It’s been far too long. I’ve got to start things off by apologizing for making you endure an agonizing wait between volumes. I’m so sorry. I can’t apologize enough. I honestly can’t even think of any excuses; this is purely the result of chronic laziness and my stupid, stupid brain. For everyone going “I wasn’t exactly waiting” but who still picked up this volume, thank you.
This is not the first time I’ve been at a loss as to how to handle the afterword. I never have much to say about my own work and prefer to spend as much time as possible talking about unrelated things, but it’s not like I lead a particularly interesting life and definitely don’t have a stock of anecdotes to share with you—in fact, I’m pretty confident I could tell you my life story in less than fifteen minutes.
My stance on afterwords was explained by the Hong Kong mystery novelist Chan Ho-Kei (best known for The Borrowed) far better than I could ever manage, so allow me to quote him here. After explaining that he never intended to write one at all, he said:
✦ ✦ ✦
I believe that once a work has been “birthed” by its writer, the text takes on its own life, and readers are free to see and receive whatever they want from it, each person embarking on a unique journey. Rather than having the author go on at length about what is or isn’t there, why not allow the reader to experience it in person?
But after saying all that, he then proceeds to give a pretty detailed breakdown of his own work and what led to him writing it, likely because the work in question is a clear attempt to capture the tumultuous history of its setting.
Meanwhile, The Intuition of Haruhi Suzumiya contains three stories of very different lengths, but absolutely no important societal themes or even any particularly complex portraits of the human experience. “Random Numbers” in particular is something I came up with in the bath, while thinking about how RSA codes work. But coming up with ideas or solutions to the so-called shower thoughts is apparently pretty common, and you see a lot of stories along those lines. There are many theories about why baths stimulate your mind. But I think the key is that beyond early childhood, most of us wash ourselves without the need for conscious participation. Nobody’s sitting there thinking, After I’m done with my left arm, I’ll move on to the right, then my back, chest, down to my stomach and my legs, and then I’ll have to dump the hot water from the washbowl all over myself. I imagine most of us do everything from getting undressed to getting out on autopilot. As an aside, my body has been programmed to the point where I automatically go straight to the fridge after getting out of the bath. This is also why we occasionally snap out of it and wonder if we’ve washed our hair yet. But since we aren’t consciously controlling our bodies but turning our minds off and letting our bodies fend for themselves, our brains might well mistake this state of affairs for something more alarming. They panic and shoot signals down our neurons, giving our unconscious minds a real workout, and the result is that whatever thoughts were stagnating in our conscious minds get resolved, the answers lobbed in from out of nowhere with a heads-up! I think the same phenomenon is why taking a walk—itself an action requiring little to no thought—is said to be equally effective when you’ve got a lot on the mind. Maybe I should write a paper on it, but if the phenomenon has already been named and analyzed, sorry.
“Seven Wonders Overtime” started with a question from my editor. “Does Haruhi’s school have seven wonders?” And that led to “What seven wonders would Haruhi come up with?” and what would the other characters think about that, and when I ran that simulation through my mind, this story popped out. But I wonder how many schools actually have seven wonders? Unrelated, but when you’re having trouble sleeping, I recommend generating random characters and running them through slapdash plots, and before you know it, you’ll be sound asleep.
“Tsuruya’s Challenge” is a bunch of stuff I’ve always wanted to do all tied up in a single story. Lots of self-quotes and stuff about how Tsuruya talks. I hope all three stories bring a look of joy to your face, whether that be a smile, a smirk, or a grin.
I’d like to express my deepest thanks to everyone involved in producing, distributing, selling, and reading this volume. May we meet again.