This as Sunao Yoshida. It's been three months since my last work.
This is the fourth volume in the Rage Against the Moons series, a real crisis point in the story. Trinity Blood has run to eight books now. I think each one of them is bad but the series still continues. It's all down to the readers who keep buying the books. Thank you so much. I owe you a lot.
There is a concept of "justifiable." Originally, it had meant something like "as long as what you were doing would improve things, then it was okay to do it." But it always depends on what you consider an "improvement" to be. For the losers, it sounds like nothing more than an excuse.
It's the same excuse for when I spend too much at the bookstore. I like to think that books are for work and that they're useful materials. I like to collect materials where I can find them though, and I often make notes of interesting things my friends have said while out drinking. I also have lots of articles, which I've found on the Internet, cluttering my hard-drive. I love keeping newspaper cuttings. Maybe I'm a Gutenberg Man. My possessions are overwhelmingly documents. There are particularly good bookshops in Kyoto. I'm always coming out with my arms full of books.
Anyway, how do these books help me?
Let's look at the bookshelf by my desk...
I have A Journey Through Wales by Gerald of Wales. He accompanied the Archbishop of Canterbury on a tour around Wales to encourage young men to sign up for the crusades during the twelfth century. He wrote down lots of the things he saw. Lots of small details like travel expenses and feelings that he had of the places he stayed. An extremely useful guidebook! However, I'm not planning to slip back in time anytime soon, so I guess it won't be that useful.
Next book is The Taste of Bugs by Satoshi Shinonaga. The book's aim is to introduce all the types of recipes that use bugs and insects in them. It would be useful if there were a nuclear war and I had to survive the fallout.
Flying on a Jumbo Jet is next to that. It explains how to control all sorts of vehicles from Jumbo Jets and luxury liners to submarines. If there is a surprise coup d'etat whilst I'm on holiday, then I would be able to drive to safety. So that could be useful.
I guess none of my books are really useful. I wonder what I was thinking when I bought them? Even more worrying is that I enjoy these pointless books.
"It doesn't matter if it's useful right away. The important thing is that it captures my interest. It will come in handy one day."
That's what I say to myself every time I go to the store to collect materials. I justify it in that way. But when I come home and see my eight bookcases and the fifty cardboard boxes piled up, I really start to hate myself. I'm so desperate for more space; I fall asleep on a bed covered in magazines. It's really tragic.
If I continue the way I am, then I'm going to die in a book slide. Or perhaps from brain damage when a book falls off my crammed shelves. Or perhaps I'll die of malnutrition when I use my last pennies to buy more books. Only just now when I was cleaning up, a book fell on my head. It really hurt.
Anyway, next volume is going to be set on an island.
If I've not died under a pile of toppled books, I'll see you then!
—Sunao Yoshida.