“The chamber dissolved in a row where all the colours of everyone’s voices clashed and mixed into an indistinguishable brown cloud. Thaniel looked down at his own shorthand. It was a bad idea to take an exact transcript of a fight. It looked crass if it got into dispatches. You were supposed to summarize, softly. He thought about translating it as the fall of Japanese modernism, which was overdramatic, and wrote, ’the gentlemen continue to disagree.”
