Gods

It probably doesn’t need to be said, but the stories Itsuki Hashima, Haruto Fuwa, and Nayuta Kani wrote all fell under the genre of “light novels.”

The term has become widely known in recent years, but even now, it lacks any sort of concrete definition, despite all the (pointless) arguing people have done over it. That’s because no matter what rubric you attempt to use to classify them—by content, by packaging, by writing style, by author, by publisher, by target audience, by genre, by characters, and so on and so on—it’s too easy to come up with several examples that defy the rules.

The series Light Novel Club includes a section where the hero, Misaki Asaba, provides a few sample books generally perceived as light novels, more or less, and says, “Yeah, those are light novels, I guess.” Just like her, people in real life are forced to make these vague judgments, with no solid definition to rely upon. She was doing the best job she could, really.

So let’s try taking Asaba’s approach. A “light novel” is the sort of novel published by prestigious, leading Japanese light novel publishers like our very own Shogakukan Gagaga Bunko, featuring (usually) anime- or manga-style art on the cover. That, in a very lazy, hazy sort of way, sums it up.

Packaging, it turns out, is vitally important for almost any product, not just books. It refers to almost anything that attracts the customer’s attention and drives them to make a purchase—in a book’s case, the cover, the title, the obi description, and the blurb on the back or the side flaps.

For a light novel, the most important thing of all—the pillars that keep the whole package upright—is the illustrations (with some exceptions). No matter how charming the characters, no matter how much the story grabs you by the heart and doesn’t let go, nobody’s going to notice if they never pick the book up in the first place.

The industry isn’t so easy to profit in that a decent package means a bestseller 100 percent of the time, but the fact of it is, if you don’t have a good package, nobody will read it. You can’t even throw your hat in the ring, so to speak. This fact isn’t necessarily restricted to light novels, either—nearly anyone involved with product development has encountered it one time or another.

So to light novel writers like Itsuki and his cohorts, the illustrators handling their books were a vital part of their continued relevance in this field. Sort of gods in their midst. And the world of artists was polytheistic; there might be Zeus-types with omnipotent skills, gods you couldn’t really rely on much, gods with tons of ability but not much in the way of stability, even accursed gods who caused problems and (on rare occasions) actively damaged their books, authors, and publishers. Generally, however, they were considered holy presences, worthy of great honor and respect.

Itsuki was, right now, playing with one of these gods. Setsuna Ena, to be exact, a young man sitting across the kotatsu from him. He had a mischievous, puppy-dog-like face and a body about as diminutive and thin as Itsuki’s. His hair was dyed a trifecta of colors, mostly blue, and his clothing was frilly, colorful, and unique—the “Harajuku style,” as some people called it.

At the age of sixteen, he was an intensely popular artist, working on titles like Genesis Sisters of the New World (Itsuki’s second series) under the handle “Puriketsu,” which literally meant “Jiggly Ass.” He was great at drawing cute girls, and he had an inimitable knack for drawing asses with the perfect amount of jiggle.

Volume 1 of Genesis Sisters of the New World remained Itsuki’s most reprinted individual release, and it wouldn’t be going too far to say that Itsuki had punched his ticket into the Bestselling Authors Fun Club thanks to Setsuna over here. And for some reason, this god among men had taken a shining to both Itsuki’s work and Itsuki himself, hanging out at his place even though Genesis Sisters had long wrapped up.

“Thirty-seven points,” Itsuki said, reading his score after the game ended.

“Dah, I’m thirty-five. Close! All I needed was one more sheep!”

“Hah-hah-hah! It’s talent, man, talent! Bah-hah-hah-hah-hah!”

Itsuki was nothing if not a sore winner.

They were playing a game called Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small, a special version of the Euro-style board game Agricola, tweaked for two players only, rather than the original’s two to five. In Japan it had earned the nickname Futaricola, a portmanteau of Agricola and futari, or “two people.”

Each player took the role of a farming couple tasked with building their household’s facilities and expanding their count of livestock. Whichever player had the more bountiful farm after eight turns was the winner.

The main difference between Futaricola and its predecessor was that it had no luck-based elements, no dice to roll or cards to draw from a pile. It was, to use technical terms, a “two-player, zero-sum, logically perfect information game,” akin to Go, chess, reversi, and so on. Games without luck elements were at their most exciting when played by people of roughly equal skills, and Setsuna and Itsuki were perfectly matched in that way.

“Boy, it sure is exciting to play Futaricola with you, sir! Want another game?”

Itsuki shook his head at Setsuna’s cheerful request.

“I gotta come up with a new proposal by the end of today.”

“Aww,” Setsuna replied, pouting. It made him look even more puppy-dog-like.

“Don’t ‘aww’ at me. You’re the one who came in without any notice.”

Setsuna rarely provided any. He didn’t have any cell phone at all, smart or dumb, so the only way to reach him was by e-mail on his PC or by calling him on his home’s landline. He was often out of the house, almost never checked his mail, and didn’t bother picking up the line when he was drawing, making communication exceedingly difficult. This had put a tremendous strain on things during work on Genesis Sisters of the New World—particularly on their editor Kenjiro Toki, who developed a stomach ulcer midway through.

“Ah, what’s the big deal, sir? You’re practically home all the time anyway.”

“Hah-hah-hah! You fool! I was over in Okinawa until the day before yesterday!”

“Whoa, really? Cool! I’m impressed.”

“Heh-heh! Jealous, huh? …Here’s something for you.”

Itsuki took out a box of chinsuko, a traditional biscuit sold for people to bring home from Okinawa, and handed it to Setsuna.

“Wow, thanks! Did you have fun down there?”

“Yep. I saw a whale shark.”

“Oh, I’ve heard of them! Like, really huge, right?”

“Yeah, it was gigantic. Up close in person, it’s totally crazy. Something that huge just makes you melt on the spot.”

“Yeah? Hey, isn’t that a whale-shark strap on your phone case?” The sharp-eyed Setsuna spotted the charm dangling from Itsuki’s phone. “You must really like ’em, huh?”

“Uh-huh. I wanted to put one in my next story, too.”

“Whoa, really?”

“…Until my lame-ass editor rejected it.”

“Whoa, really? What was it about?”

Itsuki recapped the general gist—the tale of a whale shark and his nudist human sister.

“Holy crap! That’s awesome, sir!”

“Heh-heh-heh! Yeah, ain’t it?”

He couldn’t help but laugh at how honestly impressed Setsuna seemed.

“But how’s a fish gonna have sex with a girl? I saw this documentary on TV that showed salmon laying eggs, but first the female lays the eggs, and then the dude blows his load all over them!”

“No problem there. Sharks actually fertilize their eggs inside the female’s body, unlike most fish. They’ve got genitals for it and everything.”

“Whoa, really? Sharks have dicks?”

“Mm-hmm. That’s why the climax was gonna be so awesome. The story and setting work in perfect harmony, and it only works because the hero’s a shark! And my asshole editor didn’t understand a damn word of it!”

“Here, lemme try drawing that!” Setsuna shouted, whipping out his sketchbook and a mechanical pencil.

“Draw what?”

Before Itsuki’s astonished eyes, Setsuna was sketching out an illustration at a blazing speed.

“Is that…?”

He was drawing, essentially, what Itsuki had just described—a scene depicting a whale shark in natural unity with a beautiful girl under the sea.

“Here! Kinda like this!”

The naked woman on the unruled sheet was impaled by something sprouting out of the shark’s lower body, a look of bliss upon her face. From afar, it merely looked as if she was swimming alongside the beast, but the entire piece of artwork reeked of obscenity nonetheless. It left an otherworldly, fantasy-like impression, as if the observer were himself floating in the warm tropical blue waters, marveling at the girl’s jiggly bubble butt from up close.

Despite being drawn with nothing but a mechanical pencil, it was already high-quality enough to serve as an in-the-book illustration. It was so good, Itsuki honestly felt Toki would change his mind and give him the green light if they showed this to him. He had to pause for a moment to observe, to take it all in. It was all there—the moving climax, the picture in his mind he was trying to express with this novel. Even better than anything he’d pictured.

“Boy, I could go for some ikura sushi right now!” Setsuna observed, apropos of nothing.

“Sushi?” Itsuki parroted, not following him.

“We were just talking about salmon, remember? Now I’m kinda hungry for some!”

“…Why don’t you go out and do that, then?”

“You oughta come with, sir!”

“…Well, if you want.” Itsuki nodded, not thinking much about it.

It was past sundown by the time Itsuki and Setsuna arrived in Hokkaido.

“How did this happen…?” Itsuki groaned as he set foot in New Chitose Airport, the expression on his face reminiscent of Miyako’s when she’d arrived in Okinawa.

He’d been expecting to head for some nearby sushi joint with Setsuna for their ikura salmon-roe feast, but then he’d started cajoling him further. “If we’re gonna go out,” he’d said, “we might as well eat some really awesome salmon, sir! And nobody does salmon better than Hokkaido!”

Itsuki agreed, still revved up from his previous trip. “I was just in Okinawa two days ago,” he reasoned as he made the plane and hotel reservations. “Might as well cover the northern tip of Japan, too!” The arrangements were a little trickier this time, with the enormous Sapporo Snow Festival in full swing, but it all fell into place anyway. “Might as well,” indeed.

And despite traveling to Hokkaido in search of salmon caviar, Setsuna kicked off the trip by chowing down on a bowl of miso ramen at an airport restaurant. “Hey, I was hungry!” he protested, grinning. “If you’re in Hokkaido, you gotta try out the ramen, sir!”

You could’ve gone for something with actual seafood in it, Itsuki thought, but his own ramen was too delicious to get too worked up about it. This was his first time on Japan’s northern island, so he figured he should enjoy the ride.

So they hopped on a train to their hotel in Sapporo. Then, when they left Sapporo Station, they noticed something: the cold and the howling wind.

“G-geez, I’m freezing…! This is nuts! How can people live in this?! I’m going home!”

There was a light blizzard going on as Itsuki shivered, making it hard to assess his surroundings. Setsuna was even more lightly dressed than he was, but he remained chipper, singing “Winter, Again” from pop group GLAY as he traipsed along the sidewalk.

“Hm hmm hmmm, hmmm hm hmm hmm hmm hmm hm hmmmm…  ”

He was actually singing the lyrics (and he was good, too), but our publisher didn’t want to pay the licensing fees.

“Singing about taking your girlfriend up to Hokkaido in the winter… Takuro must be some kind of sadist… You know where the hotel is?”

Setsuna gave Itsuki a blank stare. “Huh? Wasn’t it pretty much this way?”

“……Give me a sec.” Itsuki looked the hotel up on his phone. “…We’re going the complete opposite direction, dumbass! Dahhh! Hmmm, hmm hmm hmmmm…”

Itsuki was so troubled by this turn of events that he began singing T.M.Revolution’s “White Breath” (the lyrics, again, are left to the imagination) as he followed his phone’s screen to the hotel.

The next morning was kicked off at a restaurant, where the two of them each ordered rather opulent bowls of sashimi served over rice. They were practically overflowing with sea urchin, salmon roe, and crab legs, with piles of northern shrimp and scallops enshrined upon the apex. There were clearly far more toppings than actual rice.

“This is way too much!”

“Ha-ha-ha! I’ve never seen anything like this!”

The two were shocked and delighted at the meal. Once they actually finished eating it, though, Itsuki moaned, “I think I’m done with sea urchin and roe for a while…”

“Yeah,” Setsuna drowsily agreed. “I had no idea too much of that could actually make you sick…”

“…You know, I never understood why they included the ginger and the shiso leaves at the top of these bowls, but now I do. I need some vegetables, bad…”

Either way, they had set out to eat salmon roe, and salmon roe was eaten. They had reserved the hotel for only one night, and their flight back was that afternoon, so they checked out, traveled right back to the airport, shopped a little in the terminal, and ate some jingisukan for lunch—mutton grilled in a skillet, a popular meal in Hokkaido.

On their way to the flight check-in desk, Setsuna stopped in front of a poster for the Sapporo Snow Festival.

“Hey, sir, I’m gonna stay here for another week or so.”

“Um, what’d you say?”

“Y’know, I’m here and all! I figured I oughta go see the Snow Festival, too.”

“That’s kind of rash, isn’t it?”

“You wanna come with, sir?”

“No way. Too cold. And all those crowds!”

“Oh yeah? Okay, well, I gotta go cancel my flight, so see ya later! An’ thanks for the chinsuko!”

“Uh, sure?”

Itsuki smiled distractedly as he waved at the departing Setsuna, his mind still a blank.

“He just goes where the wind takes him, huh…?”

With no other great ideas, Itsuki boarded the jet by himself, went back to Tokyo, made it back to his apartment, turned on the heat, and sat by his kotatsu. Setsuna’s drawing of the sex scene with the girl and the whale shark was still on the table. He stared at it for a while.

Packaging could refer to an entire range of things. A single outstanding aspect wouldn’t be enough to make a product sell; nor would a single inferior aspect doom it to failure. The art was the most important piece of a light novel’s packaging, but even the greatest art in the world might not be a good match for readers’ tastes. It could clash with the cover logo or obi’s design or give too complex an impression to work within the confines of a paperback’s size. A high-quality work of art wasn’t necessarily the same thing as a high-quality cover illustration.

On extremely rare occasions, however, the stars would align, and you would come across a piece of art that singularly, overwhelmingly caught the eye. It would work on a level beyond individual readers’ tastes or juxtaposition with the other elements. It would shine bright, even if it wasn’t optimized for paperback sizes, and it would all but force people’s eyes to gaze upon it.

No doubt about it. That was exactly what Setsuna Ena had come up with.

About a year and a half ago, when the Genesis Sisters of the New World series wrapped and it was time to launch the next franchise, Toki suggested that Itsuki keep working with Puriketsu as his illustrator. Genesis Sisters was a commercial success, whether it gave Toki a stomach ulcer or not, and Setsuna himself was a fan of Itsuki’s work. It seemed like an obvious choice.

But Itsuki declined the offer anyway. “I want someone who’ll stick to his deadlines,” he declared. “Someone who won’t go incommunicado. Someone who’s actually a decent person.”

“True!” Toki declared at first. A bit later, he tried to walk it back. “Kind of a shame, though,” he said. “I’d really like to keep Puriketsu on board for this project, but if the author doesn’t want him, so be it! Such a shame, though…”

Itsuki, though, had another reason to refuse the offer. To him, deadlines were nothing more than nice goals to strive for. He was willing to flush them straight down the toilet if that resulted in something better in the end. No, the real reason, to put it succinctly: He didn’t think his work was up to snuff for Setsuna’s art. Definitely not the other way around.

“My novels totally lose out to your art,” he explained to Setsuna later when he (naturally) asked why Itsuki went with someone else for the next series. “So…for now…I can’t team up with you again.”

“You’re such a kid sometimes, sir,” Setsuna replied, half laughing. “That’s why I like you so much!”

Right now, Itsuki had a single-minded goal. Whenever he had the power to surpass her in this craft, that was when he wanted to strike. That was when he wanted “Illustrated by Puriketsu” on the cover, and that was when he wanted the inside art to be just as mind-bogglingly stupendous as the story he wrote. Then he’d stand at the very peak of the light novel industry.

Staring at the artwork Setsuna had left on the table, Itsuki replayed all those events in his mind once more. The trips to Okinawa and Hokkaido had recharged his mental batteries well enough.

Time to get to work.

First up, time to scan this art and make it my computer’s wallpaper.

Just as he had the thought, his editor Toki called him on the phone.

“If you’re looking for a new proposal, keep looking,” he said with a groan instead of saying hello.

“Hmm? Oh, it’s not about that.”

“Uh?”

“I was just wondering, is Puriketsu over there?”

“…Not now, no.”

“Oh… Well, if he shows up, get his ass over to editorial for me. Break his legs if you have to. I’ll vouch for you.”

“Um, is something up?” There was something slightly off-kilter about Toki’s tone of voice. It gave Itsuki the chills.

“…We don’t have his cover for the month yet, and we’re going balls to the wall to meet the deadline. I’ve been to his place every day this week, and he’s never there.”

“Oh, really?”

Setsuna was handling illustration work for another series Toki was managing. Toki had been dead set against assigning him to it, but the author had insisted. As Itsuki had expected, it wasn’t exactly a well-oiled machine.

“Do you have any idea where Puriketsu might be right now, Itsuki? ’Cause I swear I’m gonna kill that little brat this time…after I have him draw that cover…”

“Hmm…can’t say I do, no,” he lied, trying his best not to get caught up in this. There was no doubting that Setsuna Ena was a god, the highest class of illustrator in the business, but Itsuki hoped this god would be a little kinder to his editor’s intestinal fortitude whenever they teamed up again.