Chapter 131

AFTERWORD Where Your Eyes Don’t Go Good to see you again. Jin here. Once again, over a year has passed since the last volume was published. I know, I know, so worthless of me every time…seriously… Sorry (half shouted)!! So, hopefully you have enjoyed Kagerou Daze VIII -Summer Time Reload-. There might be some brash rebel kids who decided to read this afterword ahead of the book, so I’ll try not to comment on the story too much. But let’s go into it a little anyway. I know I’ve written things like “This was really hard to write; I started having bloody stools” in every afterword so far, but—as expected—writing this one was this awesomely, crushingly difficult ordeal. Bloody stools weren’t the half of it—something even redder (?) came out, actually. First off, did you see how large the character lineup is for this? It’s huge. Like, a whole, whole lot (he said, regressing back into kindergartener mode). The writing for this series started briskly enough—“I called them a gang,” I thought, “so I ought to give it ten members”—but starting around Volume 2, it was like “Whoa, this is a crowd.” In this one, they were all here, sidling up to each other. That was, like, “Gaaaahhhhhhh!!” (How do you like my novelist’s vocabulary there?) It was difficult to narrow my focus to a single protagonist in this volume as a result, but I think Seto put in a pretty good effort. Seto’s ability to peek into the internal voices of people is—in the realm of Kagerou Daze, a look into young people’s encounters and the stories behind them—kind of a joker card. Thanks to that, he’s a character I’ve deliberately avoided digging too deeply into. But imagine! Him thinking of himself as a wild card…Neat (back into kindergartener mode). It’s kind of funny to think about, but even though I wrote this, I still feel like I don’t really understand these guys. “They’re your characters!” you might protest. And you’re right. But I really don’t feel that I created them at all. It’s like I was in a constant conversation with them as I wrote. I expended a lot of effort getting to know them, and I had to think about what kinds of things they were thinking about the whole way. The result, I suppose you could say, is Kagerou Daze. Pretty funny story, really. Anyway, this volume is the concluding novel of Kagerou Daze. That long, long summer has reached one of its potential closes. As a lot of you know, way back in the day, I released a number of musical tracks on the Net under the Kagerou Project umbrella. These Kagerou Daze novels got their start when my publisher, listening to these tracks, suggested that I should put out a book. I leaped at the offer at the time—I’ll get to weave my tale in a book! I can’t believe it!—but the writing process after that was a long procession of suffering. I couldn’t write well. I couldn’t bring across my ideas correctly. I received a lot of criticism. I was discouraged. And at one point, I was so distraught that I wasn’t sure I could continue with it. That I was able to write up to this point anyway is thanks to all my readers saying “I like Kagerou Daze.” It might sound really cheesy when I put it like this, but they gave me a lot of courage. It’s thanks to them that I wanted to keep going with this story—no matter how much people looked down on me or treated me as stupid. I couldn’t thank all of you enough. And the only way I can make up the difference is with this series itself. Once again, thank you very, very much. …Oops! I’m almost out of space. One more thing, then. All the awkward “heroes” of this story are also the friends of the awkward you reading this book. So I hope you’ll hang out with them somewhere else again. I’m sure they’d love to see you. I’ll see all of you again somewhere. Thanks very much for reading. JIN (Shizen no Teki-P) …And with all that pretend-serious stuff out of the way, guess what (said the kindergartener)? I’m already thinking about the next novel. Oh, not Kagerou Daze, I mean. The story of a new Mekakushi-dan. Encountering new friends is always such a fresh and exciting experience, isn’t it? I’ll have to introduce them to you sometime soon. Like, maybe next summer, for example.