Afterword

To my supervisor: Thank you very much for helping me fix all of the things I did poorly.

To An2A, who did the illustrations: I never thought my humble prose could spawn such beautiful drawings. Thank you. I think even if the story hadn’t been any good, this book might still have sold based on the strength of the art.

To all my readers who supported the version of this story published on the web: It’s because of your feedback that my story got to be nominated for a novel award. Thank you.

To my martial arts master who taught me the basics, and all my practice partners: Thank you. I know this story only features pseudo martial arts, but I think about one-hundredth of what you taught me came in handy.

And thank you to everyone who worked together to see this book published. Never in my wildest dreams did I think this would happen for a story I wrote. I owe it all to the endless help you gave me. Thank you.

A pleasure to meet you. My name is Tsuyoshi Fujitaka. This is my first novel. Thank you for reading. Starting with a thank you is a bit contrarian, I suppose... I’m sorry.

I went to an engineering high school, so I never thought I’d have a job in the publishing industry. Life is a funny thing sometimes.

Yeah, I guess the things I studied weren’t useful at all. What was I thinking? My club was the Physics Club, and that wasn’t useful at all, either. Despite being called the Physics Club, it was actually mostly about creating amateur radios. Though I don’t remember ever touching a radio in that club... Huh? Then what did we do? ...It appears we just played games on the computers in the club room...

By the way, it seems I’m the second person from my high school who became a writer.

The rough draft of this work was sent in to the aspiring novelist site, Shosetsuka ni Naro!, nominated for the 7th HJ Bunko awards, and was revised after winning first prize there.

Thanks to the many people (mostly while it was still on the web) who gave feedback about this work, the content has expanded by about 30%.

I was very satisfied to provide new content for those who had read it on the web previously, so I hope you gave it a try instead of just saying, “I’ve read it already.” For those of you who are thinking “More middle school syndrome jokes?!” I hope you’ll read it and realize that our humor is a little different than the usual. There are almost no jokes about “the Dark History” or devil eyes.

Writing this book took just about all I had, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to write anymore. But if I do write another book, I hope I’ll see you then.

Thank you for reading.

Tsuyoshi Fujitaka