In the land of failing to remember to post these same day

Dear diary,

I don't know what to write about today, so perhaps I shouldn't. But I can say these things: Today I read two comic books in their entirety, and as much as those are very light and swift reading, it's taken me multiple days to read the last few I've read, in moments snatched on lunch breaks and while waiting for things to happen, so it feels simultaneously relieving and disappointing to open up a book for the first time and have it evaporate so swiftly. I typed up a few pages of notes from a notebook that I'd written several years previously and never quite managed the intention and will to transfer to a digital form. And despite canned pumpkin apparently not existing in this country (still not shocked - I'd never encountered it in the wild before a recipe asked for it) I managed to find out how to process a raw pumpkin into similar form at home and transformed it into - if I do say so myself - a pretty tasty pumpkin and coconut cream soup. Some of the thyme got burned and I would have benefited by collecting that first batch of little bits into a bowl to dump into the pot together, but that's only a question of improvement. What I made was good already.

Lin Hai's Journal - 4

I may have to give up on being astounded. We have arrived at the city Komae, halfway to the Imperial Palace and I am feeling less and less that I understand this world. Uta, the wolf who halfway took the Princess in as her cub – everyone here is greeting her as “Your majesty”!!! I don’t know what to make of it, except everyone here seems to recognise her as a figure of great deference and honour.

It seems not to be a case of mistaken identity, either. No, Uta hasn’t started speaking to us, but she has body language and responds that way to the Princess’s questions. That’s a relief. I would hate to be executed because someone realised the wolf we travel with isn’t the same wolf as the wolf they thought she was.

So far we have been ushered into the city, guided to a ‘rustic’ inn which is as well-appointed as any I have stayed in, been let into Komae’s famed Mermaid Gardens at no charge, and been allowed to take our pick of bathing suits, again with no charge. It all feels too good to be true, but perhaps the Princess is accustomed to such treatment. I am not, even when I have looked out for her in the Imperial Palace – the other Imperial Palace, the one back home – before.

And I ought to note that I say the Mermaid Gardens are famed on the word of one Asai, proprietor of the Sakura Roots. He under whose roof we stay this night.