KATANAGATARI 3
AFTER(S)WORD
In real life, a person of inferior powers taking down a person of superior powers, or a person of superior powers getting taken out by a person of inferior powers, is perhaps not very common, but it is by no means rare. The eventual winner and loser are not always obvious right off the bat, and sudden reversals and major upsets happen with surprising frequency. Thinking this over, most of the time, it points to something overlooked in your initial observations, meaning that the person you thought was superior is actually the weaker one, and the person you thought inferior the stronger one. This turning of the tables can be pretty moving for anyone on the sidelines. Saying “whoever should win will win, no ifs ands or buts, and no reason to overanalyze things” would be going way too far, but we certainly have a tendency to think this way nowadays. We expect the stronger person to win, and so we have no reason to applaud them, and expect the weaker person to lose, and as such see no need to blame them; if the stronger person wins, that makes them lazy, but if the weaker person wins, then it’s a miracle. To a certain degree, yes, but in seeing things this way, the simple facts of winning and losing become entangled with some truly complicated implications. Being seen as strong can be a handicap, while being taken for a weakling can turn into an opportunity for victory. Turned around, I guess this points to the idea that true strength has the ability to brush away the aforementioned implications.
The present volume constitutes Book Nine of Katanagatari. Book Nine, already? At this point there are just a few books left, which is to say that there are only three months left in the journey of Togame the Schemer and Shichika Yasuri, Seventh Master of the Kyotoryu, and as their author, I can already tell this is going to be a difficult goodbye. Starting off from Kyoto in January, they went to Tottori in February, Shimane in March, Yamaguchi in April, Kagoshima in May, Hokkaido in June, Kochi in July, Tokyo in August, and Yamagata in September. I’m now realizing we’ve been all over Japan. It’s already decided where the two of them will travel in the next three months, but it seems like the plot is becoming quite intricate. Speaking genuinely here, I didn’t have the highest hopes of this series working out, but now that I’ve got the hang of it, I find myself three quarters of the way through a twelve-book project. This in and of itself is a reversal or an upset of a kind, at least in terms of my low expectations for myself, but I’m absolutely dedicated to seeing this thing through. And now, I need to say for all to hear that take’s illustrations of Zanki Kiguchi are absolutely heavenly. I feel the need to respond in kind, but that’s something for another day.
Three more books!
NISIOISIN