Haruto, meanwhile, had seen the anime adaptation of Leviathan Revive turn into a success after being involved with everything from screenwriting to backstory supervision. He was now busy with a whole litany of spinoff projects, and not just season two of the anime. There was the script for the smartphone game, the story for the manga adaptation, his seat at the judges’ table… Add that to his main job of writing novels, and he was more insanely busy than ever before.
Put it all together, and it meant the pair had hardly even had a chance to see each other lately. Having steady work was a great thing, and it wasn’t like Miyako was going to try anything romantic with the happily married Itsuki, but seeing her spend so much of her personal time with other men still gave Haruto a sense of ominous foreboding.
“Well, um, good luck over there.”
He tried to sound as indifferent as possible as he ended the call.
“Phew…”
He sighed in relief, then lifted his face up to find Toki, Kamo, Aoba, and Ui giving him tepid looks. All four of them were well aware of how Haruto and Miyako’s more-than-friends, less-than-lovers relationship had been dragging on for years.
“Sure is tough being a popular, handsome writer, isn’t it?”
Kamo slapped him on the shoulder, his voice as grating as ever. Haruto seethed quietly.
“The type of pure love you two have just makes my heart soar,” Aoba deadpanned.
“Haruto, if you can’t bear the loneliness any longer, you can always come to my place, okay?”
Haruto could only reply to Ui’s obvious teasing with a dry laugh.
While Haruto was being teased by Ui and the others, Itsuki Hashima was poutingly returning to his unfinished novel inside Branch Hill’s confinement chamber.
Ever since I Want to Be the Protagonist became a megahit after Miyako convinced him to publish it, Itsuki had published a total of seven one-shot novels in the past three years. He was also continuing the L⇔R Days series for GF Bunko, but given the agent contract he signed, most of his work was now being published by Branch Hill.
In an agent contract, a publisher does more than simply serve as an editor and producer for a work. They function as the author’s agent, negotiating on their behalf with other companies (not just publishers, but game companies, anime producers, the media, and so on), fine-tuning their schedules, and managing them overall so they can work in the best environment possible. The author, in turn, pays a fee to the publisher for this service, but while the contract was signed with Branch Hill, it was really Miyako doing all the agent work, and nearly all the fees Itsuki paid Branch Hill went straight to her.
The seven novels Itsuki had teamed up with Miyako to get published by Branch Hill and other publishers were all decent sellers, but none of them received praise beyond I Want to Be the Protagonist, and the more combative online commentators were already calling him a “one-trick Protagonist pony.” Itsuki had anticipated this, and he too was aware that he hadn’t been able to surpass I Want to Be the Protagonist yet, but it still royally pissed him off.
What’s more, Kazuko Hashima (pen name Nayuta Kani), his wife of one year, was now a mother, and she’d announced that she was taking off from writing for maternity leave. This attracted the raging ire of some of Nayuta’s more diehard fans. They were now involved in daily ugly skirmishes with Itsuki’s own fanbase on social media, anonymous forums, and review sites—enough so that honest reviews and praise for Itsuki were getting buried in the muck.
All the mixed media projects were giving him more and more work distractions. The frustration at not being able to write novels up to his lofty standards was growing by the day. Becoming a husband and father had led to major changes in his life, and he now had a responsibility to keep his family solvent. He’d also started to sweat seeing Haruto become more and more popular, and seeing Miyako become a more and more capable editor by the day. All of it was now attacking him en masse—and so Itsuki had fallen into something of a slump.
“Gaaaaaaaahhhh! I wish every hot author besides me, every shitty editor, every shitty hater of mine—I hope they all catch some weird disease and start spraying multicolored bile from all their goddamn pores!”
Shouting these curses in a dimly lit room where no one could hear him, Itsuki violently pecked away at his keyboard. The completed manuscript that resulted from pouring his rage into the computer was packed with typos and tended toward being a confusing mess most of the time, but:
“Hmm… Well, you’re gonna have to do a lot of fixing in your revision round, but you can go home for today.”
With that, Miyako—after reading through it all—released Itsuki from the underground dungeon.
“Welcome back, Itsuki.”
A little before midnight, Itsuki arrived home for the first time in around three days. His wife Kazuko greeted him with a smile. (It should be noted that she was wearing clothes.)
Itsuki was currently living in a three-bedroom apartment designed for families. He had moved out of his old place nearby Gift Publishing, a tinier joint he had dwelled in since his college days, back three years ago. This new apartment was a ten-minute walk to Itsuki’s family house, which not only allowed his father Keisuke and mother Natsume to come take care of their kid often—it also let Itsuki and Kazuko pick up his little sister Shiori at kindergarten.
“Are you hungry? I’ll warm up some dinner for you. Or did you want to take a bath first?”
Kazuko used to be wholly incapable of household chores or cooking, but ever since she married and moved in with Itsuki, she’d begged Chihiro for guidance and had grown to the point where she had a full set of homemaker skills. Chihiro had given some instruction to the similarly clueless Itsuki as well, but Kazuko’s dedication to the craft gave her a big lead over him.
“I’m gonna go take a shower. But before that…”
Itsuki gently opened the door to the Japanese-style chamber connected to the living room. This was being used as a bedroom, with a baby-sized futon placed in between Itsuki and Kazuko’s, and inside of it, a baby was sleeping peacefully. This was Sora Hashima, age eighteen months—Itsuki and Kazuko’s son. And one look at his face left Itsuki’s soul feeling clean and pure—the fatigue from three days in confinement, the depression at seeing his writing career fail to go the way he wanted, all of it.
If it means protecting my wife and son, I’ll hold out against anything. I gotta keep doing my best for my family.
The words that sprang to Itsuki’s mind were as correct as they were beautiful, something no one should ever be embarrassed to think. But for some reason, they didn’t feel quite right to him. Was this person—Itsuki Hashima the novelist—really ever such a good man?
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