Nihon no shokunin shūkyō

Piranesi’s Index is a notebook in which he catalogues the subjects of his journal entries and records where they appear. Designed to make a large body of writing searchable, it becomes more than a practical aid: when its entries contradict the journals he believes he owns, the Index exposes a concealed history of altered numbering, lost pages, and memory he cannot trust. Its orderly letters and page references lead him toward facts that his surviving notebooks alone cannot explain.

Design and Use

Piranesi explains that one notebook is reserved for indexing all the others. He assigns a certain number of pages to each letter of the alphabet, giving more space to common initials such as A and C and less to rare ones such as Q and X. Under each letter he lists subjects and the locations of relevant entries in his journals. The system is meant to solve a familiar archival problem: important passages are difficult to find again once they are dispersed among notebooks.

He does not index continuously. Instead, he usually returns to the task every other week or so, finding that some time between writing and classification helps him distinguish important material from what proved ephemeral. When he resumes the work in the Second Northern Hall, sitting cross-legged on its pavement with the Index and a journal, the accumulated entries register how much has happened since his previous review. The routine is therefore both practical and retrospective: the catalogue organizes writing, but its delayed compilation also allows Piranesi to reassess what deserves to be retained.

The Index grows to accommodate its subjects. Piranesi has had to reallocate two pages from P to O because he has written so extensively about The Other; he counts seventy-four entries under that subject. This abundance reflects the importance of their long friendship in his remembered life, but it later becomes striking for another reason: those entries describe events he recalls clearly, while failing to supply the identity he is trying to recover.

The Catalogue as a Record of Contradictions

While indexing, Piranesi finds an entry for Stanley Ovenden under O, identifying him as a student of Laurence Arne-Sayles and directing him to Journal 21. The reference unsettles him because Stanley’s name had seemed unfamiliar when spoken by the Prophet, although it is already present in his own catalogue. The contradiction is not merely between recollection and recognition: the Index points to a numbered journal that, under Piranesi’s current account of his archive, cannot exist.

Other entries deepen the discrepancy. The Index refers to journals numbered 11, 17, 18, and 20, as well as to earlier journals whose numbers appear to overlap with books Piranesi knows. Some entries are written in a hand he recognizes as his own but finds subtly different: rounder and fuller, made with a broader nib and thinner, more fluid ink than he currently uses. The writing’s physical traits make the contradiction harder to dismiss as a simple cataloguing mistake. The Index appears to preserve the work of an earlier Piranesi, while the journals beside him represent a changed state of the same archive.

Piranesi checks the physical evidence rather than relying on the catalogue alone. In his brown leather messenger bag, hidden behind the Statue of an Angel caught on a Rose Bush, he finds nine journals, not the many additional volumes implied by the Index. He then examines their black covers and the white gel-pen numbers at the bottoms of their spines. The first three volumes were originally numbered 21, 22, and 23; someone scratched out the initial 2, leaving the numbers 1, 2, and 3. Because traces of the gel ink remain, the former numbering can still be seen. A seemingly stable system of labels has thus been physically rewritten, and the Index preserves the numbering that the surviving covers conceal.

Searching for an Identity

The Index becomes central when Piranesi begins investigating the name Matthew Rose Sorensen. Asked whether he is Matthew, he does not recognize the name and turns to his catalogue for help. The entries provide little that distinguishes this person: he finds that Matthew was interested in Arne-Sayles, but that fact offers no decisive answer. The act of looking up a name gives him a procedure for inquiry, not an immediate solution.

He next considers The Other, reasoning that entries about his friend may mention Matthew and help establish whether The Other knew him—or whether Matthew might be Piranesi himself. The search carries an emotional as well as an evidentiary logic: among the names available, The Other seems safest to consult because they have been friends for years. Piranesi has written about him more than about anyone else, and the catalogue’s seventy-four entries appear to offer an unusually full record of their relationship.

Yet the result is negative. The entries describe The Other’s rituals, intelligence, scientific skill, appearance, and clothes, but their events are already familiar to Piranesi. Unlike the entries on Stanley Ovenden, Maurizio Giussani, Sylvia D’Agostino, and Arne-Sayles, they contain no newly encountered phrases that suggest a hidden past; nor does the name Matthew Rose Sorensen appear. The Index’s silence therefore matters as much as its references. It shows that a comprehensive-seeming record of one relationship cannot, by itself, resolve the identity question.

A recollection redirects the search. The Prophet had called The Other Ketterley, so Piranesi looks under K and finds an entry for Dr Valentine Andrew Ketterley, including biographical details and a note asking whether it would be worthwhile to contact him near Battersea Park. The entry also contains an action point to prepare questions for Ketterley. Piranesi recognizes the word Battersea as part of the puzzle, noticing even that it should not be hyphenated. The Index turns a remembered name into a route through the archive, while obscure place references gain force because they recur among otherwise legible details.

Missing Pages and Recovered Evidence

The Ketterley entries lead to a further material discrepancy. The catalogue directs Piranesi to a sequence spanning the last ten pages of Journal 22 and the first thirty-two pages of Journal 23. When he opens the corresponding books—now numbered 2 and 3—both sets of pages are missing, with only torn edges remaining in the spines. The Index preserves the locations and subject of writing that the volumes no longer contain.

Piranesi cannot remember removing the pages. He considers whether the Prophet or 16 might have taken them, but has no clear explanation for how either could have found the messenger bag hidden among the House’s many statues. The catalogue cannot identify who removed the pages, and neither can Piranesi’s recollection. His own memory is an uncertain part of the investigation: he acknowledges that he has done things he cannot recall, including writing mysterious entries, so he cannot rule himself out as the person who tore them away.

A separate body of recovered paper makes the Index’s references materially consequential. Piranesi has gathered scraps from the Eighty-Eighth Western Hall, where they had been woven into herring-gull nests. To recover them, he softens dried droppings with hot water, carefully balancing enough heat to loosen the residue against the risk of dissolving the paper. After many hours he retrieves seventy-nine scraps from thirty-five nests and later assembles parts of the writing. One corner bears the page number 231, identifying it as a leaf from Journal 22—the volume whose final pages the Index indicates contain material about Ketterley.

The recovered scraps include approximately thirty entries covering the period Piranesi had designated 15 November to 20 December 2012. Their longest entry is titled “The events of 15 November 2012.” This convergence of catalogue references, missing pages, a surviving page number, and fragments recovered from gull nests shows how the Index functions within a larger documentary puzzle. It does not restore the lost writing on its own; instead, it makes the fragments legible as parts of a particular journal and period.

Significance

The Index begins as a method for managing information, but its value changes as its entries conflict with Piranesi’s present understanding. Its references point to absent volumes, its older hand records a version of his writing he cannot remember, and its page numbers identify a gap in the physical journals. The catalogue is reliable enough to guide investigation yet insufficient to explain the history it documents. It provides directions without guaranteeing comprehension.

That tension makes the Index a material counterpart to Piranesi’s uncertainty about his own identity. The erased 2s on the journal spines and the surviving references to their former numbers show that the archive has been changed, not simply forgotten. Meanwhile, the Index’s abundant record of The Other fails to mention Matthew Rose Sorensen, reminding Piranesi that quantity and completeness are not the same as an answer. A system built to separate important entries from ephemeral ones becomes an accidental witness to the instability of both memory and the documents meant to preserve it.