Afterword
Afterword
HELLO, I’m Yohna. It’s a pleasure to meet you. I recently got married and took on the last name JIN. You write it with the kanji for kami, which means GOD. Cross Infinite World asked me to publish with them before I got married, so maybe I should have made my penname GOD Yohna. Just kidding!
Thank you very much for picking up a copy of The Violet Knight. I wrote this series with Japanese young women in mind, so I’m really worried whether people in the English-speaking community will enjoy it or not. I hope you enjoyed the first volume! I know this isn’t a super cutesy or overly happy story, so I’m full of gratitude toward everyone who took the time to read it.
This story has an interesting origin. This may just apply to Japan, but there are some people who have a job at a company but no work to do. Eight years ago that was me for two straight years.
I was aware of my own lack of knowledge, so I surfed through Wikipedia and read all about Persian Mythology and Romanian vampires. But I eventually got sick of doing that and figured it didn’t matter what I did as long as I faced the computer at my work desk, so I started writing The Violet Knight. At the time I was somewhere between Yuki and Luca’s age.
From there I eventually resigned to recuperate from an illness until today. I have continued to write the story over the past eight years whenever I could find a little time. I’m shocked to think about how a story I wrote completely as a hobby and as an escape from reality is going to be accessible by the whole world! I’m not even sure how many people that makes it available to compared to the 130 million people who speak Japanese.
When I looked it up on Google it said the world population is 7.4 billion! That’s more than fifteen times the amount of people I could reach with just Japanese! Just thinking that even a portion of that population is interested in novels for young women is like a dream come true! It fills me with happiness! Is this what they mean by the American Dream? If I can share my blessings at all, I know Japan’s birthrate is pretty terrible right now, so I want to give birth to enough kids to fill a baseball team!
Translating a Japanese novel into English is pretty hard. In my personal opinion, I created the original rough draft, Miss Messier is the author, and the readers are the ones who get to decide what’s good and bad about the work.
I used to be an actress. I will never forget the words of my former teacher at the time. They were, “The moment you put your work into the world it is no longer your work.”
I sent out The Violet Knight. As such, it is a work that has already left my hands. Even so, Miss Messier of the Cross Infinite World team complimented my work and recommended it for publication, so it’s thanks to her I got this far. What I originally wrote may not have been interesting, but I am certain Miss Messier made it easy to understand and a fun read.
By the way, which character do you like? I love Ain so much I can’t take it. I created a Twitter Bot. If you could tweet me which characters you like it would mean the world to me as an author. The Twitter Account is @god_yohna.
This is the last thing I’m writing about in this afterword, but The Violet Knight Light Novel series is a revised version of the Web Novel I have on my website. I did my best to make sure overseas fans can enjoy a revised version of my work, so please feel free to use the Web Novel version as comparison to study Japanese!
With much love to everyone who took the time to read this,
8/1/2016
