Hello, everyone! I’m Asaura, the author of Lycoris Recoil’s original story and this book!
It’s been a surprise for me that we’d end up with this afterword since, you see, this isn’t what I had originally written! At first, I wrote about a certain interesting event that actually happened, and it caused quite a stir among some apparently very important people… Sorry, sorry, forget about that! Nothing happened! I was only joking, ha-ha.
We Japanese are, after all, a kind and gentle people with a strong desire to follow social norms. Books published in our peaceful country are perfectly safe, with reliably peaceful, beautiful afterwords… This is the reality we must believe in for the sake of everyone’s happiness, and the job of writers is to uphold this belief… Tee-hee!
On a more serious note, what surprised me the most about this book was the tightness of the deadline.
When I was told the book would be published in September, it hit me that other writers I knew whose books were coming out the same month had already pretty much finished writing their stories. So, I was starting at the time the draft should have already been complete…but, well, miracles can happen…
I had to adjust my writing style to make this work as a novel, but what helped was that I already had all these ideas to roll with—plots we didn’t get to feature in the anime or ones that we didn’t get to explore in depth. And so, I wrote about ordinary days at Café LycoReco and what Takina and Chisato do there all day.
I might have also used Director Adachi’s deceptive (?) teaser for Lycoris Recoil, where he’d removed all gunfight elements from his original draft, probably written a bit too eagerly, as a concept for this novel…
In the end, it turned out a bit like a bag of mixed snacks, with all sorts of flavors… There’s a bit of everything in this story! The brilliant thing about the Lycoris, and the café crew in particular, is that they can feature in any genre. So…I put them in all sorts of genres here in this very novel. I hope you enjoyed reading it!
Now time for thanks!
First, a big thank-you to Imigimuru the illustrator, who agreed to illustrate the novel despite the insane schedule! You’re awesome, Imigimuru!
Next, my dear editor, Miya. Thank you for pushing the deadline for me as far as possible!
My heartfelt thanks also goes to everyone at the publishing house, Director Adachi, and the rest of the anime project team! I know you’ve worked so hard!
I’d also like to thank P. Kashiwada and all the other VIPs from a certain big company… Er, you know what I’m thanking you for… And apologies for causing you trouble with my, um, little joke… Ahem.
Finally, thank you, dear readers, for reading not only the novel but even the afterword! I’m sooo very happy that you made it so far!
I hope we’ll meet again on the pages of another book. That’s all for now! Take care, everyone!
—Asaura