Chapter 130

Afterword While writing, I had imagined Another as a long-form one-off. At the very least, I had thought that the story of Koichi Sakakibara and Mei Misaki against the backdrop of Yomiyama in the year 1998 would end there—but then the magazine serialization ended and the story was put out in paperback. Out of nowhere, I watched a multimedia empire develop around it, and my thinking started to change. I wouldn’t mind writing a little more about Mei Misaki, still at age fifteen in 1998, I thought. At that point, my mind hit on the “blank space of over a week” when Mei left Yomiyama and went with her family to their seaside vacation home, before the class trip over the summer. I could tell a story where she actually got involved in some sort of incident during that time that Koichi doesn’t know about… Playing with various ideas along these lines, I started to see what I was going to do. The title was the first thing I decided on: Another Episode S. The S of Episode S is for “summer,” for “seaside,” for “secret,” for the character who becomes the narrator, “the other person named Sakaki”…I could go even further and mention the S of “shitai” (corpse) and “shinkirou” (mirage), too. Still, this started out positioned as a side story or a spin-off of Another, but I started to feel like it couldn’t really be a spin-off when Mei Misaki is the heroine. Not only that, but the present day where Mei is telling Koichi the details of the incident is after the final scene of the original Another books—at the end of September 1998. From a timeline perspective, I came to believe it might not be entirely unreasonable to call this a sequel. This novel has rather a different flavor from the original Another, though it keeps the aforementioned troubling phenomenon that occurs in third-year Class 3 at Yomiyama North Middle as a shared dominant note. It might have something of a perplexing bent, but now that the story is complete, I can’t help but feel it might have been necessary to position a story like this here. And once it was done, it also struck me that, in some sense, it turned out to be quite an Ayatsuji-esque novel. I hope you’ll enjoy it. I have a few other ideas (delusions?) for sequels to Another. I can’t know for sure which of these will ever be written, but presumably much depends on the desires of you, the readers. The rest is just a question of my mental and physical resources. In any event, I’m going to take a little while to recharge and let the fantasies run wild. During my run through ten total issues in the Syousetsuya Sari-sari magazine, my editor Ms. Akiko Kanako was always an incredible help. I give her my gratitude for every last bit of it. Thanks also go to Mr. Shinichiro Inoue, who gave me many insightful suggestions during the idea phase. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the cover artist Ms. Shiho Toda and the formatter Ms. Kumi Suzuki, as well as Ms. Akiko Fukazawa, Ms. Kaori Ichiji, Mr. Ryo Nakamura, and all the people at Kadokawa Shoten who were such a great help to me. Early Summer 2013 Yukito Ayatsuji