I'm going to be busy with my own panel, but I would hit up a university library if you can find it. Beaverton's got a pretty sweet library, but university libraries, at least the one at UofO which is pretty dang big, can be pretty extensive with reference. Plus they only have academic reading, too.
Just throwing it out there ^^; I don't know if community colleges have libraries, but I'm sure they must have SOMETHING.
It's not much help, but I hope it does a bit.
Oh! Doing a background story on "Gensomaden Saiyuki" would be good, too! "Dragon Ball" was loosely based off of that story. There's a good book on the original story called "Monkey" that I really enjoyed reading.