Sakaki here. At long last, I bring you the second volume of When the Clock Strikes Z.
The big reveal is sure to make you go “Wait, what? Really?” although I won’t be spoiling it here. Can’t wait to be roasted to a crisp by a certain subset of fans, hoo boy.
I had a lot of fun writing our sometimes-shy shovel-swinger and main heroine, Otoha. She lacks initiative—or rather, she can’t really carry a conversation—which made her difficult to use a lot of the time. Still, she tended to do her own thing in the right circumstances, so moving her around in the story wasn’t much of an issue.
Then we have the hot-and-cold Shiiko Katsura making her debut. Shiiko’s a somewhat standard light novel character in that she’s pretty divorced from reality, but I never see girls like her in Western zombie media, and that alone makes her one of my favorites.
Shino, on the other hand, gave me quite the headache at times; the publishers had requested that I make her a “slutty virgin.” At first, I was stuck doing multiple rewrites, but once we switched out her middle-aged butler for a maid, the pieces just kind of fell into place.
Tetsuko was originally a butler called Tetsuo Uemura, but because of the reasons mentioned above, “he” later turned into a maid. The glasses just ended up on her face, really. I’m glad she turned out the way she did. Aren’t combat maids with glasses just the best thing ever? Say, Roberta from Black Lagoon or Marin from Trench Flowers.
Tangent aside, When the Clock Strikes Z, to quote the publisher, “sold better than expected for a zombie story, but not enough for a reprint.” Thus, volume two was doomed to be the last. As a result, I had to hastily restructure the manuscript into a two-volume format. Apologies to all of you who were left disappointed. Actually, I’ve begun thinking of a different approach to zombies. Now, if only someone would let me write it!
—Ichirou Sakaki, 8/14/2018