A work of science-fiction criticism that closely reads Ryū Mitsuse's One Hundred Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights. Taking the origin of a scripture cited in the afterword to the former Hayakawa Bunko edition as its starting point, it examines why Ashura King is portrayed as a girl and the layers of invention embedded in the novel.

A critical essay tracing the figure of Ashura King in One Hundred Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights through a mystery left in an afterword to an earlier edition.

An SF critical essay on Volumes V through VII of Stephen King's Dark Tower series. Taking account of the debate over its later volumes and ending, it reads the Dark Tower as an image of an absent center and unreachable truth, and considers the process through which the work keeps expanding.

A critical essay that rereads the later Dark Tower novels as a story of an unreachable center.