AFTERWORD

After a six-month break, I’ve finally managed to put out another paperback. In addition to the fact that my writing is naturally slow, I was moving to a new home and taking care of a dog and submitting a manuscript that got rejected and writing the script for a comic and making curry.

Hello, I’m Yukako Kabei. Thank you all so much for buying this book, whether you’ve been following the series or have just gotten interested now.

It’s been almost exactly six months since I moved, but just as I predicted in the previous volume’s afterword, I still have piles of cardboard boxes left unpacked—not that fulfilling that prediction is anything to boast about. I wonder when I’ll ever be able to break free of this “I’m just living here temporarily” feeling…By the way, my new apartment is right near a horrendously complicated five-way intersection, and there’s a lot of uproar. Even in the middle of the night, I often hear the sudden squeal of brakes outside my window, or the sirens of passing ambulances and patrol cars (strangely, there aren’t really any accidents at the intersection itself; I think this is because the little Jizo shrine there absorbs all the disaster). It has a whole different feel to it than the old apartment three buildings from the train tracks, and in atmosphere it’s like another face of a run-down city, so I actually like it more than you might expect.

This book, Kieli IV: Long Night Beside a Deep Pool, takes place a year and a half after Kieli III: Prisoners Bound for Another Planet. It’s a little different from the previous volumes, which have been set in bone-dry backdrops. This time the story has a high water content, with plenty of steamy—no, that’s not right—with plenty of soggy scenes. Once again, it’s a story about a girl with a complicated personality and a man with a tiresome personality, getting together and being separated, and about a man who’s tired of living finding meaning in life again…I think.

There are people with frustrated desires, or who are unaccounted for, or who don’t feel like talking about what’s happened to them, and there are plenty of things left unresolved; so I plan to continue Kieli a little longer. Though I have this anxious feeling that the moment I talk big like that, something will suddenly happen that makes it impossible to continue…

I hope you’ll be kind enough to follow my characters’ story for a while longer.

And my afterwords are starting to get totally repetitive, so this time I’d like to write something a little different…I’d like to, but my mind’s all clouded up with this cold I’ve caught, so I can’t think of anything…

Oh! I’ll use this space to make a little advertisement. There is now a Kieli comic featuring Taue-san’s wonderful artwork. It’s being serialized in Dengeki hp Issue No. 26 (released October 2003) through next year’s Issue No. 3. It’s a side story that’s not included in the novels, so it would make me very happy if you would enjoy it as a complement to these stories.

Now then, I know I say this every volume, but I received support from my editor and many other people in the production and publishing of this book. I hope I’m starting to cause you trouble less frequently…I hope…

To Taue-san, who once again graciously took on the job of providing a part of this book, drawing a sixteen-year-old Kieli that exactly matched my image of her, and a Harvey even more gloriously dilapidated than before. Thank you for always responding so amiably when I spam you with e-mails bragging about my dog.

To my family, friends, and acquaintances. Lately it seems as though the people around me are having a much harder time than I am, so I worry. I mean, I’m just bumbling through life reaping what I sow…I pray you’ll all have good fortune in 2004.

And, of course, I give my greatest thanks and wishes for good fortune to you who are holding this book in your hands. I hope we get a chance to meet again.

Yukako Kabei