†Afterword†
GREETINGS to all my readers in North America and abroad! It’s a pleasure to meet you for the first time. I’m the author, Sato Fumino. I’m a workingwoman who loves reading, movies, manga, and anime. Thank you very much for picking up a copy of Beast † Blood. I have published eight different stories in Japan so far, but Beast † Blood is my first work published in English.
I have loved and adored works of science fiction ever since my father introduced them to me as a child. Of course I have Japanese favorites, but I also became engrossed in reading American science fiction classics such as the masterpieces by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Ray Bradbury, and I love Star Wars and Star Trek (old school, I know).
Incidentally, science fiction isn’t a very popular genre among young Japanese women compared to contemporary romances, historical romances, and fantasy.
You probably can’t classify Beast † Blood as a hard science fiction story, since there’s no space travel or robots. But I wanted to tell a story young women would enjoy by incorporating my favorite science fiction elements, including an interspecies romance, foreign worlds, and fictional dinosaurs and beasts.
Beast Bloods are my original Near-human creation. They are a species with a long life span, and they experience time differently from humans. They are beautiful, powerful, and pure. But it’s that same purity that makes them fragile.
What kind of love would come from a Beast Blood encountering their one and only lifelong mate, and what if that mate turned out to be human?
The pair’s eating habits and sex lives would surely differ, and a stable, mundane lifestyle might actually prove a burden on the Beast Blood, whose days are normally full of danger and excitement.
The storyline for Beast † Blood took off as I contemplated those things.
While crafting a plot about rains that fall only before daybreak, fortified cities illuminating deserted wildernesses, and flowers glowing in the night, I envisioned a gorgeous Beast Blood running through those settings.
And then there’s the heroine. Compared to the story’s hero, Zelaide, Euphemia might lean more toward the ordinary, if we had to classify her. Nevertheless, I made sure to never have her stray from the “woman who keeps marching forward” heroine archetype, a woman who never betrays what she earnestly believes in.
The scene at the beginning where she chooses death rather than submit to being raped by gangsters might be too much of a traditionally Japanese ethos, but the Japanese of the past were a people who chose honorable deaths at all costs.
Of course, there is nothing good about that, but I wanted to suspend an alluring space in time, in the final moments of radiance exuded by a person who makes the extreme decision to end their life and deny others their victory. That brilliant light is exactly what captivated Zelaide.
Beast † Blood is a tale about the love, trials, and adventures shared by two people whose lives entwined at that very moment. And there is still plenty of story left to tell. I hope everyone overseas will enjoy seeing how their adventures play out! Until next time!
2019. 2.28
Sato Fumino