Chikasugiru Karera no, Juunanasai no Tooi Kankei [LN] V2 Chapter 6 Afterwords

Afterword

It has been a while. My name is Kudou Yuu, the author of this book.

I am writing this afterword at a time when I am relieved to have finished the author's proofreading and to have managed to reach the publication stage without any problems.

I had to go through a number of trial-and-error processes to get the right impression of this work, because every time I rewrote it, the slightest nuance in a single scene could change the overall impression. I think I spent the longest time revising sentences in any manuscript I have ever written.

Although this work, which was written as a youth novel, has elements of romance in it, I must confess that as a novel reader alone, I have never been a big fan of what is generally called romance novels. To be more precise, while there are some very favorite works that I have read over the years, I could never really get into many of them.

After giving some thought to why, it occurred to me that perhaps I was unfamiliar with certain exaggerated plot devices. When the element of romance is dramatized too much in a story, it becomes detached from real-life love, which is complicated, absurd, and sometimes surprisingly dull if you think about it calmly. Perhaps that is what made me feel uncomfortable.

With this in mind, in this novel, I wanted to write about the characters and the changes in their relationships in a way that would strongly connect them to the sensations of daily life, without over-romanticizing them.

I wrote something similar in the afterword to the previous volume, and for this reason, I was particularly careful in my descriptions. I personally believe that descriptive writing in a novel shows its charm when you write about familiar things, details that are usually overlooked.

To use a rather blunt example, if you write ten lines about a stone lying at your feet in a first-person novel, you are not only describing the stone's appearance, but you are also indirectly describing the intense interest or bizarre (psychological) state of the viewer who is staring at the stone at his/her feet with such attention to detail.

In this way, I believe that the text of a novel acquires its original charm not only by its direct meaning, but also by the expansion of the meaning contained behind it.

Anyway, I was strongly hoping to include many such mechanisms without too much interruption to the flow of the story, so that the novel would give readers the feeling of living together in the town where Yuriko lives, and in the house where Rina lives. I am happy if that attempt has been successful.

Since the space for the afterword is about to be full, the following are my acknowledgments.

Thank you very much, illustrator Kazuharu Kina, for your wonderful illustrations. The characters, including Rina and Yuriko, fit my image so perfectly that now I can think of no other illustration but Kazuharu's. In addition to the charm of each character itself, I really like the atmosphere created by the details, such as the way they wear their clothes with a sense of reality, the way they put their hair together, and their gestures. Thank you for expressing the world of this work in such an appealing way.

The editor in charge of this project, N-san, supported us in various aspects, such as setting the schedule and offer advice on the content of the project. Thank you for everything.

I was very grateful that this volume, which I thought would be one of the few light novels in terms of both subject matter and writing style, was received more favorably than I had expected. Thanks to the support of our readers, we are now in a position to continue the work for this one volume. I strongly hope that I have met your expectations.

Writing one novel brings up issues in my mind. I have been writing to overcome them and to gain a greater response than in my previous works. This time, too, I was able to reach a point where I could feel such responsiveness, and it has become an important work for me. I hope readers will enjoy it as much as I did.

Whether it will be a work related to this one or a completely different one is yet to be determined, but I hope to see you again in my next novel.

Then see you soon!

Kudou Yuu

P.S.

There are currently two extra stories of this work, Yuriko's and Rina's, on a novel submission site called "Kakuyomu". If you haven't read them yet, please do so!

T/N : 

Thank you to all the readers who have followed this series up to this point. It took me a lot of time to translate this series, whether because of my real-life business or something else, but, finally, I was able to finish this series. 

As for the extra story that's on kakuyomu, I haven't decided whether to translate it or not, but if you guys want me to translate it, then I probably will. That's all, see you on another project!