Miyako’s Choice

But Itsuki and Chihiro weren’t the only ones facing turning points in their lives.

Two days after Itsuki’s late-June All About screening party, Miyako received a message in her inbox that made her heart leap. The subject said “Job Offer,” and the “From” box read “Nobunaga Shirogami – President, Branch Hill Ltd.”

Branch Hill was a small publisher that Miyako had interviewed for about a week ago, so it was with shaky fingers that she clicked on the e-mail and read it. As the subject suggested, the body confirmed that she was being offered a job at the firm. It was a little odd to have the company president himself send the e-mail, but as a tiny outfit without an HR department, maybe that was to be expected.

Either way, she was now finally freed from the endless drudgery of the job hunt.

“Yesssssss!!”

“What’s up, Myaa?” the naked Nayuta asked, opening the door to her room.

“I finally got a job offer!” Miyako replied, grinning.

“Oooh, congratulations. Who is it?”

“A publisher called Branch Hill.”

“Branch Hill… I think I might’ve heard that name before…”

“They’re small; they only just started up.”

“Ahh. But you’ll be an editor when you graduate next year, huh? You and I should work together!”

The innocent remark threw Miyako for a moment. “But you write for GF Bunko,” she said, smiling slightly.

Nayuta just looked blankly back at her. “It’s not like I’m a salaried employee of theirs. If you invite me over, Myaa, I can work for you guys, too.”

“…”

Nayuta might’ve been indifferent about it, but Miyako wasn’t. She thought back to a day not long ago—two days before her interview with Branch Hill, in fact. There at the GF office, she happened to be around when new author Soma Misaka got cut off from the company for peddling his work to another firm without permission.

Apparently, there was an unwritten rule in light noveldom that when a publisher picked you up as a new author, you were in their exclusive “corral” for three years, and Soma had broken that taboo. Considering the cost of running new-writer competitions and building up next-generation talents, maybe that rule was justifiable to some extent, but getting the boot because you weren’t aware of a rule that wasn’t written in the contest guidelines or publishing contract seemed incredibly unfair.

“How long has it been since you turned pro again, Nayu?”

“Umm… I think my first book came out December…so about two and a half years.”

“Ah…”

So by the time Miyako graduated next March, Nayuta would have served her three years at GF. By that custom, it wouldn’t be a problem—but how would editor in chief Godo and the rest of the editorial team at GF Bunko react if their number-one author got headhunted? Miyako couldn’t help but imagine the fallout.

“Myaa?”

Miyako looked at Nayuta’s puzzled expression and panicked. “Huh? Oh, um, umm… Well, if they do bring me on as an editor, maybe I’ll be calling on you, then.”

“Okay! I’ll look forward to it!”

Nayuta’s ever-innocent smile put a dull ache in Miyako’s stomach.

The next day, Miyako told Satoshi Godo, GF Bunko EIC and her current boss, about the Branch Hill offer. The situation with Soma Misaka had cooled their relationship somewhat, but considering how many times he had invited her to join Gift Publishing, she felt obliged to tell him.

“…It had to be Branch Hill, huh…?” Godo’s yakuza face turned even more frightening as he breathed it out. “…Any chance you might reconsider still?”

“No, sir,” was her firm reply.

Godo sighed. “That place doesn’t have any marquee series supporting it yet. Being new, there’s no guarantee it’ll still be around in a few years, and I know we offer a better salary and work environment. But instead of a place you’re used to working in, you’re going out of your way to take a high-risk position. What’s the point of that? …Were you that turned off by the thing with Misaka the other day?”

“It’s not related to that,” averred Miyako.

“So what, then?”

Miyako hesitated for a moment. “…I want to grab something all my own. Not something I got just because I happened to be friends with Itsuki or Nayu, but a trail I blazed with my own abilities.”

“That’s a pretty rookie thing to say.”

“…I suppose it is.”

“And you think you can do that at Branch Hill?”

“…I don’t know.” Miyako held back the self-doubt and fear welling inside of her. “But I want to test myself. I want to be somewhere I can’t depend on others for everything.”

Godo gave this a resigned sigh. “…Well, do your best,” he begrudgingly said.

That night, as she walked down an office corridor at the end of her part-time shift, Miyako was stopped by Kenjiro Toki.

“I heard you took an offer from Branch Hill… Congratulations on that.”

“Thank you very much.”

“The boss was pretty depressed about it.”

“Mr. Godo was? Depressed, and not angry?”

“Yeah. With his face, I know it’s hard to tell, but…”

It was hard to believe, but Toki had known the editor in chief long enough that he couldn’t have been mistaken.

“I guess it’s one thing if you turned down his offer, but you taking a disliking to him came as kind of a shock, it looks like.”

“I don’t dislike him personally or anything. I mean, I still think Mr. Misaka got treated unfairly, but…”

Toki smiled a bit at Miyako’s pained expression. “Well, as far as I know about that whole thing, I think Misaka’s partly at fault, too.”

“Oh?”

“I mean, the whole reason he started peddling his work around to other publishers was because he wasn’t a success here and he didn’t get along with his editor…but practically from the moment he won his prize, Misaka pretty much did nothing but bark orders at his editor. It didn’t seem like he took any of that editor’s suggestions at all.”

“He didn’t?”

“Now, of course, it’s an editor’s job to work through that and put out a decent piece of work anyway…but they’re only human, too. Anyway, Misaka and his editor had a fatal lack of communication going on, and that’s probably connected to why he never got informed of the three-year rule. It’s something the editor usually fills them in on before their first publication, but for whatever reason, it didn’t happen with him.”

“…”

“And that’s on the editor for not telling him, certainly. So when we first learned that Misaka was going around to other publishers, the boss thought about letting it go at first. None of the other parties signed him yet, so he hadn’t technically done work for someone else at that point, besides.”

“He thought that?”

“Yeah. But when Misaka caught wind of that, he went up to the boss and asked for a change of editor, not even apologizing for hitting up other places. So the boss asked around for someone to pick up Misaka, but nobody volunteered, me included, so he had to turn down the request. That, however, wasn’t something Misaka was willing to accept, so that’s why we cut things off with him.”

Toki’s story gave Miyako mixed feelings. If it was true, Soma didn’t exactly get kicked out for breaking rules he wasn’t aware of, the way she had pictured it.

“I’ll never forget there’s an editor out there who cried for me.”

“I hope I can write a book with you sometime.”

Soma’s tears, and the words he said to Miyako before he left, still struck deep chords within her heart. She hadn’t lost all sympathy for him, but Godo—the stand-in for all the unfairness of adult life in her mind back then—had his own circumstances. The situation wasn’t as simple as a poor, pitiable young author and his cruelhearted editor in chief. It felt like she was gaining a glimpse of just how complex grown-up life could be, and the thought made her want to sigh.

“…But I really think you should write down these unwritten rules from now on, to prevent something like this from happening again.”

“Well, that presents its own problems.”

“It does?”

“If we made the three-year rule an official policy, that creates trouble if one person wins multiple new-writer prizes at the same time. The author would have to carefully choose which prize to accept, which is bad for both the publishers and the submitters. But even before that, putting in this ironclad rule that you can’t write for anyone else for three years basically means we’d have them sign a non-compete contract, and that leads to all these other rules and bylaws we’d have to set up. And for the writer, not being able to leave for three years, no matter how dissatisfied they are, puts them at a huge disadvantage.”

If the rule went that writing for other companies got you cut off, that also gave you the freedom to jump publishers—as long you didn’t mind losing your connection to the first. Only now did that occur to Miyako.

“So having it be a ‘custom’ instead of a contract stipulation actually helps in some ways…?”

“Right.” Toki nodded. “And that’s not only true for the three-year rule. Putting all these immovable rules in place isn’t great for a publisher, either, but really, I think it makes things even worse for the creators. Deadlines are the best example of that. In pretty much any other industry, delivering something late means you have to pay penalties and maybe even damages, but just try to apply that to writers and illustrators.”

“…It’d be ugly.”

There were tons of writers and artists who blew their deadlines all the time—or even worse, fled somewhere and fell completely out of contact. If a new release from a popular author like Nayuta Kani got delayed, that had to mean pretty sizable losses for the publisher to eat, but GF Bunko certainly didn’t ask her to pay a penalty each time. Not being contractually obligated did allow Nayuta to ignore deadlines freely, but it also let her take her time and write the wonderful novels she was known for.

“I hear a lot about people who enter publishing from other fields, only to be shocked at how loose the whole industry is. But it’s definitely the kind of industry that works because of these fuzzy oral agreements, for better or for worse. Now, there has been momentum lately to tackle some of the collusion-type stuff in this business and protect creator rights more, but there’s no telling how that will turn out…”

Toki gave his meekly listening audience an ambiguous smile.

“…But there’s no such thing as an industry without stuff like that, I don’t think.”

“…Yeah.”

She earnestly nodded. No, every industry had its own issues. Stuff that Miyako herself couldn’t possibly picture in her mind—in the world, in society, in the industry, and in the human race. And starting next year, she’d have to face up to that reality as a full-fledged member of society. She was finally understanding the wide expanse of what she had only glimpsed before, and it made her head spin.