The Father

While Itsuki was celebrating the anime launch with his friends, a man was visiting a bookstore on the way home from the office.

He came here around once a week, browsing through the business and new-releases sections and occasionally picking up something that captured his interest—and nowadays, he took at least a passing glance at the GF Bunko section of the light novel department, identifiable by the reddish-brown color of the book spines, before walking to the checkout line.

Today was January 18, the date new releases came out, and GF Bunko’s January lineup was placed front and center in the main light novel display. There were six in all, and the one boasting the largest number of copies was Volume 5 of All About My Little Sister. The man looked at the name “Itsuki Hashima” on the cover, a range of emotions on his face. Then he noticed the “TV Anime Premiere Coming Soon!” ad copy on the obi. It made his eyes go wide.

“…TV…anime…?”

He picked it up, eyes fixated on the sentence. It surprised him enough that he couldn’t help whispering it out loud.

The man was Keisuke Hashima, a forty-seven-year-old office worker and the father of Itsuki Hashima, whose latest volume of All About My Little Sister he held in his hand. He stood there with it for a while, motionless, and then he took Volume 5 over to the register. It was the second book of his son’s that Keisuke ever bought—the first one since Sister of the Apocalypse, his professional debut.

Back at home, Keisuke changed out of his suit and ate dinner. Tonight, his wife had cooked a variety of dishes in the style of his favorite Japanese cuisine—kinpira gobo (stir-fried burdock root), buri daikon (simmered yellowtail with radish), and hot tofu. She used to be a nonstarter in the kitchen, but ever since she married Keisuke and became a stay-at-home mom, her daughter had been teaching her how to cook. She wasn’t quite as good as said daughter, who had an honest talent for it, but she was now pretty decent.

His wife was in the living room watching TV.

“Hello!”

As Keisuke ate, their daughter came home. This was Chihiro, his wife’s child from her previous marriage—and since the day they met, she had always been cheerful and friendly toward him, even though he was admittedly not too outgoing toward others. The two hit it off quickly, a fact that further convinced Keisuke it was time to remarry. She was gentle, thoughtful toward others; a gifted student, and handy both in the kitchen and with a vacuum cleaner. You didn’t have to be her parent to see that she was the perfect daughter.

“………Um, Chihiro?”

Keisuke called for her, a little reluctantly at first.

“Yeah, Dad?”

“……”

He thought about how to phrase it, but couldn’t find the right words. Instead he just took the book out of the paper bag in the seat next to him and showed it to Chihiro.

“……About this…”

The sight of Volume 5 of All About My Little Sister surprised Chihiro.

“Oh? Did you buy Itsuki’s book, Dad?”

“……I did,” he replied, nodding sourly, while Chihiro smiled. “But I wanted to talk about this.” Keisuke pointed at the obi with his finger.

“That?”

“This. It says it’s going to be a TV anime.”

“Yeah.”

“…But… It is? Itsuki’s books?”

“Uh-huh,” Chihiro said with a soft smile.

Keisuke furrowed his brow. “So it’ll be a cartoon show you can watch on TV? Like Sazae-san?”

“Um, yeah. I think All About’s probably gonna air late at night, but…”

Chihiro’s father tilted his head, a stern look on his face. “…So Itsuki’s books are gonna be like Sazae-san? Mmm…”

“Yeah, pretty neat, huh? Not exactly Sazae-san, but…”

“………………You sure this isn’t some kind of prank on him?” Keisuke was serious.

“No, not at all!” Chihiro hurriedly replied. “He’s been going over the scripts for each week’s episode with the animation staff. He’s writing new story material for the show, too. It’s a lot of work for him.”

“Mmm… But…” He was still dubious. “…I mean, something like this has to be pretty popular to even get a manga version, right?”

“Right. And, you know, his books are popular.”

“They are, huh…?”

“It’s true!”

Chihiro felt it appropriate to harden her tone against her still-doubtful stepfather. “I mean, the anime’s not out yet, but it’s already been manga-fied—in other words, serialized in a magazine like Shonen Jump. And they’re releasing a drama CD, too, which is, like, an audio theater where voice actors play the roles of his characters.”

These were unfamiliar terms to Keisuke. Being raised in a poor household, he never had any manga to read as a kid, and the only “cartoons” he knew were Sazae-san and Studio Ghibli’s films. Now, though, it was dawning on him. Itsuki’s work really was popular. And being popular meant:

“…So the world’s accepting his books…?”

For Keisuke, that was the greatest wonder of all.

He had read one of Itsuki’s novels before, Sister of the Apocalypse, and it shocked him to the core. A whirlpool of negative emotions swallowed up his mind—“this makes no sense”; “I can’t understand how any of the characters think”; “the story’s too hard to keep up with”; “I can’t decipher his sentence structures”; “this is gross”; “I hate this”; “this is scaring me”; “it’s disgusting”; “I get that he has special feelings for little sisters, at least…but the fact that he does fills me with this intense disgust, fear, and repulsion”; “the writer of this novel is sick, distasteful, incomprehensible, terrifying, and disgusting.” The fact that this novelist was his own son made him feel like he was going to black out.

Sister of the Apocalypse was praised by Kasuka Sekigahara, genius novelist and a judge for GF Bunko that year—“there’s an inscrutable, powerful force here,” and the author’s “either a genius or a total f—k.” Four out of five readers rejected it wholesale, but to the remaining 20 percent who were on the same wavelength, it was a masterpiece. Without a doubt, it was one of the most unconventional novels to earn a prize in the GF Bunko New Writers Contest.

Keisuke Hashima, meanwhile, had almost no exposure to manga, light novels, or popular forms of entertainment in general since childhood. To someone like him, with no antibodies against something of this nature, the book was simply too much to comprehend. It was enough to cause him to believe there was no way his son could be exposed to a new family—and, especially, a new younger sister.

Recalling all too well how hard it was to be denied the freedom of entertainment from his own parents, Keisuke wanted to avoid that with own son. As long as Itsuki kept his grades up, he purchased whatever books he wanted. (His parents—Itsuki’s grandparents—still put up enough of a fight that he drew the line at manga and video games.) He would come to regret that intensely. Those bizarre novels, with the weird manga-like illustrations in them, were something he never should’ve let near his son. He knew for a fact that he had raised his child wrong, and it pained him.

The traumatic shock his debut novel delivered to his own family proved, in its own way, just how rare and extraordinary a talent Itsuki was. But it also turned the gap between Itsuki and his father into a yawning abyss—and thanks to that, Chihiro was forced to shoulder one of the craziest “white lies” anyone could have imagined.

Now, however, Itsuki’s work was being made into a cartoon. The kind they show on TV. That was how much support he’d received, from so many people. When he read Sister of the Apocalypse, he’d assumed the prize it won was some kind of mistake, and there was no way Itsuki would continue his novelist career. Keisuke wasn’t exactly the only critic of that book, in fact; its sales were beyond negligible.

—Sooner or later, he’ll have to face reality. Then he’ll find a real job when he graduates college.

That was what Keisuke had assumed. Instead, Itsuki dropped out without telling his parents and spent the ensuing four-plus years writing dozens of books as a professional. The trauma of Sister of the Apocalypse still hadn’t fully faded away…but, maybe, it was finally time to admit that Itsuki had made a name for himself.

“……Is Itsuki doing okay?”

Keisuke noticed Chihiro’s face brighten. She would occasionally tell him about Itsuki, but this was the first time Keisuke had demonstrated any interest in his well-being since he’d raged at him for quitting college.

“Oh yeah! He’s working super hard right now. Plus, he’s found a girlfriend recently—”

Just as she said it, Chihiro cut herself off. Her joy at this show of kindness from her father had loosened her lips. But Keisuke’s ears picked it up.

“…A girlfriend? Him?”

Itsuki was engaged in a completely respectable romance. Itsuki, who sang the praises of little-sister love in a book that was incomprehensible and repulsive to Keisuke. Judging by the title of his latest release, the themes of his work hadn’t changed much…but it proved that Itsuki’s actual feelings about romance differed quite a bit from the deviant sister-love in his novels.

“Wow…”

Whether he realized it or not, a sigh of relief crossed Keisuke’s lips. Itsuki was recognized by society as a novelist, and he had a lover. He wasn’t a closeted sex offender longing for the chance to commit incest after all.

And in that case:

“Chihiro…maybe it’s time we tell Itsuki the truth.”

And when Chihiro answered…