Afterword

Demon City Shinjuku may well have met its most dangerous enemies ever.

Vampires.

These three (Kikiou is a different species of immortal) are not ordinary vampires. They are messengers of the night, thousands of years old and in possession of untold powers.

Even the combined forces of Setsura Aki and Doctor Mephisto may not be enough to resist them, as when Mephisto’s fortress-like hospital is easily penetrated without the perpetrators breaking a sweat.

Creating a heroic, vampire-themed, supernatural battle has long been a dream of mine. I don’t think a vampire story has been depicted in quite this way before. That’s not the sole reason, but the originally planned two volumes have soared past a thousand pages.

Ideas bubbled out of my head one after the other, and I couldn’t bring myself to discard any of them. The story has evolved enormously and the number of characters keeps growing. Keeping all those balls in the air from installment to installment is a big challenge.

But fear not. Everything will be resolved in its own good time. The light at the end of the tunnel isn’t an oncoming train. I’m not one for meaningless endings. The road ahead may look bleak, but you can trust me on this.

The one person qualified to challenge that claim is my editor, Mr. T. On occasion, a serialization scheduled to run a hundred and thirty pages has run into a brick wall after fifty or seventy. At times like that, Mr. T is wont to shout, “Man, I’m out of here!”

“Let’s take that long walk off a short pier together then.”

“Ah, this sofa is stained with the blood, sweat and tears of your poor editor,” he blusters, in a mixture of intimidation and resignation.

But looking at him out of the corner of my eye, I catch a glittering premonition of developments that will far exceed anything we could expect or imagine if left to our own devices.

To start with, my dedication to the material is completely different. I really love my vampires. Even more than the infamous Miss Toya.

More than in any other previous work I’ve committed to novel form, I’ve been breathing new life into the old-school monsters you used to see in the movies, as the haunted atmosphere of Demon City Shinjuku turns into its own worst enemy.

This city exists if for no other reason than to tell the story of Yashakiden.

So to Mr. T and my readers I say, relax. I promise you that Yashakiden will succeed as a story unequaled in its class. Lost in the midst of the labyrinth, the mists of Transylvania swirling around me, I resolve to press forward, with hope and confidence as my sole sidearms.

But even when I put the final volume to bed, will that be the end of the tale?

Hideyuki Kikuchi (while watching The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires)

May 28, 1989