Afterword

Hello, hello. Light novel author Sakaki here.

I’m an itinerant author, plying my trade at one publisher and then another. This book is my first work for Kodansha. Which only makes sense, since it’s one of their launch titles (hah).

So, on the subject of this book, Outbreak Company: The Power of Moe. I’ve actually had the basic idea for the story in my mind for quite some time. I was wracking my brain to come up with some sort of fantasy setting, and since I’m a little twisted myself, I didn’t hit on your regular swords-and-sorcery adventure. Instead I started to wonder: What would be the strangest way to approach a fantasy world?

Ever since I started writing novels, dragons have been basically boss characters in fantasy settings. But I thought to myself that if a dragon showed up today, the army would just shoot it full of rockets and that would be the end of it. So I thought about telling the story of a dragon who found himself in the modern world.

With that in mind, I started to think of things that would seem strange in a fantasy setting, and one of the things that drifted through my head was “a company.” Wouldn’t it be weird, I thought, if you had a company (maybe even a publicly traded one!) staffed by elves, dwarves, lizardmen, and the like? And wouldn’t it be even weirder if that company’s specialty was manga? The ideas kept flowing and ultimately resulted in this book.

Both our modern world and the annals of history attest that when people and cultures encounter something totally unprecedented, near-chemical changes take place, often in very unexpected ways. How would the entertainment of our own world fare in another? I suspect it would be transformed in surprising ways. I hope my readers will follow these changes with interest, just like the main characters do.

Ichiro Sakaki

27 Oct 2011