Afterword
SOMETIMES, the more we love and admire someone, the more likely we are to distance ourselves from them so we won’t come away disappointed or heartbroken. And yet, in the vast majority of cases, people won’t know how you feel about them unless you put it into words. This can make establishing intimate relationships with others a tricky business when you aren’t prepared for rejections that might hurt both them and you. But it still feels a little unfair, doesn’t it? Seeing someone’s most heartfelt emotions go unrequited, I mean.
We know deep down that it’s not rational to expect the other person to be a mind reader, and that it’s borderline toxic for the would-be suitor to tell them one thing and expect that they’ll interpret it a different way, when in reality, we should be able to take someone’s word at face value. Still, when a person has such strong emotions that they literally can’t act on them or put them into words, we still empathize with them—we want those wild and uncontrollable feelings to be rewarded, to mean something. This essentially sums up how I felt about the female lead, Akari, throughout the entire duration of writing this novel—more than anything in the world, I wanted her to get her happy ending.
With that said, I’d just like to make a few acknowledgments before I sign off.
To Mr. Hamada, my loyal editor: I know it was an awfully hard road getting this one from the initial planning stages all the way through final revisions, and I’m eternally grateful to you for sticking with me through it all. Something tells me we’ll have another uphill battle on our hands with this next book; I hope I can continue to lean on your guidance.
To KUKKA, my incredible artist: just as I felt like I had no future as a writer, and I should hang up my pen and move to Hokkaido to eke out a meager living on a farm or something, I received your first piece of concept art, and it gave me the inspiration to get my messy manuscript in order and see this thing through to the end. This book probably wouldn’t even exist right now if it weren’t for your jaw-droppingly gorgeous illustrations. Thank you so much for gracing these humble pages with your artwork once again.
To my extremely supportive readers: it’s thanks to all of you that this second novel of mine was able to come to fruition, so thank you for that. And thank you for all of the fan mail and the love you’ve shown me on social media—it really does help keep me going from one day to the next. I have every intention of continuing to write until I physically can’t anymore, so I hope at least some of you will follow my continued works and come along with me to wherever it is I’m going next.
Finally, I’d just like to give a huge shout-out to all of the other incredible people in the editing department, my proofreader, my designer, and everyone at the printing office who had a hand in making this book possible.
And on that note, dear reader, I leave you. Until we meet again.
MEI HACHIMOKU
2020