THE AUTHOR, THE AFTERWORD, AND YOU!

Everyone has one or two things they can’t tell anyone else…but in terms of having secrets, I feel like not many people really have things that they must hide from everyone.

Look up “secret” in the Japanese dictionary, and one of the latter definitions you’ll see is “the esoteric teachings left hidden by Buddha.” This is known as mikkyo, or esoteric Buddhism—and based on that, you can interpret a “secret” to mean something that, whether kept hidden or revealed, can impact however many people are located around the secret.

If you turn a person’s life around and look over the whole of it, I feel like you won’t find many things where it really mattered whether a person kept parts of their life a secret or revealed them. Generally, most things you’d want to hide are the regrets or underhanded dealings you engaged in during childhood or young adulthood. That, or more delicate things like your yearly salary or assets. Those things, however, don’t really have much impact on the people around you—and as long as the secrets don’t involve illegal or salacious matters, all revealing them does is change that person’s view of it. It doesn’t bother others too much.

In the end, the only thing you can really call a “secret” in one’s day-to-day life is who’s in a relationship with whom, I think. Within a set group, a couple forming can have a huge impact on the rest of its members. The fact that such couples are often kept secret until the right time, out of concern over that potential impact, has a lot of meaning, I feel. After it’s revealed, the secret’s fated to be judged based on whether its concealment was a good thing or not—and the revelation that a secret existed at all has just as large of an impact.

If you’re looking for a secret bigger than that, I doubt you’ll find one that directly affects your life as much. In a good way, that secret could be the members of your national team, announced in advance of an international sports championship. In a bad way, it could be a company covering something up or a politician or bureaucrat’s corrupt dealings—really huge stuff like that.

So, looking back on my own life, I, Wagahara, have been able to keep many secrets thanks to my readers. No, not about what the future holds for the story… I’m talking about my release dates.

Going forward, even though I have a plot in place, there are a lot of things that don’t go according to plan once I actually start writing, so much of it remains an unknown to me. Not knowing, of course, doesn’t count as a secret. Concealing a release date, however, has great meaning for obvious reason, whether it’s kept secret or revealed for commercial reasons. The moment the release date becomes “TBD” and the author says, “Be patient and keep an eye out,” the impact on the author and everyone around them is truly immeasurable.

So I’ve now gone on for quite a while about this inscrutable stuff, but what I’m really trying to say is that I’m sorry so much time has passed since the last volume was released. Getting The Devil Is a Part Timer!, Vol. 19 out, and getting to reveal just a few of the secrets behind the story, comes as a great relief to me. When is the next release date, and when will a few more secrets come out? I’d very much like to see it as soon—as soon—as possible. Right.

This is the story of people struggling to somehow face up to the secrets lurking in the subconscious of their daily lives. When they finally do, will the secrets be revealed, or concealed? I hope you’ll want to see the conclusions each character comes to within the story world.

I’ll see you all in the next volume! Until then!