A Japanese writer has been publishing very short comic monologues in the voice of a sixteenth century samurai who has, without explanation, ended up in contemporary America. He is dignified. He is bewildered. He is at a Waffle House at three in the morning.
There are about 120 of these. Most are under two hundred words. The good ones are structurally identical to the best openings in this newsletter, which is why I am filing it as a source rather than a curiosity: a small concrete observation about an ordinary American ritual, held at exactly the right angle, until it stops being about the ritual.
The stories are sorted into five categories, and the categories are the best thing about the project because they are a genuine taxonomy of American strangeness rather than a filing convenience.
| Category | What it is actually about |
|---|---|
| The Free | Things Americans give away without being asked. Refills, chips, bread baskets, water. To a visitor this is genuinely disorienting behaviour. |
| The Enormous | Portion sizes, store sizes, parking lots, the yellow school bus. Scale as a national aesthetic. |
| The Renamed | Being called boss, chief, buddy, my man. The coffee counter asking for a name. American instant informality as a kind of forced intimacy. |
| The Sacred Rituals | Weather reports as theatre, the national anthem, yard sales, saying bless you. Ceremony that Americans do not notice is ceremony. |
| The Bewilderment | The catch-all. Self checkout, garbage disposals, doorbell cameras, being asked how you want your eggs. |
Unexpected item in the bagging area, narrated by a man who has been accused of things before and has always known who was accusing him. This is the best one for this newsletter, because the joke and the point are the same joke: we built a machine that treats every customer as a suspect and then decided that was normal.
The domestic surveillance apparatus described by someone with no prior assumption that it is ordinary. Pairs with almost anything on ambient monitoring, and the outsider frame does the critical work without any of the critique.
Informed consent for hot sauce. Funny on its own and structurally identical to every consent form anyone has ever signed without reading, which makes it usable in a much more serious context than it appears in.
A man in a suit gesturing at a map with great urgency about a thirty percent chance of rain. On the presentation of probabilistic information to the public, which is a subject this newsletter keeps circling, and which has never been made this funny.
The whole category in one piece. Being given a new name by a teenager with a marker, and accepting it, because what else would you do. Gentler than the others and the one most likely to land with a general audience.
Two practical problems. There is no RSS feed, and the stories index carries no dates. There is no way to automatically diff this site for new material, which means it needs an actual manual look. The full story list as of today is captured in the inventory, so a future check is a comparison rather than a re-read.
One editorial caution. The premise depends entirely on the samurai never becoming the butt of the joke, and the site holds that line carefully. Any excerpt that lands as "look at the confused foreigner" rather than "look at what we do all day and never see" has been pulled out of its frame. The direction of the comedy is the whole thing.
Worth watching, mostly for the openings. The technique on display is one specific concrete detail, described without commentary, until the description becomes the argument. That is the move this newsletter is always trying to make and rarely makes in under two hundred words.
Filed as a recurring source. No feed, so it needs a manual look rather than a scan.
Sources
Site: Wandering Nobunaga. wandering-nobunaga.com
About page: wandering-nobunaga.com/about (authorship, translation method, illustration credit, stated ethos)
Full story index: wandering-nobunaga.com/stories