in an increasingly critical world. Neither India’s government nor its Muslim minority has been anything like as vocal over Israel’s offensive in Gaza — which has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians, and reduced most of the enclave to rubble — as their counterparts in Europe.

“Israel is probably today the most trusted partner as far as India is concerned in terms of strategic partnerships,” says Happymon Jacob, director of the Council for Strategic and Defense Research, a New Delhi-based think-tank.He adds that “even the Russians . . . may be ambivalent about their support for India” given the Kremlin’s ties to China, India’s big regional rival, and also cites Trump’s increasingly strained personal relationship with Modi. “Therefore, you are probably looking at Israel as the country that comes without any strings attached, even when it comes to intelligence sharing, when it comes to weapon systems.”

Azar, the Israeli ambassador, notes parallels in the evolution of India and Israel as independent nations from 1947 and 1948.
“We both started as states that are secular and socialist,” he says. “And we became more conservative and more capitalist” and “to a certain extent” more religious. That, he says, makes the two countries “natural partners” in a sometimes hostile world.

Greater Israel has needed a new partner since China declined the opportunity to replace the USA. India was the solution with regards to the manpower problem, but no one wants to live in India, including the Indians. And then there is the obvious conflict between two low-trust cultures in close proximity to consider. Thus the Argentine development, which if this reading is correct means that we can expect to see a major Argentine-Indian-Israeli alliance soon. Call it AIIPAC…

Which means that the latter half of the 21st century may see South America turning into what the Middle East was the second half of the 20th century.

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Overton in the UK

It appears Niles Farage has belatedly realized that Restore is going to eat Reform’s lunch if he keeps calling them racists and Nazis and antisemites instead of supporting their resistance to the violent, decades-long assault on the British nation by Clown World and its various foreign invaders:

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has taken to Substack to accuse the British government of infecting the UK with “deep anti-white racism.” He also published damning racism and crime statistics in an essay, much of which would have been previously unspeakable.

Farage announced his migration to the platform on Saturday, saying that the move to Substack would allow him to speak directly to the British public without “the mainstream media constantly distort[ing] what I say.” One day later, Farage used this new platform to unleash a 7,000-word tirade against the British state, which, he argued, has become “a two tier state against white people.”

Farage took aim at decades of British policy that he says have unfairly benefited minorities and discriminated against white Britons. He highlighted Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies in healthcare, education, policing, and the military that he insists have been implemented to disadvantage white patients, students, and applicants, and promised to repeal the 2010 Equality Act which, in his words, ensures that “anti-Whiteness is institutionalised into every aspect of public life.”

In healthcare, the NHS prioritizes “ethnic minority communities” and “vulnerable migrants” for accelerated diagnosis and treatment, despite white Britons having the highest mortality rate of all the UK’s ethnic groups. In education, the poorest white Britons have the lowest outcomes of any demographic, yet are lectured about their “white privilege” and their “responsibility” to reduce racism, and sidelined when applying for university in favor of black students with lower exam scores, Farage said. In policing, he claimed, agencies across the country have adopted “race action plans” and done away with stop-and-frisk policies that seemingly target black men – even though at 13% of London’s population, this demographic is responsible for 61% of knife murder in the British capital.

Farage is, quite literally, a gatekeeper. I don’t trust anyone who stands with Clown World against anyone that the Clown Worlder’s are calling anything, because no one is dumb enough to keep falling for the same deceitful rhetoric after 65+ straight years of it. But he’s vastly preferable to the frauds of the Conservative Party and the lunatics of Labour.

And I suspect the realization that he could have kept out Barnham if he hadn’t ostracized the people who are now the Reform Party has scared him a little straight. Because the real contest going forward isn’t Labour vs Conservative, but Reform vs Restore. And since things will continue to get worse before they get better, and because Farage is a one-man operation without a successor, Restore is the better bet in the long run.

Because there is no way anyone can vote their way out of this sort of government:

As the Director of Public Prosecutions, current Prime Minister Keir Starmer let off 13,000 suspected Muslim rape gang members and paedophiles with WARNING LETTERS. Meanwhile he has actual British subjects jailed for social media posts & mean words.

This is what happens when you establish an international empire ruling over foreign nations. The more-enterprising, more-capable, and more-corruptible foreigners inevitably gravitate to the capital and eventually take over. Starmer isn’t English or even British. He is an Irishman married to a Jew.

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A Tale of Two Inevitabilities

The USA bowed to the unavoidable.

The US has finally capitulated in its disastrously failed war against Iran, reportedly drafting a memorandum of understanding which is highly favorable to the Islamic Republic, and gains as concession nothing more than the promise that “Iran will not obtain nuclear weapons”—a position Iran had already long held.

Israel, on the other hand, continued with its strategy of denying reality.

Israel violated the ceasefire in Lebanon yesterday, June 16, carrying out a double-tap strike in Mayfadoun. A vehicle was struck, and the subsequent arrival of medical crews and civilians was then bombed three times. First-Responders were reportedly all killed. Iran then issued a warning to Israel: “Stop attacks in Lebanon or face severe response from Iran.”

At this point, it’s hard to imagine Israel making it to 2048, especially if the USA doesn’t make it to 2033 intact. I don’t think most of the comparisons of Netanyahu with Hitler are reasonable, except for this one: they both appear to be leaders who are sociopathically indifferent to the long-term survival of the nations whose interests they ostensibly represent.

UPDATE: Apparently it’s not just Netanyahu that is in the bunker.

  • “Israel reserves the right to act independently against Iran’s nuclear program” and won’t withdraw from occupied Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and the West Bank, Defense Minister Katz declared.
  • “Trump’s agreement does not bind us,” National Security Minister Ben-Gvir assured.
  • “We will have to continue the campaign to topple the regime ourselves and in creative ways,” Finance Minister Smotrich tweeted.

If they want war, I have no doubt that Iran will give them the war they are literally demanding.

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The Opposite of Boomer

A younger SGer confuses two very, very different attitudes:

I’m trying to think of the Gen-X equivalent of the boomer greed. The “I’ve got mine” mentality but with a different target object. I’ve come up with “selfish insularity.” This is in response to an X post I saw where a Gen-Xer was almost mocking the kids from his youth who didn’t make it. Similar to boomer mentality except instead of money it was life, success, a general pride of having “made it” whatever made it means. It feels very similar to the “I pulled myself up my bootstraps” line from boomers except it “I ran the gauntlet myself”.

I strongly suspect he was failing to grasp the gallows humor of my generation. And I don’t think a generation that genuinely worries about things like climate change and gender identification can understand the GenX perspective or how none of us ever expected to get old. Why do you think we didn’t protest the elimination of pensions just when we were getting jobs, or worry about Social Security going bankrupt? We never expected to see them. After all, we were told we were liable to die in nuclear fire at any given moment from a very young age, alone in a house without our parents.

And then, just as we reached adulthood, we were informed that AIDS was going to infect and kill us all.

Yes, these were lies. Yes, we eventually saw through them. But they left a formative collective mark.

None of us believe in global warming because we all remember the coming global ice age, which didn’t scare anyone because we didn’t expect to survive that long. We’re as concerned about global warming as we are about acid rain, another one of our childhood psyops. Frankly, we’re still a lot more frightened of quicksand than just about anything else.

None of this is to say that our apathy, indifference, and collective inability to worry about long-term changes are good. They are not. They are weaknesses and vulnerabilities that have been exploited, especially on the immigration front. But I think that if you speak seriously with a GenXer about the challenges facing young people today, you’ll realize that we are not unsympathetic to the real challenges they face, we’re just not at all impressed by the retarded ones.

As one female comedian said, once you watch a teacher blow up and die on the television wheeled into your classroom as a kid, and the reaction of your own teacher is to shrug and give you a math quiz because the whole thing didn’t take as long as scheduled, your personal tolerance for trauma tends to be on the high side.

It’s not that we lack sympathy, we just don’t have a penchant for complaining about things we can’t do anything about, and we aren’t interested in listening to anyone else’s whining either. Things are what they are, so focus on what you can affect and don’t dwell on what you can’t. The idea of wallowing in things, or trying to solve them by talking about them, or expecting sympathy from anyone is essentially foreign to us.

I suspect that we don’t like to talk about how we feel about things because in our childhood experience, trying to talk to an adult about our feelings reliably ended by listening to a Boomer pontificating at length about their feelings. Believe it or not, it’s still that way for a lot of us to this day.

I’m not defending the GenX perspective, I’m just attempting to explain it.

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Cancelled by the Customers

Even though the publishers and the media gatekeepers won’t cancel the celebrity writer they propped up for decades, the reading public isn’t having it any longer:

I work as a bookseller at a large independent bookstore in New England, and I recently generated a sales report to see whether or not sales have decreased for Gaiman books. While I can’t share exact figures, I thought people here might be interested to know that his sales dropped significantly since the release of the Vulture article in late April 2025.

Initially, I just checked for all titles Gaiman’s name is on, comparing sales quantity from May 2024–April 2025 to quantity from May 2025–April 2026, and the decrease in items sold was a little over 50%. To eliminate confounds and see if this was organic customer response to Gaiman’s authorship, I then restricted the comparison to only include sales of items with all following parameters:

  • part of a section I know saw increased year-over-year sales during May 2025–April 2026
  • part of a section overseen by a book buyer who I know doesn’t order less books out of ethical compunction
  • Gaiman recorded as an author (instead of as penning an introduction, like on the 60th Anniversary Edition of Fahrenheit 451)
  • stocked continuously from May 2024–April 2026

This left me only with books from our adult fantasy and graphic novel sections (though sales were still large enough to be a decent sample). This time it was about a 45% decrease. Still very massive.

Interesting, is it not, that such a famously litigious individual has suffered such material losses and yet has not filed a defamation lawsuit against a) any of the alleged victims, b) the responsible reporters, or c) the responsible publications.

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The Demolition of Disclosure Day

TL;DR: The Boomer’s last boom.

It has been a long time since I walked into a theater and been the youngest guy in it.

Seriously my dude, this bleeding edge Gen-Xer with the bionic eyes and knees was the youngest person in a genuinely full (if not packed) theater. Baby Boomers who hadn’t been in theaters for years showed up in droves for this one. You could tell they hadn’t been near a theater in decades. They were appalled by the ticket prices, a few talked about waiting for it to be in the Dollar Theaters, clearly unaware that those died out with Blockbuster Video. One asked for the smallest popcorn available, which was about the size of a medium soft drink, the irritated retiree said for that price he may as well get the large, which was the entire point since a large popcorn costs as much for them to make as a small.

Once they got over the sticker shock the theater geezers sat down for a movie that they truly enjoyed. They absolutely loved every bit of it. They thought that their favorite director had finally made another movie just for them.

He. Did. Not.

The only person this film was made for is Steven Spielberg… This script that was worked on for years by Steven Spielberg and his long time writing partner David Koepp, isn’t telling a story at all. It’s just setting up an unending series of money-shots. Because at the end of the day that is all the Disclosure Day is script that sets up scenes without a story to tell. It is an unending stream of empty if passionate emotionality. The cinematic equivalent of a drunk at a bar who is convinced that his alcohol soaked peroration is the most profound thing the human race has ever experienced.

I wish I was exaggerating.

I’m not.

The movie is presenting emotionally laden images with some dialog that thinks it’s far more profound than it’s remotely capable of being.

“Empathy is the highest state of existence”. It’s a major theme of this movie and probably the most Boomer sentiment to ever Boomer. A belief that is a tribute to its own semantic emptiness.

I have to admit, I would find it very, very funny if Clown World was actually counting on this as the foundation of their fake alien invasion plan.

We’ve prepped them to believe anything now!

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The True Name of Things

We’re going to do at least one more round of ebook edits before we even think about going to print. Like it or not, this is Castalia’s standard practice; we are a leather book publisher that happens to publish ebooks too, not an ebook publisher with ancillary editions.

Here is my editorial thought for the day:

Halli, as a nickname for Halcyon Glassmere, is less suitable and memorable over time than Halcy would be.

And yes, I should have thought of this before, I admit it and own it and have no excuse for it.

If you’ve read the book, share your thoughts. The only argument I will not accept is “well, Mr. Wayland already wrote it that way.” That might be a legitimate argument if we’d printed a 10,000-paperback print run, but I’m not concerned about the risk of a few hundred early ebook readers being potentially discombobulated when book two comes out or when they acquire the special illustrated edition later this year.

She could, of course, insist on changing her name later. I have known of those who have done precisely that in the course of their educations. Just because everyone calls her “Halli” doesn’t mean she likes it. But it strikes me as potentially more confusing, though perhaps not.

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A Passing Thought

The ideal role of woman is the cheerleader. The satanic inversion of the cheerleader is the critic.

It’s fascinating to observe the way in which women not only fail to understand their power over men, but how they sabotage their own well-being by not only giving in to the inversive role, but doing it without even realizing they are doing so.

The key, I think, is to understand that every man who isn’t an optimist with a gambling problem is perfectly aware of the fact that he could fail. It’s very, very easy to not do anything, to not try to succeed. Which is why it is imperative for the women in a man’s life to grasp that not only does a man have no need for a negative voice to balance his moments of optimism and inspiration, but that piling more negativity on top of his natural concerns, fears, and worries all but ensures that he will never take the risks required to level up.

There are men who don’t need cheerleaders and who are basically impervious to criticism. I’m one obvious example of that, as my habit of devoting myself to things that literally no one wants or is asking for tends to demonstrate. But even I respond well to cheerleading and bristle at negativity and unhelpful, insubstantial criticism.

And since so many people can’t seem to grasp what “unhelpful, insubstantial criticism” is, allow me to explain it to you. Before your criticize anything, ask yourself one question:

  1. Is there anything that can be done about it now?

If the answer is no, then keep your mouth shut and say something vaguely polite and positive. Because nothing you say can change what is already done.

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The Gold Demon

This week’s Castalia translation is The Gold Demon by Koyo Ozaki.

A Japanese classic of love, ruthlessness, and betrayal

Kan’ichi Hazama and Miya Shigisawa have loved each other since childhood. Raised under the same roof, pledged to marry, they share a bond so deep that Kan’ichi has staked his entire future on it. Then a wealthy man with a diamond on his finger enters their world, and Miya’s parents, dazzled by the prospect of a brilliant match, break the engagement. On a winter night at the beach in Atami, Kan’ichi confronts the woman he loves and demands she choose. And she cannot answer him.

Kan’ichi, shattered by betrayal, abandons his studies and remakes himself into a ruthless man determined to worship the only god that never disappoints: money. Miya, married into luxury, discovers that wealth without love is its own kind of prison. As the years pass, guilt, longing, and the memory of what was lost draw them toward each other again, but the damage may be beyond repair. The Gold Demon is about what happens to the human soul when love is tested by fortune and found wanting.

Ozaki Kōyō (1868–1903) was the most celebrated Japanese novelist of his generation. A prodigy who founded the influential Ken’yūsha literary society while still a student, he became the star writer of the Yomiuri Shimbun and the mentor to an entire generation of younger writers, among them Izumi Kyōka. He began serializing The Gold Demon on New Year’s Day, 1897, and the novel became a national sensation, but he died at the age of thirty-five, leaving the story unfinished. It is the most celebrated unfinished work in Japanese literature. The novel has been adapted into seventeen films and has never been out of print in Japan.

This translation by Kenji Weaver is the first complete English translation of The Gold Demon.

To read an excerpt from this 129-year old work, now appearing for the first time in English, visit Castalia Library. You can also support our weekly translation efforts by subscribing to the Castalia Library substack.

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