In Empire of Signs Barthes  documents Japan while describing it personally and yet still as an observer.
Empire becomes an image of Japan, but it is not the real Japan. His method to obtain this diegesis can be
extracted and used as a format to document any world - including my diegetic unicorn haven.

I hope to create an impression of "The Last Unicorn" world, not a recreation of it. The material signifiers,
whether represented as an image or textually, will be manipulated through juxtaposition or sequence; they
render an emotion, mood, feeling tone. Relationships form and meaning manifests.

*absolute focus on material world

Barthes makes sure to remain diligently descriptive about the images and signs he sees in Japan.
He intently studies and describes the physicality of cities, food, writing. The environment he systematically
details produce such images that they evoke thought; reasoning occurs on the level of emotional affectiveness.

          EXAMPLE:  The Station (p. 38)

The station, a vast organism, which houses the big trains, the urban trains,
the subway, a department store, and whole underground commerce - the
station gives the district this landmark which, according to certain urbanists,
permits the city to signify, to be read. The Japanese station is crossed by a
thousand functional trajectories, from the journey to the purchase, from
the garment to food: a train can open onto a shoe stall.

Barthes description of the materiality of the station produces a feeling of instability and lack of concentration.
They are not randomly selected objects that he chooses to describe, however; they are carefully selected and
included in his text to further the impression of Japan. I also select discriminately the images and text to include
in my widesite. I choose as to produce self-knowledge rather than communication.

*detail

There is a great amount of effort to detail the setting.  These details are focused on the material aspects of this
Japan world.  Detail functions to create the world through text as the reader forms an image from the words.

EXAMPLE: Pachinko (p. 27)
 

You hear only the balls whirring through their channels (the rate of insertion
is very rapid); the parlor is a hive or a factory - the players seem to be
working on an assembly line.

One must take into consideration that Empire is a translation from Barthes' original text in French.  The
English reader encounters hyper-elongated sentence structure replete with hyphens and semicolons.
Barthes and Richard Howard (the translator) enjoy running the syntax long, most likely due to the immense
detail.

EXAMPLE:   Bowing (p.63)
 

According to this schema, the human "person" is that site filled by nature
(or b y divinity, or by guilt), girdled, closed by a social envelope which is
anything but highly regarded: the polite gesture (when it is postulated) is
the sign of respect exchanged from one plenitude to the other, across the
worldly limit (i.e., in spite and by the intermediary of this limit).

Indeed, Barthes chooses to write full sentences; these even bring mood to his writing.
 

Barthes uses repetition to enhance his impression of Japan. The reoccurring face of the actor at the  beginning
and end of Empire was selected with intent. Intention is deduced from its repetition calling for reader to take
notice of  this detail. The repetition creates meaning. This device ties together with the anchor.

*anchor

Empire of Signs at first appears to be a tour of randomly selected locations and events within Japan. The flow
seems aimless, Barthes sections his book with various locations and events that seem to not connect. Soon it is
realized through the use of repetition cleverly placed within the book an anchor that forms his narrative. The
repeating signifier is the rendezvous, depicted as a map. It appears on pages 13, 17, 23, 37.