I had quit writing for three years. If you asked me why, my answer would be that I was simply tired after spending the previous three years hard at work updating my mecha fantasy novel on Naro every day and barely getting any ratings or reviews. It felt like my journey had taken me very far.
My creative background
My first work was a manga. I got a magazine award as well as an editor, but things didn’t really work out after that. So I ended up helping out at home while learning to use a computer and looking for ways to get back into writing.
Next, I tried my hand at visual novels. Tsukihime had already come out and Higurashi was on the way at the time. I didn’t join a team, instead choosing to draw and write everything on my own. I made two games called Mahō Shōjo Sakana (“Magical Girl Sakana”) and Kokuto no Ken (“Sword of the Capital”), but, well...they didn’t sell much. Still, this was when I really started writing. I had to write a lot because visual novels need megabytes of text. I wrote, drew, scripted, took the finished work to Comiket, and didn’t sell many copies. Such was my creative cycle at the time. This was when I met my good friend Arai Azuki.
Having learned to write novels, albeit visual ones, I then contributed to an anthology of novels and ended up making friends with lots of other people who liked writing. And where do writing enthusiasts go? That’s right—to Naro.
There, I began writing a novel titled Saenai Kōkōsei no Boku ga Oddoai no Bishōjo Madōshi ni Densetsu Robo no Sōjūshi toshite Isekai Shōkan Sareta Ken (“I’m a Boring High School Student Who Got Summoned by a Beautiful Sorceress with Heterochromia to Pilot a Legendary Mech in a Different World”) which began with a silly conversation I once had had with a friend, but, well...it wasn’t popular. I think it had some readers, but nobody wrote their thoughts or left ratings.
If you spend a long time writing new chapters for an interesting story every day, readers are sure to come to you, I thought. No such luck. I still think it gets interesting from the middle of the story, but it seems mecha doesn’t do very well in light novels. Still, give it a read if you have time. Although I’ve yet to hear anyone say they’ve read all 750 episodes of it.
And so, after three years of daily updates and consistently low readership, I lost motivation. My future looked bleak to me at this point: I imagined I would idle away the rest of my life.
My return to work and starting to write TenYuu
Why did I come back to Naro? Because a VTuber who goes by the name Zumomo Saito tweeted about completing her playthrough of Kokuto no Ken, thus introducing it to her audience. People wondered whether the developer still worked on anything, and though I didn’t feel like going back to making visual novels, I wanted to write something on Naro that Zumomo would enjoy. And so I wrote TenYuu, short for Tensei Seijo wa Yūjō Endo wo Mezasu! ~Fujoshi nanoni Otome Geemu no Sekai ni Tensei shichaimashita ga Shin’yū Kyara to Ichaicha Yuri Shinagara Akuyaku Reijō to Habatsu Kōsō Shitemasu~ (“A Reincarnated Saint Aims for a Friendship Ending! ~I’m a Yaoi Fan Who Got Reincarnated into the World of an Otome Game but I Go All Yuri on My Best Friend While Engaging in Factional Conflict with a Villainess~”).
It had a ludicrous title at first: “Everyone’s Dream Girl Laughs Like a Cat on Catnip.” In the early days, the page view count stayed pretty low, but the protagonist stood out, and that made me feel rather positive about the work.
Japanese Twitter has a popular tag that takes you to novels written by the person who retweeted your post, and I put the early TenYuu in there. And what do you know—a fellow Naro writer, Kuchinawa Sakura, read it and praised it highly. Then it saw praise from Mojizuka, Nishikawa Asahi, and other Naro writers who had designed this popular tag, and the view count ticked up. Then Mojizuka suggested I change the title, which is how it became the long one it is today. And all of a sudden the view count exploded, reaching double the previous value. People began to write their thoughts on the work. TenYuu was my first novel to get on the Top By Genre list. Seeing regular comments from fans, I was suddenly filled with motivation. At present TenYuu has over ten thousand ratings and some hardcore fans, which makes me very happy.
The conception of Grand Sumo Villainess
Having realized long titles are an effective strategy on Naro, I began coming up with such titles and posting them on Twitter as practice. And as I enjoyed myself posting lots of them, I realized something: what makes these titles so effective is that they tell you what the whole work is about at a glance, and that coincides with the idea of keeping your sales pitch concise. I stuck with the practice, feeling that it was building my planning skills as well. And after some time, I posted the following title: Sumo Lady ~When I Was Slapped in the Face by a Saint I Remembered That I Was in the Sumo Club in My Past Life and Now I Want to Feed the Abandoned Cat Prince Chanko!~.
Then I changed it to “Grand Sumo,” added “Villainess” and “Dosukoi Dosukoi!” and it became the full Japanese title of this work. It’s not often you have the title ready before writing the novel itself. I wasn’t planning to write it at first, but it did sound interesting. And as I went over ideas for it in my mind—such as “Purification Salt” and lines like “Open the banzuke”—I came to think it was worth a shot and started writing. I still updated TenYuu every day, but now I was making daily updates for Grand Sumo Villainess as well.
The new novel met with a positive reception and climbed the ratings. Namako@Tadanogyo wrote a review for it, and all kinds of people expressed their support as the novel gained in popularity, until it climbed to seventh place on the Top By Genre list in Isekai Romance. Wow, this really caught on, I thought, as I concluded the story within a hundred thousand Japanese characters. Continuing to write it was an option, but I still had TenYuu to work on, plus this whole novel was like a one-liner, so I judged it would be more enjoyable for the readers if it had a conclusion.
Blowing up on Twitter
Seeing a good response to Grand Sumo Villainess, I was considering writing another novel similarly focused on a single topic as I continued working on TenYuu. Then, on the 17th of October, 2020, a Twitter user named Yakitorii introduced Grand Sumo Villainess on her account, causing the novel to go viral.
My good friend Yoyogi told me something insane was happening with the novel’s view count on Naro. Thirty thousand views in one hour—the numbers didn’t feel real. It got its own page on Togetter, a Twitter aggregator website. News websites made articles about it. It was crazy. As a result, the rankings on Naro shifted so much it took first place in Isekai Romance and seventh place overall. The experience taught me how amazing it is to blow up on Twitter.
I started getting work inquiries. The very first one I got on Naro was about a manga adaptation. Likely finding the novel to greatly stir the imagination, many readers had been asking for either a manga or an anime based on Grand Sumo Villainess. As a writer, I would rather be adapting something into the book format instead, so I put that offer on hold. The next inquiry was from Earth Star: they offered to turn Grand Sumo Villainess into a book.
At this point I was worried whether it was okay to accept both offers, and have the publisher that offered it make a manga adaptation while also making it into a book at Earth Star. As I honestly voiced my concerns to the editor who had made the first offer, they gave me the helpful advice of speaking to the publisher who offered to make a book adaptation about making a manga too. And when I brought up the subject with Earth Star, the reply was, “We’ll speak to our manga adaptation team.” It was nice to have the synergy that comes with one publisher making two different adaptations for you.
And so it was decided Earth Star would be making both a book and a manga adaptation for me. Thus, Grand Sumo Villainess began to take form. Yuna Kagesaki, a veteran manga artist with anime-adaptation experience, was assigned to the manga project. Incidentally, Yuna Kagesaki really took a liking to the source material and has made storyboards for two chapters extremely quickly. She’s making a superb adaptation filled with passion.
As for the book adaptation, the illustrator for it was Murakami Yuichi, whose contribution has been simply wonderful. I like Floortje’s cute character design, as well as how stout Yustin looks.
I never thought I would experience the so-called Naro Dream, so I’m still bewildered by the whole thing. I believe I am only so fortunate thanks to the support of everyone who loved Grand Sumo Villainess.
It was the constant support of the sumo enthusiast Sanbon, the cheerful support of Tomori Rinko, the helpful Let’s Read streams by Ikagaya Saito, the emphatic thoughts regarding this novel left by Rikudo Shūichiro, the writing and drawing assistance by Tosei, and support from various other people that brought Grand Sumo Villainess to where it is today. You have my heartfelt gratitude. Thank you.
Let us meet again in Grand Sumo Villainess Z ~My Fluffy Find in a Burning Elven Forest~ (temporary title). Dosukoi dosukoi!