Afterword
WELL, THIS IS IT—the final afterword I’ll ever get to write for The Mimosa Confessions.
To be completely honest, I feel like I’ve already written everything I could ever want to say into the text itself this time around, so I really don’t have that much gas left in the tank at this point to give any additional thoughts or insights. All I feel right now is a sense of relief, like a student who made it safely through to graduation.
Actually, perhaps that’s a better and more fitting way to look at this book than as a conclusion or an ending—try to think of it more as a graduation for this world and these characters instead. Yes, there will only ever be five volumes of The Mimosa Confessions, but that doesn’t mean their stories won’t go on beyond the words I’ve written here. They’ll all go on to finish college, and look for jobs, and start their careers… Sure, they might just be fictional characters, but they still have their own lives to live, don’t they? So I guess my point is: It’s not that the universe of these books ends here, but that I’m simply stepping away from the author’s seat and leaving the rest to the realm of imagination.
It’s been three years now since the first of these five volumes came out in July of 2021, so of course it’s going to feel sad to say goodbye. But again, I’ve said literally all I could possibly say with these characters, and I have no regrets in that regard. It’s to the point now that even if someone put a gun to my head and tried to force me to write another volume, I’d just have to throw my hands up and say I’ve done all I can do.
I suppose if I were to write some sort of follow-up story, though, I’d probably want to make it something purely comfy and slice-of-life. No discrimination, no suffering—just Sakuma and Ushio having a nice night in, watching some movies, playing some games, maybe ordering a pizza, then fighting over who ate the last of the ice cream, before whoever did buys a cake on their way home from work to apologize… Just something totally run-of-the-mill and ordinary like that. I think that’d be nice. I’ll probably never actually write that story, mind you (I think it’s most elegant to just let the tale end here), but it would make me very happy as an author if you, the readers, kept this world and its characters in your thoughts and remembered them fondly, if only for a little while.
Now, on to the acknowledgments.
To my editor, Hamada-sama: I feel like you’ve been letting me get away with writing whatever I want for quite a while now. I dearly pray that we still have at least a few more solid books in us—and that you’ll treat me to a nice dinner too sometime, if you don’t mind. Here’s hoping we can continue working together for many years to come.
To KUKKA-sensei: You have my eternal gratitude for gracing these humble pages with your beautiful artwork for five volumes straight. To this day, I still have the cover art for Book One framed and hanging on my wall, right where my eyes can see it whenever I turn around from my writing desk. All of your illustrations have been astounding, though—and I still remember being so happy to hear that you were excited to draw these characters when I was first drafting up the initial plans for this series. I can’t thank you enough for sticking it out with me to the very end.
And to all of my faithful readers: Thank you as well for coming along for the ride with me these past three years. It’s all thanks to your passionate support that I was able to see it through. Reading your thoughts and impressions over the course of the series has always given me the motivation to push forward. Thank you also for all of the kind words and fan mail and such. I’m sure there were certain parts of these books that might have been hard or even painful for some of you to read. But if you can take that pain with you into the real world and turn it into empathy and compassion for your fellow human beings, well…as an author, I think that’s about all I could possibly ask for.
May we meet again—in another time, and another place.
MEI HACHIMOKU
JUNE 2024