The Job Hunt

“Hey, I’m back…”

During an evening in early June, Miyako had just returned to the apartment she shared with Nayuta and Kaiko, wearing a proper business dress and looking discouraged with life in general.

“Oh, hey there, Myaa!”

Nayuta, playing a game on the large living-room TV (naked), dropped the controller and jogged up to her. She then removed Miyako’s clothing, undergarments and all, as if nothing could be more natural. Thus stripped, Miyako collapsed on the sofa and let out a deep sigh.

“Are you tired, Myaa?”

“Not tired, really…but kind of depressed.”

“The interview didn’t go well?”

“…No,” she curtly replied.

June is the time when major firms across Japan begin to give job offers to college seniors for the next business year. Just like all her classmates, Miyako had begun sending out entry sheets back in March; today marked the first “round one” interview she landed.

This interview was given by a regional bank. As a member of the College of Economics at her school, Miyako had sent out several dozen applications to finance firms, insurance firms, securities firms, and so forth. All the mega-banks turned her down at the document phase, as did most other large, national-level firms apart from the financial outfits.

Miyako’s economics department was classified as “above average” in the scale. Judging by the jobs previous graduates had landed, she knew not to expect famous, brand-name companies to bid against each other for her services. But having over half her cover letters get rejected out of hand was still a major bummer.

Today’s interview was a group session, and the questions were all the kinds of things the job-hunt guides talked about—Why do you want to join our firm? What did you work on while you were in school? What are your strengths?—and so forth. But as all the other candidates gave their answers without hesitation, Miyako just blanked out on several occasions. Looking back, the rest of the pool must’ve been nervous, too, but to her, everyone else was a model candidate.

“What would you describe as your strong points?”

“Y-yes! Um… Well, I think it’s in my optimism and how I’m not timid about anything. I think.”

Miyako recalled how the interviewer smiled at her. She was timid about so much up there. It made her want to scream.

“Which company were you interviewing for?” asked Nayuta, sitting down on the sofa.

“______ Bank.”

“Oh.” She raised an eyebrow. “Never heard of it.”

“…Well, it’s a regional bank. There’s just one branch in Tokyo.”

“Did you want to be a banker, Myaa? Like Naoki Hanzawa in that TV drama?”

“Not really, no…”

All her college classmates sent entry sheets to banks, so Miyako followed their lead. The whole reason she chose economics in the first place was because, out of the non–hard science degrees, it seemed to give her the best advantage on the job hunt—but now she wondered if she had grown at all since making that choice.

She just kind of went to college; she was just kind of looking for a job. But right now, there was something she was interested in.

“It’s funny to imagine you ‘getting back double’ at your mean bank boss and stuff,” Nayuta said offhandedly, “but I really think you’re better suited to editorial.”

“I’m not gonna do any of the stuff on that TV show,” retorted Miyako. “But…I did apply to a few publishers.”

“You did?!” Nayuta exclaimed, eyes shining. “Can you be my editor?!”

“No way. I didn’t send an entry sheet to Gift Publishing.”

“Huh?”

Miyako smiled a bit at the disappointed Nayuta as her expression clouded.

When she began to seriously look for work, she conducted a thorough analysis of herself, and it told her that editing was the one thing she wanted to do the most right now. Working in the GF Bunko editorial department was fun, and looking at Toki and the other editors, she knew that, as tough as the job was, they got a lot out of it.

But she still chose not to apply to Gift Publishing. The editors there treated her well, and Godo, the editor in chief, had asked her to go full-time on several occasions. That was exactly why she couldn’t take them up on the offer. She was working part-time at GF Bunko only because she happened to know Itsuki in college, which led to her knowing Toki. Really, Godo wanted her to join them because she was close to Nayuta, not because he appreciated her own talents.

Miyako was sure that, out of the people applying to Gift Publishing, most of them were more talented than her. They read far more books than she ever had, they loved light novels far more than she did, and they had loads more passion for the publishing industry. Blasting past them and getting hired just because she was friends with a well-known author didn’t seem right to her.

I want to achieve something through my own power.

“…Anyway, I got another interview tomorrow, so I better start prepping…”

“Good luck, Myaa,” Nayuta casually called as she stood up.

Several days later, Miyako had her first interview with a publisher.

This was a midsize firm, one that also published light novels and manga, including several that she had borrowed from Itsuki to read. She had glossed over their past hits and the series they were pushing the most. In her eyes, she was totally prepared.

She was thus in high spirits as she went to the interview site. The e-mail had said to come in “everyday attire,” so she went with a normal dress instead of a business suit. But when she arrived, most of the other applicants had on their finest formal attire.

…It did say “everyday,” right…?

So she anxiously sat there until her number was called. The time came, and once again, it was a group interview, with Miyako joining six other soon-to-be college grads in the interview room. The moment she sat down, she locked eyes with the interviewer, a man in late middle age sporting a smartly tailored suit.

He gave what she thought was a scornful look for a moment before speaking.

“…So given the television and comic work we’ve done in the past, a publisher like ourselves can often have eccentric people working for them. Some people think this means they don’t need to have common sense as members of society, but that’s really not the case. If we want to create products that are broadly accepted by audiences, you could say that our people—our staff—are expected to have even more common sense than usual. And one core, fundamental way this plays out is in one’s choice of clothing.”

…The interviewer wasn’t looking at Miyako, but she could tell he was speaking directly to her.

A few days later.

The next publisher Miyako had applied to produced a number of magazines and such, but its main business was in self-publishing, with authors ponying up the money to get books and so on produced. According to the company website, they had a lot of connections to distributors, allowing them to get your book into stores nationwide and potentially become a bestseller.

The interview room was a tiny, cramped affair, and this time, Miyako was one-on-one with the interviewer. He was a middle-aged man, looking sharp in his ironed suit, and he gave her a friendly smile.

“My name is Miyako Shirakawa. It’s good to meet you.”

“You too! Thank you for coming today,” he softly replied.

The interview began with a few standard questions—what she did at school, what she thought were her strong points. Then the interviewer took three sheets of paper off his clipboard and placed them on the desk. Each one had text on it, apparently part of a novel.

“Ms. Shirakawa, if you were working for our company, which of these three books would you suggest we publish?”

“Oh?”

The unexpected question threw Miyako. She thought for a bit.

“…Can I take a look at them?”

The interviewer smiled. “Well, I’d like to say ‘of course,’ but unfortunately we don’t have a great deal of time, so let me give you some rough guidance. These are excerpts from three books that were brought to our company recently. This one is a finalist from a new-writer contest in the mystery genre. This one is a historical novel that’s already made it past our first round of a contest. And this one is an autobiography.”

“An autobiography? Of whom?”

“The author of this work, of course.”

“Is it someone famous?”

“No. It’s a man in his fifties who’s led a perfectly normal life. It just lists out his boring experiences in detached fashion, and his grammar is fairly atrocious.”

“Huh…?”

Despite her misgivings, Miyako pointed at the mystery excerpt.

“…This one?”

Out of the three provided, this was the clear winner. But the interviewer shook his head. “Nope. That’s not it.”

“What?!”

He flashed an eerie smile at her surprise. “The correct answer is: We publish all of them.”

“Huh? But…”

What would publishing such clearly low-level work do for them…?

“Our business,” the smiling interviewer continued, “is to typeset our customer’s work to look the part, bind and design it well enough, and make it look like a book. We’re helping them create memories for themselves.”

“C-create memories…?” she repeated.

“Yes. Good memories. ‘I’m a real writer.’ ‘I published a real, paper book from a real publisher.’”

If a customer paid money to create (what looked like) a fine-looking book and was satisfied with it, there wasn’t any actual problem with that…but Miyako was still dubious.

“…Well, you work with the author to edit the content, right?”

“Our company cherishes the individual style of the author first,” replied the interviewer, friendly and calm. “As a rule, we publish our work exactly as the customer wishes.”

It didn’t strike Miyako that a book lacking the fundamentals of correct grammar counted as “style.”

“As long as our customers can use desktop publishing software, we can make their dreams come true. It’s truly a fun job to have. Would you like to work alongside us, Ms. Shirakawa?”

Miyako gasped. It did seem like they were giving her a pretty deep dive into the firm during this interview, and apparently they were already set to hire her. In her entry sheet, she hadn’t written anything about her connections to Nayuta and other pro writers, but she did mention her part-time editing work and familiarity with DTP software, something she picked up from the GF Bunko editors during quieter times at work.

If all they did was take manuscripts and publish them as is, that software was all you really needed. In fact, any professional conscience you had as an editor might actually be an obstacle. No, what they wanted was someone who’d take the text people brought in, fawn over it, and close the sale—and a young woman would be especially attractive for the role.

“……”

The interviewer gave Miyako a faint smile as she stared at him.

“All right. I think that’s enough for now. Thank you very much for your time.”

“…Thank you.”

So she left the interview room and headed home, profoundly depressed.

The next day, Miyako asked Kirara Yamagata at GF Bunko about the publisher where she’d had an interview. The mere mention made Yamagata wince.

“Oh yeah, they’re famous in the publishing industry… Well, infamous, really.”

“They are?”

“Yeah. They’ll encourage you to self-publish with them, claiming they can get you in bookstores across Japan and make you a famous writer. But all they really do is put one or two copies into a few stores they have special arrangements with, so there’s almost zero chance you’ll make any money as an author. Plus, the doujinshi scene can produce books that look just as high quality as commercial stuff, so if all you want is a book you made yourself, going that direction’s way cheaper. I mean, think about it. If your work’s really worth national distribution, it could probably also win a new-writer prize somewhere. And even if it can’t, you can still self-publish on Amazon or produce an e-book or whatever. If you’re not in it for the money, you can even make it into a web novel. Basically, all that place is doing is selling you the false glory of getting a book published in paper form. I heard they’re fighting multiple lawsuits, and I bet they’re gonna go out of business sometime soon.” Her voice was flat and cold. “…But why bring them up out of nowhere, Ms. Shirakawa? You weren’t thinking of joining them, were you?”

“Oh, no way. I just saw an ad on the net, so I was wondering about them.” Miyako’s face tensed up at her concerned colleague.

“Ah… Well, that’s good. I’m not really in the business of badmouthing other companies, but I hear that the employees get ‘penalties’ if they fail to make their quotas. It’s a total hellhole to work in. Definitely avoid at all costs, you know?”

“W-www… Yeah, I’ll bet,” Miyako said, sweating as her soul nearly left her body.