Takeshi Fumimota the Message Carrier

[木原善彦]

This is the first e-meil I send to the list. I am a Japanese graduate 
student studying Pynchon's fictions.
Here is a new topic, I suppose, although I have not read all the e-mails 
stored in the archive.
As a native Japanese speaker, I have always felt the strageness of the 
family name of Takeshi. I know no one named "Fumimota", nor can I find 
anyone in the local telephone directory whose family name is "Fumimota".
So TRP must have coined it. The probable etymology is as follows:
"FUMI" is a rather formal and old-fashioned Japanese word for "a letter", or 
"a message". "MOTA" does not make sense in this form, but probably it 
derives from "MOTTA", which is a noun-modifying case of the verb "MOTU", 
whose main meaning is "to have" but could include "to carry", "to take 
something with one".
Then this will make sense. For we can now see it fits in the pattern of the 
recurrent appearance of message carriers in _Vineland_, beginning with the 
"carrier pigeons . . . each bearing a message" (VL 3) through DL's "message 
from beyond" (VL 122) and many others.
What do you think, y'all? Or, does the name bring anything else to the ear 
of a native speaker of English who do not speak Japanese?
Incidentally, those influencial Pynchon scholars on the List, please feel 
free to use this information *along with my name*, because such mention may 
help me find a job at some university in Japan where it is becoming 
increasingly difficult to find one.
Thank you in advance.