「The Hunt for Priceless Tears」
The Importance of Archiving and Digitalization

What would you do if you tried to find something that is basically non-existent on the internet? What if you have searched the depths of the internet, wading through the old Geocities sites and Japan's National Diet Library's archive for a specific piece of work? When nothing came to fruition, would you lay down and say "There is nothing else that I can do?".

Many might've just stopped there and called it a day but, where there is a will, there is a way.

For the sake of making the pages equal, I decided to look up any information on the plot for Priceless Tears so the pages follow to the Wiki's standards.

Looking through the Japanese internet was equally arduous, looking up the name only lead to people asking about the ability from the series and wondering what it can do. Looking it up with the name of the writer did not help either, wading through the many articles there wasn't much. However, there was a slight salvation to the bad streak.

A few days after the discussion, my friend hit me up and we decided to call through Discord to find the book. The first obstacle was unexpected however, it was the signal inside the library which is atrocious to put it lightly. At this point however, I was determined to get something out of this trip. At first we couldn't find the book at all until my friend found it in the shelves. Unfortunately, there were several volumes and not only that, these books were the original Meiji-era copy so they were fragile.

We then decided to talk to one of the librarians who gladly helped locate the book, after some amount of broken Japanese, we got through and we found the exact page where the story was located.

It felt like looking through a treasure trove but we came here for exactly one thing and that's when it was a little bit late when I realized that my friend had only took the picture of the synopsis. The other pages are those of other plays from the same edition of Kabuki Shinpō. Due to the book being fragile, we decided that it's better to leave things this way rather than risk the book being further damaged but, at the very least we had the synopsis which was better than zero.

The Synopsis

At last, we have the synopsis. Again I forgot something very important at this stage and that is to look for a translator. A translator who understands the Kyūjitai kanji which was used during the Meiji-era. During this time I spent the time transcribing the text to preserve what we have at the very least. This was how it went for the next few months, the synopsis still in the back of my head and I couldn't do much about it.

Someone had pinged me on the Bungō Stray Dogs Wiki Discord that they were able to do translations, immediately the first thing I had in mind was to pull out the script for Priceless Tears. They were very kind and was very much happy to help which was a massive relief. After almost a solid year, we finally have a picture of what's going on.

It honestly still feels unreal and I am greatly shortening this entire search. I hope that one day the full script will be transcribed online so that it's easier to understand the greater picture.