Afterword

It’s been a while. Yuki Yaku here.

Thanks to all the support from you, my dear readers, the second volume of Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki has successfully been published. I am truly grateful.

This series has marked the beginning of my life as a working writer, albeit an imperfect one. I’ve learned that a great number of adults are involved in improving what I’ve written in order to get it out into the world, which has made me want to repay the debt in some way, and it all seems to depend on how well I write this afterword. In addition, after reading the afterword of Volume 1, in which I discussed Hinami’s thighs, my editor kindly told me he was “hoping for an afterword written from a more objective perspective.” I get the feeling that was a warning.

In light of those two considerations, I naturally arrived at my topic for this section: the knot in Mimimi’s shirt in the second color illustration of this volume.

When I saw that knot, I felt that Mimimi perhaps existed in our own world. It may have been a hallucination of some kind, but the feeling was real.

Of course, the suggestion of her belly button and slender waist and the curving lines evoked by the overall drawing were appealing as well, but I felt there was something more important going on in this picture.

That is, the knot itself.

The presence of the knot indicates that after putting on her track clothes, she took the initiative of tying the hem of her shirt. In other words, the knot contains her intentions.

It communicates to the viewer that Mimimi is among the real-world female high school students who knot their gym uniforms, giving her a powerful presence. With regard to this particular illustration, we might even say that the knot itself is Mimimi.

Due to space limitations, I’ve had to keep this discussion brief, but I hope my feelings have come across at least a little.

And now for the acknowledgments.

To my illustrator, Fly-san, thank you for gracing this book with the best illustrations I could imagine: cute, beautiful, charming, and even fetching. I’m a fan.

To Iwasawa-san, my editor, you called my habit of being inordinately picky about tiny things “annoying” back in Volume 1, but I feel that you’ve begun, ever so slightly, to get used to it. Please keep that up. Thank you.

And to all my readers, thank you for lending your support to a first book by a new writer you didn’t know from a hole in the wall. I hope you’ll join me for the next volume.

Yuki Yaku