Afterword
Afterword—When The World Ends
(Dramatic title, but there’s no deep meaning to it.)
Not to jump right into it, but have you ever gotten so worked up you lost your cool and then totally had it blow up in your face? I have. So many times…both when I was really happy and when I was absolutely furious. The checks on both emotions fail, and the results are…often not worth mentioning. The result is usually me being deeply embarrassed, and looking around for a hole to hide in. But when that happens, I find myself thinking something crazy—“Oh, if only the world would just end right now!” But man, no matter how pathetic I am, that’s no excuse for bringing the world down with me. In hindsight, that’s perfectly clear, but at the time, I always mean it, and I think that’s pretty bad.
But will the world actually end? I had my doubts, but if you look into it a little, you can easily find the answer. If that surprises you, well, you learned something today. Humans have been around for tens of thousands of years, and the world has ended a number of times already. More accurately, we’ve overcome what was believed to be the end of the world a number of times, but for the people involved at the time, their world certainly did end. Like, this even happened in Japan! The world of the “Unbroken Imperial Line” ended. (If you don’t get what that means, ask someone else.) Even this guy named Bradbury wrote a short story about a Native American boy scared by the sight of men with white skin arriving on boats, and called it “Perhaps We Are Going Away.” (If you don’t know it, ask your nearest old-school sci-fi fanboy.)
“That’s not the end of the world! That’s just the end of a country or a culture!” you say, being clever. But when we say ‘the world’ don’t we mean ‘the part of it we live in’? And if that’s overturned, then isn’t that the same as the world ending? “But things start up again,” you think, but doesn’t that just show that when the world ends, we get a do-over? The real meaning of “History repeats itself” is “What happens happens, no use fussing.” I mean, if we couldn’t try again, then every time in history a world ended, it would have ended for good, and then what would be the point of putting in all the work to make a world in the first place? You didn’t think of the world as the set in a monster movie, just there to get stomped to bits, did you?
An end comes to all things. We can’t stop it. The trick to it is to figure out what to do next, and to do that in a world that’s busy ending. But since we don’t live in a world where a monster will conveniently come along to destroy it for us, we have to be the ones who end things, who destroy things. So if you ever mess up so bad you want to destroy the world you live in out of sheer embarrassment, that’s where you have to start. We’ve got a long road ahead of us, hunh?
(Don’t you ever get discouraged, writing stuff like this?)
(…quite frequently, yes.)
(………w-well, cool, I guess?)
BGM “Come With Me” by Puff Daddy (featuring Jimmy Page)
About the Author
Born in 1968, Kouhei Kadono grew up uncertain about his direction in life. He spent a considerable portion of his early years frittering away his youth before somehow ending up writing novels.
In 1997, Kadono-sensei’s first Boogiepop novel, Boogiepop and Others, took First Place in the Media Works’ Dengeki Game Novel Contest. Early the following year, the novel was released to widespread acclaim and ignited the Japanese “light novel” (young adult) trend. Since that time, Kadono-sensei has written thirteen Boogiepop novels and several related works such as the Beat’s Discipline short story collection and the two Boogiepop manga series entitled Boogiepop Doesn’t Laugh and Boogiepop Dual. In its entirety, the Boogiepop series has seen over two million copies in print and spawned a live action movie and a hit anime series.
In addition to the Boogiepop universe, Kadono-sensei’s body of literary work includes a wide array of fantasy and mystery novels such as the Jiken, Soul Drop, Limited World and Night Watch series.
About the Illustrator
Born in 1970, a native of Osaka, Kouji Ogata spent his early twenties struggling to get enough credits to graduate from Osaka Design School. In late 1996, Ogata-sensei was commissioned by Media Works to illustrate the first Boogiepop novel, Boogiepop and Others.
At the time, Ogata-sensei was simply a rising star with a distinctive, eye-catching art style, but he was gradually able to further hone his artistic skills with each subsequent work. His watercolor-style paneling seen in the two-volume Boogiepop Doesn’t Laugh manga series was a particularly high point of his early career.
In addition to providing illustrations for novels and manga, Ogata-sensei has been involved with supplying character designs for anime productions including Boogiepop Phantom, Spirit, and Gin-iro no kami no Agito.
In his free time, he enjoys motorcycles, tennis, and remote-controlled models.