Wow, it’s been ages. We haven’t seen each other since that horror talk show in Shibuya. That’s almost ten years, right?
What do you want to order? Yeah, I’ll have an iced coffee, black. What, you want the same thing? Ha-ha. I remember when we always had iced coffees at meetings and joked about how easy we were to order for.
Yeah, I’m freelancing. Fortunately, my connections from when I was an editor have kept me in business. I’m not working on anything paranormal anymore, though. I mean, there’s not much money there. I’m not into horror like you are. They just happened to assign me to that department.
But it’s nice to hear from someone I used to work with.
Don’t be so formal. I’m not a client anymore. If anything, you have more experience in this genre than I do.
After that? It was a mess. Management suddenly told us we had to stop printing. Well, there had been rumors it might happen. The magazine wasn’t selling well after the chief editor changed, and by the end, the whole department had shrunk to just three people. I’m sorry for calling you so suddenly with the bad news back then. And right when you were working on a piece for us…
The three of us quit when they dissolved the editorial department. I doubt any of the other departments would have wanted someone from a discontinued publication. I’d already been considering freelancing anyway. The other editor, O, found a job at a different publisher soon after he quit. I still see him. He sometimes has odd jobs for me. You never met him or the other editor, did you?
The chief editor? Oh, you mean S. I wonder what he’s doing now. I have no idea. We weren’t close. S quit first and never said anything to the rest of us.
I can say this now, but I never liked him. Why? Well, it comes down to editorial philosophy, but O and I wanted to make more like an entertainment magazine, while S was more focused on factual reporting.
The element of reality is what makes paranormal stuff fun, of course. Readers want real stories, not fiction. But when it comes down to it, what they really want is entertainment. I think it’s okay to embellish real events, so long as the readers enjoy them.
But S wasn’t like that. He wanted evidence or reliable sources for every project or draft. But how can you get evidence when you’re dealing with ghosts and aliens, right? We can’t know if our informants’ stories are real, and there’s not enough time to do detailed interviews for each story. It wasn’t like we were writing for a newspaper. But S wouldn’t accept anything that couldn’t be proved. I don’t know how many times we argued over it.
But we were adults and S was the chief, so in the end, we did what he wanted. But there were a bunch of times when O and I secretly disagreed with him. That’s one of the reasons we were so happy to have you around. You always delivered such high-quality work. All three of us trusted you. That, at least, we agreed on. We rarely ever had to ask you to redo a story.
You’re kind of a rarity in this industry, you know.
I learned a lot from you about perspective and story structure.
Come to think of it, there’s actually one more thing I can’t forgive S for. I just said that the department dissolved and everyone quit, but I asked someone working in HR at the time, and they told me a different story.
Apparently, the whole thing started because S declared one day that he was going to resign. When upper management heard that, they suspended the magazine. I don’t know how much of that is true, but if it is, then it would make a lot more sense that they suddenly stopped publication right in the middle of the fiscal year.
Well, whatever. If he wanted to quit, that’s his business. But I wish he’d explained the situation to O and me. Just sending all your work to the remaining employees on your last day and saying good-bye is unacceptable. Anyway, was suspended, so there wasn’t really anything to hand off or take over for any of us.
What? The archive is a mess? Ha-ha. Sorry about that. That’s our fault. I feel bad for whoever had to come in after us. But it’s good to hear that the magazine is still going, even if it’s just irregular supplementary issues.
Sorry. I got all nostalgic and started babbling. We’re talking about today, right?
Hey, I see you’re using a tape recorder. Yeah, I know it’s an app on your phone, but I still say “tape recorder” out of habit. Ha-ha.
I’m usually the one asking the questions, so I feel a little weird being interviewed. Have you been recording this whole time? Hey, no fair. Please keep that first part about the editorial department off the record.
Yeah, I remember. I went out there once for a report. I can’t recall what I was there for… Oh yeah, that’s right. There was a tunnel. We spent all night investigating a paranormal phenomenon. But nothing happened, so we just published a picture with a hazy orb and ran that.
Magazines on the paranormal were pretty popular at the time. I actually enjoyed the job quite a bit. One of the guys who worked on the magazine before me said he wrote an article on a religious facility around that area. It was a different time back then, huh?
What you told me over the phone surprised me. That newbie you mentioned is pretty sharp. I never realized that mountain was such a paranormal hot spot. But now that you point it out, I think you’re right.
Like I said before, it’s embarrassing to admit, but after the higher-ups decided to stop publication, everybody was just focused on what they’d do next. All we did before leaving was stuff the back issues, data, and other paper documents into boxes, then cram everything into the archive.
When we left, our files, project data from freelancers, and research notes were still on our computers. We never transferred them back to the company to hold on to. I bet O did the same. I still have it all. When you contacted me, I went back through it for the first time in ages.
I just glanced through everything, but I found a story on that was never published. Something from—as your newbie would say—the east side of the mountain, the other side from the dam.
Unfortunately, the story never made it to the draft stage, so I’ll have to relate it based on my notes and what I remember.