POSTSCRIPT

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The setting of the Vampire Hunter D series sprang from my greatest love—movies. The wild Frontier through which D wanders isn’t Transylvania, but rather the Great Plains of American westerns. The sheriffs of my westerns are the lawmen, the houses are connected by elevated plank sidewalks, and the towns’ residents wear swords on their hips instead of guns. However, there is no Castle Dracula out on the Great Plains. Vampire Hunter D is a direct descendant of Hammer Films’ horror movies, so the European castles, towns, and villages depicted in those films were incorporated into the backdrop of the D series.

I didn’t intend to make D’s story a horror tale set in the future. Well, at its core, the story isn’t far from horror, but at that time, horror wasn’t the kind of product to pull in readers. The target audience of the Asahi Sonorama Library line was teenagers. But the young have the instinctive ability to evade the true fear that horror brings. At the same time, they’re interested in the future and the technology that will accompany it. The only field of literature to incorporate that is science fiction. In this manner, the Vampire Hunter D series became the half-breed child of horror and science fiction. Just as its protagonist is himself a half-breed.

The character of D came from a compilation of all the things that are commonly considered virtues in a man: he’s taciturn and strong, gentle beneath a cold exterior, handsome, and tall, plus he looks good in black. However, on further consideration, that doesn’t seem like the sort of man who’d be very good company, does it? As far as fashion was concerned, I decided to have him in a double-breasted, long coat with high boots and long gloves. I never considered giving him a cape. Putting someone with vampire blood into a black cape would be too easy. Too expected. Therefore I had him in a coat, although in that respect he’s like the handsome hero of one of my other series, Setsura Aki from “Makai Toshi.” Though lacking a longsword, a wide-brimmed traveler’s hat, and a cyborg horse, the man-searcher armed with a mysterious titanium wire that can slice through steel certainly has the same superhuman blood in his veins that D does. However, as readers are no doubt aware, D can’t be mentioned without a black cape springing to mind. This is due to the power of Yoshitaka Amano’s brush. The “coat” in the text was forever altered by one of Mr. Amano’s cover illustrations. The strength of pictures is incredible. Incidentally, the most faithful illustration Mr. Amano has done is the cover to the fourth book, Tale of the Dead Town.

Thanks to the film Twilight being a big hit, the live-action version of Vampire Hunter D that’s been stalled for some time looks like it’s starting to move forward at last. As the creator of the series, my curiosity is boundless as to just how D will strike readers when he appears before them as a real actor and how those same readers will greet him. Twin-Shadowed Knight is a tale that was born from the simple speculation of what it’d be like if there were two such Ds. I hope you thoroughly enjoyed it.

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Hideyuki Kikuchi

May 23, 2009

while watching Count Dracula