City Series:Volume7 Afterword
Afterword[edit]
The long wait is over and the Tokyo compilation is here.
I have all of you to thank for letting me put this out in this form. Thank you so much.
I wrote most of the background information in the Origins of Tokyo section, but you can probably see this was a story I just had to do eventually.
I really am grateful that you all kept reading it the entire time.
The project idea for Tokyo began with wanting to do a somewhat different approach to an illustration novel.
I was already doing Image City – SF in Dengeki hp when it began, so it was started with the intent of being different visually from that.
In other words, SF is an illustration novel where the illustrations are front and center and Tokyo is an illustration novel with a focus on the page layout and other design elements.
It’s up to you readers to decide if that worked, but this is what we came up with.
I hope you will all remember this story that took the bizarre form of 120 memories.
Now, I have a lot of page space this time, so time for a longer chat.
“Did you read it? Or rather, have you been reading it?”
“Yeah, I read it. What magazine was it in again?”
“Are you familiar with Dengeki hp?”
“Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Are you sure you read it?”
“I read it, idiot. This is the one where, um…wait, I didn’t read it!!”
“You gave up fast.”
“Honesty is the best policy. Did you know that? Bet you didn’t.”
“Then call up your parents and tell them you lied about working for a securities company and that you’re actually a writer.”
“I can’t tell them that. They’d worry. Filial piety takes precedence over honesty. Do you know how to write the kanji for filial piety?”
“Take a child, slash them diagonally, and bury them under the dirt.”[1]
“That’s the same joke you made last time! Shameful! At least say the parent is stomping on the dirt from above or something.”
“You’re the one that asked the same question twice. Now, do you know how to write the kanji for parent?”
“Standing on a tree to do some peeping.”[2]
“That’s quite the parent. Anyway, let’s actually talk about Tokyo.”
“La la la! I can’t hear you!”
“You’re even less cooperative than I’d heard. Can I ask about a cringe story from your schooldays that N told me about?”
“Idiot. I was a studious kid who spent his schooldays doing ordinary, average stuff, so I don’t have any cringe stories.”
“When the Buddhism Research Club was trying to recruit new members, is it true you wrote ‘Rise up, ignorant masses!’ on a signboard and set up on the fence around the school and that got the club shut down?”
“Ow, ow, ow, ow! N-no fair using a college story!”
“Then how about a high school one? When your English proficiency test proctor asked a highly personal question like ‘What is your hobby?’, is it true you wrote down ‘I am hobby’ and then walked out of the room yourself?”
“Ow, ow, ow, ow! My past is ambushing me? I was so young. So very young.”
“Oh? Didn’t you say just the other day you tried to eat an entire mandarin orange in a single bite on a dare from your wife and you ended up spitting it out like an artillery shell? You’re such a young father.”
“M-my wife betrayed me! I see now why the kanji for wife is written as ‘there’s a kunoichi in your house’!!”[3]
“I’m going to ignore your lame excuses. Oh, but your wife did say your complete inability to think anything through is cute.”
“Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow! That one hurt way more than the others!”
“She’s behind you right now, isn’t she?”
“Yeah, and she has no idea this is what I’m writing. But she did peek over my shoulder when I was writing an article the other day and asked who thought up the term ‘mufufu’. Answer me that, trivia king.”
“I think Yasuda Hitoshi used it at around ’84 in Login. Can’t tell you if it was ever used before that.”
“How the hell do you have an answer for that!? And even I’m starting to feel a bit rude, so I guess I’ll ask: what’s Tokyo about?”
“It’s about us in the past.”
“Wow, that is awful. Actually, I don’t know that much about your past.”
“You don’t? Whew, dodged a bullet there.”
“Weren’t you and your friends the kind of people to sneak into the school at night for airsoft battles or to swim in the pool, to race a motorcycle gang in your bicycles, and to readily jump down from the 2nd floor of the school? And didn’t a friend of yours get overcharged at a yakuza yakiniku place, couldn’t pay, got caught, went to pay off his debt, and got complimented by the yakuza while they gave him a receipt? I want nothing to do with any of you.”
“Y-you say some hurtful things, you know? I barely did any of that stuff. I saw most of it happen though.”
“Oh, really? Weren’t you the one who stuffed the top and bottom of his track suit full of newspaper and dropped it from the roof, causing a panic at your school?”
“I was so young. So very young.”
“Oh? And who was it that nearly froze to death recently by lying on the roof in a sleeping bag to watch the meteor shower?”
“I did not ‘nearly freeze to death’. I only lost feeling in my hands and feet.”
“That’s the same thing, idiot. I hope they don’t find you until spring.”
“Honestly, it was a valuable experience. The scariest part was climbing down the ladder from the roof. And when I got back to my room, my mouth was trembling so much my voice sounded really funny.”
“Is that what Tokyo is about?”
“Kind of, actually.”
Okay, let’s call it there.
Anyway, my background music while writing up the commentary was Naive by the Barbee Boys. I listened to that back when I wrote the initial stories and it was on Listen, the very first CD I ever bought. (But if you see the afterword as the ending, I guess a better ending theme would be Boku no Mori by Yusa Mimori. That song was on Harumoni Odeon, an all-time great album if you ask me.)
When I read through this again, the question on my mind was, “Who was the #1 me?”
Anyway, look forward to my future books.
February 2004. A morning with a beautiful moon.
-Kawakami Minoru
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