The New Publishing Gig

Generally speaking, the official office hours for part-timers at the GF Bunko department of Gift Publishing were from nine to five, Monday through Friday, with an hour break for lunch. Most other publishers had the same rule. A high-school diploma was the only qualification you needed, and the work pool consisted of people with multiple part-time jobs, students going to night or online school, housewives, and so on. This pool was paid by the day, and when Miyako converted that into hours, she found that it paid better than the convenience store and café she worked at, but less than the tutoring gig she held for just a brief time.

The responsibilities associated with the job could be summarized with the word miscellaneous. This included a wide variety of shipping work (author proofs, sample copies, contracts, merchandise, and much, much more), photocopying of manuscripts and materials, marking out borderlines on proofs, getting approvals from this or that department, organizing and collating reader feedback forms, and so forth. Many editors arrived at work late in the day, so the part-timers also ran phone duty in the morning for them. They could also be asked by the editors for quick shopping trips and other favors, as well as to help out with events (award ceremonies, autograph tours, fan shows) and the like.

In the case of Gift Publishing, each department had one part-timer to work with, with another brought on for new-writer awards and other busy events. GF Bunko had hired an extra to aid in handling the rookie prizes and their corporate booth at Comiket in a week and change, so Miyako’s contract was effective only for August and September, when the university was on break.

“Right…”

Mentally reciting the job description Toki gave her, Miyako gave herself a reassuring nod and headed up to the fifth floor. It was 9:05 AM on August 1—the first day of her new job—and since the interview had been held one floor down, this would be the first time she’d set foot in the editorial department.

Using the part-time key on her lanyard, she unlocked the steel door that led to the edit room and slowly opened it.

“Hello,” she said softly as she stepped inside—and felt her foot lightly kicking against something. Flustered, she looked down to find Kenjiro Toki on the floor, lying faceup.

“Mr. Toki?!” she half shouted in fear.

“Mrrnngh…”

His eyes were closed, and his face looked stern as he half groaned, half snored down there.

“Oh… Um, are you asleep…?”

She gave him an incredulous look. Why was he on the floor? She bent down, trying to wake him up.

“Um, Mr. Toki…?”

“You can just leave that there,” a cold female voice snapped.

Miyako turned to the side and saw a single woman, seated right at the center of a neat row of desks. Nobody else was in the room.

“Once more people show up, I’m sure someone will kick him awake by accident. It happens all the time with KenKen.”

“Oh, it does…?” Miyako looked down at Toki again, unsure how to take this woman’s advice, before looking back up. This coworker appeared to be in her late twenties and was dressed in a pair of wrinkled pants, a blouse, and black-rimmed glasses. She was pretty, with kind of childish features, but the effect was ruined by the deep rings under her eyes and the exhaustion on her face.

“…You the new part-timer?”

“Yes!” Miyako bowed to her. “My name’s Miyako Shirakawa. I’m starting work here today.”

“Yeah… KenKen told me about you. You’re friends with Kani and Hashima?”

“Um, yes.” She nodded as she circled around Toki’s body and toward the woman.

“Hmm…” The woman sized her up, as if examining the fruit in the produce department. “My name’s Yamagata. I edit for Kani.”

“Oh, I see!”

Miyako shot a glance at the ID card hanging around her neck.

Kirara Yamagata

GF Bunko Editorial

“Um…”

It was a cute name, but Miyako wasn’t sure if Kirara would take that as a compliment, so she fell silent instead as Yamagata let out a lifeless yawn.

“…Have, uh, have you been here since yesterday?”

“Uh-huh,” Yamagata replied, eyes half shut. “A manuscript that was due yesterday never showed up, so I’ve been waiting for it all night… KenKen was, too, but his submission got wrapped up around three AM.”

She shot a spiteful glare at the passed-out Toki on the floor.

“W-wow… Sounds tough.”

“Ah, editors deal with it all the time,” Yamagata replied. Her face said she was resigned to her fate, but the flames of resentment were burning in her eyes. “Not that I’m willing to forgive it, but…”

“Um, by the way,” Miyako asked, carefully choosing her words, “what’s this manuscript you’ve been waiting for…?”

“Kani’s.”

Miyako’s face tensed up. She suspected as much.

“She isn’t responding to e-mails, of course, and I can’t get her on the phone. She wasn’t at the hotel room we use for deadline slackers, and she wasn’t at Hashima’s place, either…”

She watched Yamagata mumble on as her eyes glazed over. Huh, Miyako thought. Would she be mad if she knew we were screwing around together yesterday?

Nayuta had actually invited her over the previous afternoon. They caught a movie, went shopping for a bit, ate dinner, and sang karaoke until late at night. The girl was full of energy in the karaoke booth, singing the opening songs from multiple PreCure seasons in a row in her passionate, if off-key, voice. When Miyako inquired about her work status during dinner, she had smiled and said, “Oh, nooooo problem, nya-ha-ha,” but she thought she saw Nayuta’s face tense up a bit at the question.

So she must’ve been using me as a distraction while she totally blew her deadline…

“…What?”

“Oh, um, nothing,” Miyako stammered at the suspicious-looking Yamagata.

“Mm,” she replied, not looking very engaged with the world. Letting out a half-yawned sigh, she picked up the phone. Nobody answered after thirty seconds, so she angrily put down the receiver and let out a deeper, more pained sigh.

“…Um,” Miyako dared to ask, “is Nayu’s manuscript in that much trouble?”

“…Do you know what the on-sale date is for Kani’s next book?”

“Uh…no.”

“It’s this month.”

“This month…?”

The release dates for GF Bunko titles always hovered around the eighteenth of each month. Were they in that much of a hurry?

“So you still have two weeks or so, right…?”

“Oh, you don’t know a thing, do you…?” Yamagata gave her a look of fairly obvious disgust. “We can’t put a book on sale right after the writer sends us the file. There’s editing, there’s proofs, there’s checking for any problematic content. You check it over and over again for typos and missing words. Then you hand it back to the author, she makes her own corrections and checks the edits themselves, and then it finally heads to the printer.”

“Um…but even if you do all that checking, it still seems like a lot of stuff makes it through to the final books…”

Even with Miyako’s relatively shallow experience with reading for pleasure, it felt to her like every book had at least a few typos or other weird spots. The ages of characters varying from page to page; a cast member’s name appearing without warning when they weren’t supposed to be in the scene; misspelled terminology; a climactic scene ruined by some goofy mistake.

“Well, editors are only human, so there’s no way you can catch everything.” Yamagata’s voice sped up a bit as she pleaded her case. “You’ll miss stuff no matter how careful you are, so if you keep chipping away at editorial’s time in the schedule, you know what’s gonna happen. It varies from writer to writer, but most manuscripts we receive are in pretty crappy shape. Kani practically never goes back to read her own writing, so it’s really brutal with her. If Kani’s fans ever read one of her first drafts, they’d probably pass out from the shock. That’s the kind of thing we have to polish up and make into a salable product in what limited time we have. And of course when a reader finds a single typo, it’s all like ‘Do your job, editors’ and ‘We’re paying real money for this crap’ and…ughhh.”

Miyako forced out a smile as Yamagata audibly gritted her teeth.

“Yeah, that… That sounds rough.”

Yamagata heaved another sigh. “It is rough. But that’s my job! It’s not the readers’ fault that we have to go through this. You can’t blame them for slamming us…” Her voice fell to a whisper as she spoke, like she was reciting a mantra to herself. “…But anyway, I’m in a very dangerous situation. And we’re doing the Obon dance right now, too…”

This was an unfamiliar phrase to Miyako. “The Obon dance?”

“You have the Obon holiday at the start of August. The printers close up for a week straight. So we gotta move up the schedules for all that prep work to account for that. There’s the New Year’s dance and the Golden Week dance, too.”

“Ohh…”

“If you’re an editor, extended national holidays like that are nothing but a menace. I wish the government would do away with multiday holidays for good…,” she moaned with heartfelt loathing.

“So…what happens if Nayu’s submission doesn’t come in on time?”

“Well, of course, it’d mean…we’d have to…ngh…delay it…”

To Yamagata, the mere concept seemed like unspeakable anguish.

“…Um, not to play devil’s advocate, but is delaying a book that bad?”

It was a simple question that popped into Miyako’s mind. Yamagata answered it with a pained sort of shock, as if to say What the hell is this girl talking about?

“Er, I mean, if the schedule’s that tight, that means more mistakes make it into the book, right? So why not delay it so you have the time to work out all the bugs and make it a better book?”

“…Yeah. You might have a point.” She paused. “But…there’s a lot more people involved with publishing a book than you think. If the book’s delayed, that creates a lot of hardship on all kinds of people. We’ll disappoint the readers looking forward to it, of course, but then there’s the distributors, the bookstores, the printer, the proofreaders, the sales and marketing people… It’s not just the writer’s problem; it affects people’s trust in this entire company. And if it’s a bestselling author, that makes the impact even worse.”

Yamagata’s eyes grew heavy again.

“…And so, I’d have to go around and apologize to every single person involved. Me, the editor. And once I run that gauntlet, I have to deal with the EIC and company management yelling at me. Me! Not the dumbass kid who can’t produce a damn novel for me, but me, for some reason! Can you think of anything more unfair?! Why is this always happening to me?!” she shouted, slamming her fist against her desk. Then, in silence, she chewed at her nails a bit…then slumped back in her seat. “…But no, no, I understand… This is my job… Just let some teenage girl ruin your life. What could be easier…?”

She sighed and picked up the receiver again. No answer. Miyako could hardly bear to watch anymore.

“Ahh… She just isn’t replying to me…”

“…Um, would you like me to try contacting Nayu?”

Yamagata turned toward Miyako. “…All right. Try it,” she said in a drained voice.

“Okay!”

Miyako took her phone out of her bag and sent Nayuta a quick You awake? message. The word Read appeared next to it several seconds later.

“Oh, she read my message.”

The bloodshot eyes of her editor opened wide.

“What the…?!”

Then Nayuta sent a message—a sticker of some kind of weird costume character smiling and giving a thumbs-up. Yamagata stared at it for several seconds, her eyes almost popping out of her sockets.

“Can… Can you ask where she is for me…?”

“Sure…”

Where are you? she typed.

At the hotel, came the immediate reply.

“God damn her…!!”

Yamagata began to visibly shake, her face twisted into an expression that looked nearly demonic. She took a breath to gather herself.

“You were…Shirakawa, right? Can I ask you to visit Kani and see how her manuscript is going?”

“Sure… By myself, though?”

The editor nodded with a weak smile. “…She wouldn’t be too happy if I went with you. I suppose she has this hate-hate relationship with me now…”

“Oh…”

As good or bad as their relationship was going, was this really something to ask a part-timer on her first day? Miyako wasn’t too sure, but faced with the spiritually drained Yamagata, she couldn’t drum up the courage to ask.

Twenty minutes later, Miyako was at Nayuta’s hotel room, smiling in the buff like she always did.

“Why are you here so early in the morning, Myaa?”

“Oh, I just had something to…ask, you know…”

“Well, go ahead and take off your clothes, please.”

“Um, okay.”

With a practiced hand, Nayuta removed Miyako’s clothing. The whole process was over in a flash. Then Nayuta went to lie down faceup on the bed, smiling in her self-satisfied way.

“Nya-ha-ha! Now I got Myaa here!”

Miyako sat down naked next to her. Then she blinked, shooting back up to her feet.

“…Wait, I’m not here to talk to you all day!”

She always ended up naked whenever she visited this room, so in Miyako’s mind, chatting at the hotel was now firmly associated with stripping bare.

Nayuta looked up at her, a tad put off. “Huh? Are you on an errand or something?”

“I told you yesterday that my first day part-timing at GF Bunko was today. Right?”

“Right. Good luck with that, Myaa!” she said, playfully rolling around on the bed.

“Thanks,” Miyako replied, looking as serious as possible. “So, um, this is my first job.”

“Uh-huuuh?”

“So I guess your deadline was yesterday, Nayu?”

Nayuta awkwardly turned her head aside. “Nyaa…”

“Ms. Yamagata’s been staying up since yesterday waiting for you. When do you think you’ll be done?”

“Mmm…” Nayuta pursed her lips before slowly, languidly opening them. “There’s a lot left, so it’s going to be a little bit. I just… I don’t know; I’m not feeling it.”

“Not feeling it…?”

“Yeah. That’s why I invited you over, so I could maybe rev myself back up. And it really worked. I totally recharged my batteries yesterday, so I figured I’d go back to the hotel and just zip through the rest.”

“So…did you?”

“No, I was tired out, so I went right to sleep. My spirit was in maximum overdrive…but my body was like ‘nuh-uh!’ (·ω<)”

She stuck her tongue out in her best effort at a “tee-hee” pose.

“Yeah, um…” Miyako let out a dejected sigh. “Can you just ‘zip through’ it right now, please? Your energy’s back up after sleeping, isn’t it?”

“Well, about that… I had recharged my spirit gauge, but all that sleep just knocked it straight back down to zero.”

“Okay, look…”

“So let’s go out and have some fun so I can charge it back up again!”

“No.” Miyako almost snarled at the smiling Nayuta.

“Aww…”

“Don’t ‘aww’ me. You can play all you want to once you’re done writing.”

“Nyaaa… Well, I guess you’re right…”

Ever so reluctantly, Nayuta rolled over to the nightstand and picked up her phone.

“Okay, Myaa, lemme put my head on your lap.”

“Huh?”

“I wanna recharge myself while I write. You’re my power source.”

“How’s that work…? I mean, if it’ll make you do it, then fine, but…” Miyako sat back down on the bed, slapping a knee. “Come on.”

“Nya-ha-ha!”

Placing the back of her head on Miyako’s thighs, she began tapping away at her phone screen. It made Miyako wonder.

“Are you writing on that phone?”

“Uh-huh,” Nayuta said offhandedly with a nod.

“Really…? You aren’t playing a game or something?”

“No, really.” She gave Miyako a disgruntled look and showed her the screen. It displayed a text editor filled with her work in progress.

“Oh, you are…”

“Hee-hee! I can write with just about anything. A computer, a palmtop, a phone, pencil and paper… And it’s just about the same speed across all of them.”

“Huh.” Miyako squinted at the proud Nayuta. “Impressive…but if you have to be naked to write, I don’t see how useful that is.”

“Hee-hee! Your thighs are so comfy, Myaa.”

“Yeah, great, thanks.”

It was with slow, measured strokes that Nayuta began tapping away at her phone, and in time, the emotion drained away from her face, her blue eyes focused solely on the screen. Miyako couldn’t see it from her angle, but she definitely spotted the supersonic speeds her finger was now moving at. She was in full writing mode now.

Taking care not to disrupt her, Miyako reached for her own phone and sent a message to Yamagata.

Looks like she’ll have it finished soon. She’s writing on her phone, so don’t contact her.

After a few moments: All right. Thanks.

Nayuta wrapped up around two hours later. She briskly attached it to an e-mail and sent it off to Yamagata—no body text, nothing in the subject line.

“Good work, Nayu.”

“Hyaaaah…”

Nayuta erupted in a self-satisfied yawn as she tossed her phone away, head still on Miyako’s lap. Then she lifted up her arms and began kneading Miyako’s breasts.

“Whoa?! What’re you doing?!”

“Hee-heeeee. Chargin’ you back up, Myaa.”

“Ugh…”

She sighed but allowed Nayuta to do whatever she wanted, patting her head as she did her work and focusing her eyes. It wasn’t a bad sensation.

“Well, thanks to you, I’m all done. Too bad you couldn’t be my editor.”

“I’m just a temp, pretty much.” Miyako grinned a bit, then lowered her voice. “But…what don’t you like about Yamagata, Nayu?”

“Huh?” came the quiet reply. “I don’t hate her or anything.”

“No? Then why didn’t you just contact her?”

“Mmm, ’cause she’s annoying. She’ll just needle me for my submission. It’s not like chatting with my editor’s gonna make me finish any faster.”

“But you don’t know that, do you? Maybe talking with her could give you some good ideas.”

“Mmm… I dunno…”

There was a trace of self-doubt on Nayuta’s face.

“Is it, like…you have trouble trusting her?”

“Not really.” Nayuta closed her eyes, and the emotion left her voice. “It’s not a matter of trust, really. I don’t have anything against my editor, and it’s not that I don’t trust her. I’m just…not expecting much from her.”

Not expecting much. In a way, Miyako thought, that was even crueler than hating or mistrusting her. It was the same as dismissing her out of hand, really. Their relationship wasn’t even worthy of “like” or “hate.”

“Personally speaking, as long as my editor corrects my typos and stuff, that’s enough for me. Seeing Itsuki and Mr. Toki carry on all day like they do… To be honest, I don’t really understand that. If Ms. Yamagata harangued me about this and that the way Mr. Toki seems to do, I’d probably just want her to get out of my way.”

Miyako had nothing to say. There was no advice an average person like her could offer Nayuta Kani, a genius in a gift-wrapped package.

That night, at a traditional izakaya bar near the editorial office, the staff held a combination welcome party for Miyako and general post-work boozeathon.

Eight members of the GF Bunko staff were on hand, along with Miyako. The edit team had another part-timer on staff, a twenty-three-year-old woman who’d been working for GF for the past year or so as she looked for a more permanent career, but she was never one to go to these things, apparently. “Sorry I can’t be there for your welcome,” she said in apology, before adding a whispered “…Be careful!” at the end.

Once everyone had their drinks, editor in chief Godo, seated adjacent to Miyako, stood up.

“Okay… Well, let me introduce Miyako Shirakawa to you all once more. Starting today, we’ll be seeing her on a regular basis. And as you all probably know by now, on her very first day, she managed the incredible feat of extracting a completed manuscript from Nayuta Kani herself…!”

“Whoaaa!”

“Seriously?”

“Daaang!”

The cheers and applause from the audience seemed honestly heartfelt to Miyako.

“So here’s to a new hire that I think we can definitely count on. Ready? Cheers!”

The editors clinked their glasses with their nearby neighbors and got straight down to the business of drinking. Miyako played along, taking a gulp from her draft beer. The chill from the beer, along with the carbonation, filled her mouth and ran down her throat. Itsuki and Haruto always popped open a lot of unique, tasty beers from overseas whenever they hung out, but Miyako still had an affinity for the good old lager beer drunk most often in Japan, especially in hot summers. It went great with the small cup of cubed tuna stew served to everyone at the table as an appetizer.

“Mmm! Not a bad drinker.” Watching Miyako chug down half her glass with one swig, the adjacent Godo flashed her a threatening, mafia boss–style grin over his sake. “You drink a lot of beer?”

“Well, kind of… Fuwa brings a lot of imported beer over, so…”

“Aha. What about sake?”

“Um… I like it a lot, actually.”

“Mm-hmm…hee-hee…”

That reply seemed to please Godo even further, but it made Miyako break into a cold sweat. The wider and deeper his smile, the scarier he looked.

“…You want a sake cup?” he asked, offering her one.

“…Oh, sure, thank you.”

A selection of sashimi had just arrived at the table, so she leaped at the opportunity. Godo filled the cup as she grabbed one of the tuna cubes in her bowl and took in a mouthful of chilled sake. A faint sweetness and acidity spread across her tongue. She could feel the aroma of high-quality rice rising up from her mouth to her nose.

“Ooh… This is good,” she commented honestly. She had noticed, as of late, that she both enjoyed alcoholic beverages and had a decently high tolerance for them. Whenever she was drinking with Itsuki and Haruto, or with her university buddies for that matter, she was still fully conscious even after other people passed out or got wasted, and she never got hungover.

Suddenly, Godo bowed his head at her. “You really saved our asses today. Thank you. I really mean it.”

“Oh, no,” the bashful Miyako replied. “All I did was go to Nayu’s room and have her finish that book up.”

“Heh… You have no idea what kind of monumental feat you just pulled off. We were all but expecting to delay it… I wasn’t anticipating such a last-minute miracle.” His grin was almost maniacal at this point.

“Um,” Miyako began, “does Nayu’s writing schedule always fall out of whack like this?”

“On the deadline-blowing scale, Kani is basically Satan. We pretty much always miss the real Deadline every time.”

The Deadline, unlike the normal deadlines put in place to allow for a little breathing room, was a border that, if crossed, guaranteed a painful sales delay.

“What’s the…deadline-blowing scale?”

“We rate authors on a scale of one to five based on how well they stick to deadlines. If you’re a wonderful person who submits your manuscripts a month or more ahead of when you need to, that’s the Angel level. Fuwa is an Angel.”

“Huh.”

“If you aren’t as fast as an Angel but always submit before the regular deadline, you’re at Knight level. That’s where most of society lies, but for some reason, you don’t see this much with writers. The majority are in the next level, Peasant—that’s when you blow the first deadline, but make it in by the second or third, generally between a few days and two weeks of the original one. Then, if you stick it out until the Deadline every time, that makes you a Demon. Hashima hangs around that level.”

“Okay…”

Miyako recalled how Toki had dragged him into that basement room at the end of one recent project.

“But the worst of the worst are the people who always, always, blow right through the big Deadline, no matter how much time you put into their schedule. That’s a Satan. The word deadline isn’t even in their dictionary. They are the release-lineup apocalypse. They’re such a delay-triggering risk, it’s hard to even assign release dates to them, so figuring out when to bring on the illustrator and designer is another enormous hassle. And normally, we’d cut these delinquent authors the first chance we have, but it’s always the biggest bestsellers, the people your label can’t do without, that turn into Satans on you. Maybe it’s having enough money that not putting out a book doesn’t affect you so much anymore. I don’t know.”

“Sounds like quite a headache.”

“It can be. Also, sometimes you have what’re called Fallen Angels. These are the ones who keep submitting volumes before you even set deadlines for them, faster than any normal editor can cope with. A real famous example is Kma Kchi over at Dki Bunko.”

“Whoa…”

Whether this was really useful or not, Miyako appreciated hearing this insider talk.

“So what that means is, on your first mission ever, you killed Satan, you know what I mean? I’ve got to know what you did to achieve that.”

“Well, honestly, I didn’t do much of anything. All I did was promise her we could go out and have some fun once she finished.”

Godo observed her intently but said no more. Which was good. Because Miyako really didn’t want to go into the whole resting-on-my-naked-lap thing, if she could help it.

Even with the final train out of the neighborhood due to arrive, the drinking party showed no signs of wrapping up. In fact, everyone was so well hammered that time was no longer even a minor concern. Kenjiro Toki, after pulling an all-nighter twenty-four hours ago, got smashed almost immediately.

Godo, meanwhile, was talking a mile a minute as he continued at the same measured sake-drinking pace. Miyako tried to lend an ear to him, nodding and giving an “uh-huh” now and then, but eventually he started repeating himself, prattling on even when Miyako excused herself to visit the bathroom. Oh, she finally realized, he isn’t really talking to me. He’s just totally hammered. So after a while, she just let Godo be her audio background as she took in the rest of the party.

“…You see all these remarks on the net about ‘Oh, light novels are nothing but this these days or nothing but that these days,’ but if you look at the data over the past thirty years, it’s always been diverse. There’s never been a period where you could definitively say it was any one thing. People say ‘Ooh, the titles are all four nonsensical syllables thrown together,’ ‘Ooh, it’s all really bitchy heroines who fall for the hero,’ ‘Ooh, it’s all school harem fantasies,’ ‘Ooh, it’s all stupidly long titles,’ ‘Ooh, it’s all titles that make up fancy new readings for old Chinese characters,’ ‘Ooh, it’s all God-mode heroes,’ ‘Ooh, it’s all regular people ending up in fantasy worlds,’ but even in the most notorious eras for all those things, there were always tons of titles that weren’t that. So why do all these casual accusations keep gaining headway? Is it because a lot of people are idiots who don’t know much about the industry, don’t bother checking the stats, and just give their own vague assumptions? Is it the general public’s regrettable tendency to abandon critical thought and toss around the baseless conclusions they’ve made instead? Yes, those are factors, of course. But you know who created that so-called conventional wisdom in the first place? You know who it was? It was me. It was us. If you’re somebody who doesn’t interact with this business too much, all you see are the major movements, the trends. So if you see a few standout titles that get released all at once, even if they’re a tiny percentage of overall output, these clueless idiots go ‘Oh, light novels are all about this.’ If there’s a groundbreaking new title that does this or that with the genre, we make an effort to produce more titles like that. That’s how we create hits. If there’s just one wannabe novel modeled after a previous successful one, that’s a rip-off; if there’s two or three or four, that’s a genre. And a new genre means a new market for us. We’re the ones creating these genres, these movements, these images, this atmosphere, these trends. This whole era! We’re at the front lines of light novels, a great force creating the era we live in… That is the GF Bunko editorial department! We, ourselves, are the epitome of ‘light novels these days’!!”

But even as Godo was drinking and mumbling his speech to himself, Miyako was planting the seeds for her next move.

“Hey, uh, I better get home soon. I’d feel kinda bad for being the first one to leave my own welcome party, but…”

Kirara Yamagata, who had been soberly working on her notebook PC at the edge of the table, approached to offer a helping hand. “Yeah, head on back. You don’t want to miss the last train.”

“…Are you sure?”

“What’s it matter?” Yamagata cast a judgmental eye toward the drunkards in the room. “They’re just using you as an excuse to drink anyway. Nobody’s gonna care. In fact, the sooner you escape, the better, or else you’re gonna see some things you wish you hadn’t.”

Miyako raised her eyebrows.

“Things…?”

“Boss! Oh, boss, that’s so amazing! Lemme show you my ‘great force’!”

One of the younger editors was now screaming across the room, his cheeks fully reddened as he began to clumsily take off his pants.

“Uh…?!”

By the time Miyako audibly gasped, his pants were low enough that his ass was fully visible.

“Ahh! What, what is he doing?!”

She covered her eyes with one hand as she blushed, trying her best to avoid the detestable sight.

“…You see?” Yamagata asked, blushing a bit herself as she trundled Miyako out of the building. “Let’s go.”

But even on the way out, they could hear more of the editors disrobing, a harried manager shouting “Gentlemen, please, stop!” and their editor in chief replying “We will stop nothing! Take it all off, boys!”

“…This is how our staff parties usually turn out,” Yamagata deadpanned once they were safely on the sidewalk. “They’ll get kicked out soon, so they’ll just move their debauchery over to some karaoke place. Every time.”

“Wow. Pretty trashy.”

“Totally,” she replied, eagerly nodding her agreement.

Now Miyako knew. This must’ve been what that advice to “be careful” meant.

“But anyway, Shirakawa,” she continued, “thanks for helping me today. I think we can actually get this book out on time.”

“Oh no, I… I hope you can wrap it up, Ms. Yamagata.”

Miyako couldn’t help but honestly pity her. Waiting for the manuscript all night, finally getting it in the early afternoon, then having to work until the wee hours checking it—this was a clear-cut case of employee abuse.

“Is it always this hard, being an editor?”

“Not always, no. Pretty often, yes, but…”

“Wow… That’s so rough.”

She had used that term several times today, but it was frankly the only word that seemed to fit.

“Well,” Yamagata said as she began walking toward the office, “see you tomorrow.”

“Wait, are you going back to the office again?”

“Uh-huh,” she said, pausing just long enough to nod back at the shocked Miyako.

“Um, good luck…”

There was no reply. Miyako just watched her exhausted frame totter away. It was the end of her first day on the job, and the one thought she brought home with her that night was:

…Editorial work might be a lot harder than I thought.