It is May 2nd in Kyoto, western Japan, once great capital of this once great land. Passing a shanty town of cardboard boxes and blue tarpaulin under a decorative road bridge by the side of the Kamo river that runs to the east of the town, DF Lewis spots someone he thinks he knows.

DF LEWIS: (hunches into the stinking, tight confines of the box) Hertzan Chimera, my old buddy. We all thought you were dead.

HERTZAN CHIMERA: I have been fishing the river all day and am exhausted. Please go away and leave me to die.

DF LEWIS: Not before I have bought you a jar of warm sake and shared a few thoughts with you. It's been such a long time.

HERTZAN CHIMERA: There's not a bar on this side of town that hasn't barred Hertzan Chimera. Can you not come back another day?

DF LEWIS: My flight leaves tonight - there is no other chance. It's good to see you but I can't talk here, these shanty towns bring down my spirits. Let's away to the Philosopher's Walk and I'll let you share my last ten years.

HERTZAN CHIMERA: You're right, you're right.

The philosopher's walk is a legendary walkway by the old canal that leads north out of Kyoto. It is a tourist trap in the summer but in the Spring, only Japanese families frequent it's cherry-blossom-tree lined splendour.

DF LEWIS: At my time of life, ten years, although a rounded area of time, is a short angular chunk - shorter than that urchin playing in the gutter where I found you today, dear Hertzan. I mentioned ten years for devilish reasons because, as a whole, it cannot easily be encapsulated creatively for DFL as a writer. It began as a continuation of that story-a-day syndrome I'd be suffering from after my first publication in 1986, mainly Horror and Dark Manicstream, then gradually slowed, grew misshapen, more textured, more absurdist as well as surreal. Then it ground to a halt in 1999. A Sartrian mid-life crisis for which I'm still undergoing self-treatment. In the last three years I've only written solo stories as monthly homework for a small local writer's group in Clacton-on-Sea. So, yes, mentioned the arbitrary ten years because it was some sort of oblique reference to unsummarisable nothingness and change (both of which are good for you, I suggest). Got you listening on false unrepresentative pretences, old friend. You expected the unexpected, no doubt, anyway.

HERTZAN CHIMERA: I believe you have been working on a couple of novels? Or was it a collection of your 3000 stories published to date, correct me if I'm wrong.

DF LEWIS: No, I've not been working on any novels as such. More story accretions which I've now abandoned. I haven't got the skill plain and simple. I have often tried to write as a perpetrator of extended readabilities but end up as DFL every time! Always him turning up like a bad penny. My alternate world novella 'Agra Aska' written in the early eighties and published in 1998 is the nearest I'll ever get to a novel. A retrospective book of my work called 'Weirdmonger' (some 60 stories from the 1500 I've had published since 1986) is due out shortly.

HERTZAN CHIMERA: Can we get off this trail, I am dying of thirst. There's a tea house up ahead, it's expensive but they know how to serve sake.

DF and HC make their way to a nearby tea house where HC hasn't yet been barred. They settle down and, after ordering warm sake and cracking each other's ceramic cup, a new life seeps into HC's eyes.

HERTZAN CHIMERA: DF, I love your early stuff from the sixties, whatever happened to that?

DF LEWIS: I haven't shown anyone the things I wrote on those old student days. The world was quite normal then. Only in hindsight has it mutated into the Sixties. I'm not sure how you know my work from that time - perhaps as part of a Jungian Collective Unconscious, you've been tapping my hinterland! You must have done, to say you love my stuff from then. Loads and loads of poems, many I can't fathom now. Also 'The Egnisomicon' which I co-wrote - a Blakean Necronomicon, I suppose. And I founded The Zeroist Group in 1967 for which we received a University grant. Happenings, daubings, crazinesses of drama - all of which perhaps pre-figured my current obsession with Nothingness and Anonymity and Collaboration and so forth.

HERTZAN CHIMERA: (the sake arrives, perfectly warm) You know, one of the delicacies of this place is warm custard, just cooled enough so that there's a thick skin on it

DF LEWIS: That's the one food I can honestly say I hate, Hertzan. Anyway, as I was saying, it all comes back to that Jungian thingie - tapping the parthenogenetic universe. Pretentious stuff. But you don't mind, do you? Nobody else is listening. I suppose my love of music is very much part of this wordpool (did you use that word earlier?) - and I love 'classical' music from the 13th to the 21st century - which is really all serious music in the Western hemisphere. Tuneful and din-copated alike. I can't be focussed on one subsection of the 20th century like some people are. Go into a record shop and they have many rooms full of ephemeral stuff from the present day and a small cupboard for Nine hundred years! I love big concepts. The more fingers in the wordpool the better…

HERTZAN CHIMERA: Wordhunger. I use this now like I would use an old zither to crank out a no-longer-familiar tune. Whatever happened to that after our first abortive attempt?

DF LEWIS: Wordhunger? Well, of course, you were a valuable part of that Internet collaborative group for fiction writing from 1999 to 2002. We've since failed to revive it but not given up hope. The Internet is a bit like a sky for heavier-than-air human creativity - which reminds me of that airport out in Kyoto bay here - an aircraft being a story in the internet. A plane waiting for take-off so that I can reach back to where I belong … assuming that the Krakens in the sea round here don't engulf the runway with their huge mountings. Which reminds me - no more fanciful broodings with you, I'm afraid - I must fly.