Chapter 17

Afterword. Hello! Harusono here. Now we not only have a Hirano and Kagiura novel but a Sasaki and Miyano one as well! Kotoko Hachijo once again handled the writing duties, and she has my profuse thanks! Thanks to everyone who picked up the last book, we were able to do a second novel. Thanks to you, the readers, Sasaki and Miyano’s world is growing. Thank you so much. Unlike the last novel, this one is written in first person. Despite being a collection of short stories from a variety of perspectives, it should still be easy to follow. If it is, you can thank Hachijo for her tireless work in making it that way. I certainly do! This novel focuses on the first year of high school, which mostly occurred in the gap between Volumes 1 and 2 of the manga. Each time I introduced a new character, I tried to think hard enough about who they were and where they came from that I could have done a thirty-page short story about them. But because those stories weren’t relevant to the main relationship between Sasaki and Miyano, I never included them. Well, here they are—in novel form! Let me highlight some things I liked in this book. For the opening of the Kuresawa story, I had this vague idea that I wanted a sort of “start of a romance” thing. When I saw what Hachijo came up with—“It marked the beginning of my new life with her”—I was like, “Now, that’s being young in a nutshell!!!!!” The whole world seemed to sparkle. Then there’s the end of chapter 3: “Maybe he’d stumbled on someone who would be a good influence on him.” It made my heart race, like, “Could Hirano possibly say that?!” Hachijo has a gift for these lines that end on the perfect note and just sort of stay with you. After I read them, I would close my eyes and soak in them, like a bath. Personally, I have a special soft spot for Tashiro’s first-person pronoun (he uses ore, a strongly masculine pronoun in Japanese). It shows how he’s got that edge buried under his kindness and decency. One of the bookstore bonuses Hachijo wrote was about what was happening with him before the cultural festival, and I really appreciated it! Hachijo seems to have read the manga extremely carefully. (That’s my assumption, anyway, and I’m not questioning it!) For example, after Kuresawa gets in that fight, she mentions how the lenses of his glasses weren’t broken. There’s a single panel of his flashback in Volume 3 that shows him holding his glasses with the lenses intact, and I have to think that’s where she got the idea from. It was in the manga, but it wasn’t necessarily in my description of the character, yet she picked up on it anyway. I’m really impressed and grateful. She also took care to give expression to some shifts of feeling that were sort of vague in the manga, stuff where, plot-wise, I was like, “Ehh… More or less like this.” (Even in the manga, there were things I kept changing right to the bitter end.) Over and over again, I found myself nodding along, like, “Ohhh! Yes! Yes! That! That’s exactly how it happened!” What I’m saying is, I had lots of fun supervising the novel as it took shape. I hope you’ll enjoy it alongside the manga version. If you have a chance, please do send your thoughts and feedback! To: Kotoko Hachijo and/or Shou Harusono Attn: Gene Pixiv Editorial Department Kadokawa Corporation 2-13-12 Fujimi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 102-8177, Japan