Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 11 - Chapter 7

Chapter 7: Sagamicizm of the Sister

For the third time in the same day, I found myself in a chain restaurant. It was, unfortunately, the same chain restaurant that I’d been to the first two times, and the same waitress showed us to our table as well. I couldn’t help but worry a little about what she thought of the same guy—that is, me—sitting down for a drink with three different women over a very short span of time, but I couldn’t devote too much mental attention to that problem. No, I had to focus on the girl in front of me.

I hadn’t exactly gone out of my way to avoid her, up until now. It’s not like I was trying to preserve the status quo. One way or another, though, this would mark the first time that Kanzaki Tomoyo and I had spoken with each other face-to-face.

“H-Hey, Sagami...where’s Andou?” asked Tomoyo. “You said he’d meet us at this restaurant, didn’t you?”

“Oh, that? I was lying,” I casually admitted. Tomoyo’s eyes widened with shock. “I made it up because I wanted to have a chat with you, Kanzaki. I had a feeling you’d turn me down if I asked you straight up, so I— No, wait, don’t leave! I’m sorry, really! I genuinely apologize for tricking you, and you’ve already ordered your drink, so why not at least stick around long enough to finish it?! I’ll even put it on my tab as an apology, okay?”

Tomoyo had already risen halfway out of her chair, but my desperate begging thankfully got under her skin enough to make her sit back down again. “I’m leaving the second I’m done with my drink,” she said with a pointed glare.

Ouch! I guess I didn’t make a great first impression. “No need to be so on edge! What’s the harm in just hearing me out? It’s not like you were being particularly serious about searching for Andou in the first place, were you? Considering you had time to go book shopping, and all,” I added, shooting a glance at the bookstore-branded bag she’d placed on the chair beside her.

Tomoyo grabbed the bag and shoved it out of sight without missing a beat. “N-No, it’s not like that!” she shouted. “I was just going to all the places where I thought Andou might be, and when I ended up in the bookstore I couldn’t help myself...”

In other words, it absolutely is “like that.” Framing it as her getting distracted by her hobbies while she should’ve been searching for a missing person made her come across as a coldhearted monster, but in all fairness, Tomoyo had no idea what sort of predicament Andou was really in. I didn’t have any grounds to blame her for making a quick stop to buy a book.

“Okay, Sagami. What did you want to talk with me about?” asked Tomoyo as she sipped her café au lait, which had just arrived.

That was, indeed, the question. What to talk with her about? I had a wealth of questions to ask her and subjects to pose to her, but I was at something of a loss for where exactly to start probing for info. I thought for a moment, then settled on an option.

“What sort of book did you just buy?” I asked. “Speaking as a reader, I can’t help but be curious. No need to answer if you’d rather not share, of course.”

“What sort...? Just a li— A n-novel, that’s all. A totally normal novel.”

A light novel, then. Interesting. “Hmm. What sort of story is it?”

“It’s, umm...an action-adventure story written for a young adult audience.”

Way to spin it to sound respectable! Why would she be embarrassed about telling me that she bought a light novel? I wondered, but then it struck me that she probably had no idea just how much of a terminal geek I was. If she was afraid that I might come at her with a “What’s a light novel?” in response, then maybe this reaction was only natural.

“Do you read a lot of novels?” I asked.

“Well, y’know, a few...”

“Why?”

Unsurprisingly, she looked pretty befuddled by that question. “I mean, what do I even say to that...?” Tomoyo mumbled.

“Then let me ask you this, Kanzaki. Why do people read novels—or, rather, why do people consume fiction?” I asked, steering us down the same line of questioning that I’d explored with Takanashi earlier that day.

“Well...because they’re entertaining, right?” said Tomoyo. “What other answer even is there?”

“They’re not, though,” I said. I presented the exact opposite of the argument that I’d made to Takanashi. “They’re not entertaining. There’s nothing entertaining about them. Manga, novels, anime, light novels, movies, TV shows—nothing whatsoever that falls under the banner of fiction is entertaining in the slightest.”

Tomoyo didn’t say a word. She looked entirely taken aback.

“I’m lying, of course,” I added.

Now Tomoyo’s shoulders slumped. “Wh-What are you even trying to say, Sagami?” she sighed.

“I just thought I’d try arguing a logical extreme, that’s all. I don’t actually believe that there aren’t any entertaining stories out there. There are plenty of them. But,” I continued, “there are just as many...no, far more boring stories out there than there are entertaining ones. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Once again, Tomoyo didn’t reply.

“Tell me, Kanzaki—if you were to read ten novels, about how many on average do you think would turn out to be entertaining?”

“On average...?”

“There’s basically no chance that all of them would suit your fancy, right? No matter how much someone loves books, reading ten and liking all of them just doesn’t happen. The opposite, though? That’s plausible. Reading ten books and thinking that all of them were boring is a completely believable situation for any dedicated bookworm.”

She didn’t deny that. I had a feeling she’d finally caught on to what I was getting at.

“Now, when you’ve only just started reading novels, it’s not totally unthinkable that you could miraculously go through ten in a row and find them all entertaining. Once you’ve consumed a certain number of stories, though, that miracle becomes unattainable. There will be stories that bore you. That’s the thing about novels: the more of them you read, the less they entertain you.”

That wasn’t just limited to novels. It applied to manga, anime, movies, and TV shows as well. It applied to all forms of fiction. The more you got into them—the more well-versed in the field you became—the more of them you would find uninteresting.

“But...that doesn’t follow, does it?” said Tomoyo. “The more you read, the less interesting they get...? That’s not how it works—reading a ton of books is what lets you really start to understand them on a deeper level.”

“That’s how you see things because you’re already an avid reader—and I’ll admit, there is some connection between being an experienced reader and finding books interesting. The connection between being experienced and finding them boring, however, is a far stronger one.”

As you continue to consume stories, a number of things become apparent to you, whether you like it or not. You start to notice their shortcuts, shortcomings, flaws, inconsistencies, retcons, and derivative elements. The bad elements of stories start to stand out to you far more than the good ones do. You start criticizing them far more freely than you praise them. You become better at listing out stories’ failings than you are at acknowledging their strengths.

“Apparently, an editor somewhere once posed the theory that if you ask someone what the most interesting story they’d ever read was, the vast majority of people will reply with the name of a manga or anime they were hooked on in middle school. When all’s said and done, the content of the story is way less important than the age you were when you read it. The older and older we grow, and the more and more stories we consume...the more and more they begin to lose that element that makes them entertaining.”

There’s no big mystery why there will always be people who say “That series has been really lame lately” or “That series used to be so much better” when it comes to weekly shonen manga magazines. The explanation’s as simple as could be: the people who say those things just got old.

The fact that the readers are the ones who get to decide whether or not a work is entertaining is a truth that spans all eras. There are, as such, no works of fiction in this world that are inherently entertaining—only works of fiction that readers are entertained by. Entertainment is determined by the readers, not the works themselves. There’s one more tragic fact underlying it all, though: the readers themselves have no control over what actually makes a work entertaining to them.

“You and I are high schoolers right now, Kanzaki. We’re in the era of our lives when fiction is at its most enjoyable—the interval when we’ll determine our all-time favorite work. If you look at that from another perspective, though...this is the peak. Stories will only be getting more and more boring from here on out.”

“You...can’t say that for sure,” said Tomoyo.

“Of course I can’t. I can say that the odds are highly stacked in favor of it, though. I believe that from now on, the ratio of entertaining to boring stories you experience will become smaller and smaller.”

“...”

“It’s strange, isn’t it? I adore fiction with all my heart and soul, so why do I have to be subjected to that tragic progression? And not just me. Deep down, everyone—and I do mean everyone—loves fiction. We all read manga and novels and watch anime and TV shows because we want to...so why do we have to end up feeling like they’re all trite and uninteresting?”

The more you love it, the more you come to hate it. How could something that irrational possibly be allowed?

“You know...I’ve been preoccupied by a question for a very long time now. It’s always been there, somewhere in a corner of my mind: Why did I lose the ability to praise stories unreservedly? Why is it that I have to be such a nitpicky pedant? It took me until very recently to find the answer,” I explained. “You see...it’s all the authors’ fault.”

That’s right. Not my fault—not the readers’ fault. The authors were to blame for everything.

“The...authors?” Tomoyo repeated disbelievingly.

“The more people grow up, the less they enjoy stories. Why? Simple: because they come to understand the truth. They come to understand that the authors who write those stories...are people. They’re the same as you and me. Nothing more.”

When I was little, I thought that authors were gods. To me, cartoonists, novelists, editors, screenwriters, directors—everyone who worked in a creative field was a perfect, unimpeachable genius. I was convinced that their powers of insight and intellect were leagues beyond those of the common masses, and I thought that their stories were the work of an abundance of knowledge and talent. That perspective allowed me to believe that each and every one of those stories was a work of perfect wonder.

The older I grew, though, the more reality was thrust into my face. I learned the plain, simple, undeniable, and profoundly boring truth: that there was no such thing as a perfect human, and that by extension, none of those authors were perfect geniuses at all. To be totally frank? I came to look down on them.

“Tragically enough, many authors decide to flaunt their own imperfection to their readers. ‘I wanted to do more with this story, honestly, but unfortunately, I wasn’t capable enough to see it through.’ ‘I always end up running up against the deadline, so my stories never turn out the way I want them to.’ ‘This series is on the chopping block if we don’t get the response we need, so please buy the next volume on the day it releases!’ ‘We’re living in an era where people just don’t buy books anymore’... More often than not, it ends up being hard to tell whether they’re being humble or just making excuses for themselves. It’s like they’re trying to beg for their readers’ forgiveness—to beg their readers to love them.”

The core problem wasn’t the question of whether or not authors were geniuses—no, the core problem was that readers lost the ability to see authors as geniuses.

“Once you come to see an author as just another ordinary person, your expectations for them just...die. When you pick up on little contradictions in their stories, you stop wondering whether details could be foreshadowing and start bashing the author for being pointlessly cryptic instead. When authors introduce a sudden new plot element, your first instinct ends up being to roll your eyes and laugh at the audacity to pull something like that out of nowhere. When they publish a new work that inserts all the popular tropes of the day, you can’t stop yourself from thinking that they’re pandering to the mainstream because the stories they wanted to write just didn’t sell...”

...and when you have no expectations for a story, that story will never be entertaining. Now, at long last, I understood the point that Kiryuu Hajime and Andou Jurai had tried to make to me. The commonly accepted belief was that it was better to lower your expectations when approaching a piece of fiction—and while that belief wasn’t wrong, it was incomplete.

In a perfect world, expectations should be raised as high as they can go. We don’t find stories to be boring because our expectations for them are too high. Rather, we lose the ability to see what’s interesting about them because we can’t raise our expectations for them high enough.

If you start reading a series because you’re sure it’ll be a work of highest art—if you follow an author’s work out of blind faith that they’re a god of their craft—then you’re sure to find something to enjoy in any story, no matter what it is. Children can do that with ease. Chuunis can too. The moment you become an adult, though? That’s when you lose it for good.

“Once you hit a certain age, or once you’ve consumed a certain number of stories, your reverence for authors will inevitably wear thin. Even if you can still respect them as people, you can’t worship them as gods anymore. It’d be wonderful if we could extol them as perfect idols forever...but unfortunately, the authors themselves always end up butting in to ruin any chance of that. Being way too self-assertive for their own good is in their nature, every last one of them. I mean, honestly...the authors aren’t the protagonists or the main heroines of their works—so why is their name on the cover of every single volume, every single time?”

Stop writing afterwords. Stop posting photos of yourself. Get the hell off Twitter. Don’t schedule autograph sessions. Don’t take interviews. Don’t come up with a catchy pen name. Authors belong behind the scenes and should stay there. Don’t let the readers see you. Don’t flaunt the fact that you’re an author for the world to see. Please, for the love of god, leave us and our dreams unspoiled. All that we readers want is to bask in our illusions, so just stop getting in the way and leave us alone!

“If only authors could just disappear altogether,” I muttered. I couldn’t quite tell what sort of expression I was making, but judging by how shaken Tomoyo looked, I had to imagine I was wearing quite the unsettling scowl. “It would be so, so much easier to enjoy stories if the authors just went away...”

“Well...if there weren’t any authors, we wouldn’t get any stories. You know that, right?” said Tomoyo.

It was a very valid point—so valid there wasn’t any way to argue with it, so all I could do was reply, “True enough,” with a tired sigh. “That’s unfortunately, tragically, brutally true indeed. The existence of authors robs stories of their entertainment value, and yet without authors, stories wouldn’t exist at all. I suppose you could call that yet another endless paradox, couldn’t you?”

“Wait—”

“Oh, no, don’t mind me. I just thought it’d be fun to say. It’s really more of a dilemma than a paradox in this case, after all. Let’s call it the ‘Author’s Dilemma’—that has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?”

Tomoyo raised a skeptical eyebrow as she drained the rest of her café au lait. She’d more or less promised to leave the moment she was done with her drink, but she showed no sign of vacating her seat. Apparently, she was up for chatting with me at least a little longer.

“It’s not like I don’t get your perspective...or, well, what you’re trying to say, anyway,” said Tomoyo.

“Oh? I’m glad to hear it.”

“I don’t agree with it, though.”

“Oh?”

“Actually... It really pisses me off.”

“...Huh?”

My gaze had drifted away from her, but now I looked back reflexively. Tomoyo...seemed to be furious. She was outright seething, from what I could tell.

“People who go on and on about authors this and creatives that, spouting off their pretentious BS even though they’ve never even tried to write a novel themselves...just piss me the hell off.”

I paused. Wait— Hmm? Did I touch a nerve, perhaps?

“But wait, Kanzaki,” I said, “isn’t being selfish and pretentious a reader’s right? You can’t possibly be saying that only people who write novels have the right to critique them? That would be incredibly boring, wouldn’t it?”

“That’s true, and that’s why I’m not saying that you’re wrong. The readers can say whatever they want...but personally, I can’t stand people like that. People who think that they can mouth off about anything and everything just because they’re readers... I hate their guts, plain and simple.”

“Y-You hate us, huh...?”

In an odd sort of way, this was almost refreshing. A lot of people’s first instinct when I started talking openly about my unvarnished opinions was to either get creeped out or distance themself from me, so it was surprisingly rare to find someone willing to tell me to my face that they hated me. It was such straightforward animosity, it actually felt nice.

Tomoyo was glaring daggers at me as a storm-cloudlike aura of stifling irritation formed around her. There was a darkness that I couldn’t quite identify deep within her gaze. It was like she’d recalled something deeply unpleasant to her...but what? Was she an aspiring author, perhaps? Was I dealing with a wannabe? The part about people who had “never even tried to write a novel themselves” certainly felt like something that a prospective writer would say. Maybe she’d been subjected to that sort of pretentious evaluation in the past? If so, it had almost certainly happened online.

“We need authors,” said Tomoyo. “That’s so obvious, I can’t believe I have to say it. After all, stories only have meaning when you have both an author to create them and a reader to consume them.”

I paused, and Tomoyo carried on.

“Sagami, you see things in, well...a really unique sort of way, don’t you? It’s like you’re trying to totally separate stories and their authors, or like you see stories as sacred and authors as a disgrace. It’s almost like you can’t stand the fact that stories belong to their authors.”

Tomoyo’s speculation was right on the mark. She was precisely correct: I found the idea that stories belonged to their authors intolerable. The argument that the truth about a piece of fiction could only be found in its author’s mind sickened me. I despised it when people said “The author said this” or “But this is canon” in an effort to dictate what a story was all about. Stories belonged to the readers—to us—and I wasn’t about to hand them off to anyone.

“People say that stories don’t belong to their authors...and, well, I actually agree with that,” said Tomoyo. “But that doesn’t mean they belong to the readers either.”

“It doesn’t...? Well then, who do they belong to?”

“Nobody. You have writers and readers—creators and consumers—and stories are born between those two sides. Doesn’t that just make sense?”

Stories are born? They happen between writers and readers?

“Let’s say the world really did follow your ideals—so, authors would be perfect geniuses who weren’t even slightly self-assertive, didn’t seek out money or fame, and just silently churned out fiction like living assembly lines. Do you really think that would make their stories any more interesting than they are now? Because I sure as hell don’t,” said Tomoyo. “Authors being like gods? That wouldn’t make stories more interesting at all. After all, if authors were perfect geniuses, then they wouldn’t need readers to begin with.”

What? They...wouldn’t need readers?

“Readers don’t only exist to give authors their money. They’re an essential part of the equation that lets authors make fiction, period. Just like the authors themselves.”

“...”

“Sometimes when a story goes super hard on the popular trends of the day, people will make fun of it for pandering to the readers, right? Well, honestly? I really, really, really can’t stand that,” Tomoyo said with an especially bitter scowl. It seemed that the darkness that dwelled within the heart of an author on this particular subject was deep indeed. “I mean, come on—what’s so bad about pandering to your readers?”

I didn’t have an answer for that.

“I mean, sure, it’d be awesome if you could get super popular just by writing whatever you wanted to...but authors aren’t perfect, so it’s never that easy. You have to think about trends and analyze popular stories. Sometimes you have to hold back your individuality, and sometimes you have to bring it to the forefront. You have to rack your brain over and over about what the readers want from you...and that’s supposed to be a bad thing? What’s so wrong with putting effort into making the readers appreciate you? Isn’t that desperate desire for appreciation what drives authors to write more and more entertaining stories in the first place?”

Putting in effort for the sake of appreciation... Pushing yourself to your limit to live up to someone else’s expectations... Somehow...all of this rang a bell for me. The concept she was describing felt deeply similar to that certain something that was so very essential for interpersonal relations...

“...It’s like putting on a persona,” I muttered.

“Hm?” Tomoyo grunted, cocking her head.

“I was just thinking...it’s sort of similar to how people put on personas,” I explained. “Authors put on an act because they want to be loved—to be accepted. They lie to themselves and the people around them in the hopes it’ll earn them appreciation. In that sense, it really does feel a little similar to how people play out different characters to fit in with different social scenarios.”

“Huh...yeah. That really might be sort of similar,” said Tomoyo. All of a sudden, her harsh expression softened into a faint smile. “That reminds me...back during the cultural festival, Andou said something kinda related to all this. He said that it’s totally normal for people to put on personas.”

“Andou did?”

“Yeah. According to him, ‘everyone has an idea about how they want the people around them to see them.’ He’s got a way of really cutting to the core of this sort of thing, every once in a while.”

How very like Andou to put it that way, I thought. It was the sort of notion that could only come from someone who’d given up their chuunibyou, then deliberately, knowingly, succumbed to it once more. Chuunis acted out preposterous stories and scenarios of their own invention out of a desire for others to see them as cool, after all—and I was quite certain that they weren’t the only ones who engaged in that sort of behavior.

“I try to write the stories that I want to write in my own sort of way, more or less,” Tomoyo explained, “but if you asked me whether just writing them down is enough to satisfy me...I probably wouldn’t be able to bring myself to say yes. What I really want is for someone to read them—for my readers to say that they enjoyed my story. I guess it feels like that desire’s an inherent part of what drives me to write.”

“How very greedy of you.”

“So what? Let authors be greedy. They’re not gods, after all. They’re just human.”

Authors aren’t gods...and so, surely, readers aren’t gods either. Authors and readers alike are only human. They’re human—and so, they can reach an understanding. As living beings that share a common language, they can communicate. Thus, the desire for love and acceptance is born.

That’s why we construct personas. It’s why we create stories. It’s why we tell lies, and why we write fiction. We lie because we want to be loved by our partners—and we write fiction because we want to be loved by our readers. All of that, surely, was true. There was nothing insincere or unjust about it. It was simply a natural, inevitable desire born of our very human natures...

“Heh... Ha ha ha ha ha! You’ve got me! I’m completely bested, and I know it. I guess this is how it feels to be at a total loss for words,” I said. I just couldn’t stop myself from cracking up. “I get it now. I was being a little narrow-minded, apparently. I was so single-mindedly focused on the readers’ perspective that the authors’ perspective never entered my thought process at all. I haven’t the foggiest idea how authors feel, after all. I’ve never done any sort of creative work since the day I was born, so how could I?”

“I think you’re probably being pretty stiff about how you define ‘creative work,’ aren’t you? I mean, I’m pretty sure that everyone’s got a bit of an author in them somewhere.”

“Oh, are you?”

“Everyone’s the author of their own life story, after all... Okay, no, sorry. Forget I said that, please. Oh my god, that was so pretentious it burns,” said Tomoyo, shrinking in on herself as a blush spread across her face.

She hadn’t meant much by it, I’m sure. It was just a line that had come to her off the cuff, and she’d said it because she’d thought it would sound nice...and yet those words of hers shook me. They hit hard, piercing straight to the core of my personality—my very being—and throwing it for a loop, leaving me reeling in the aftermath.

Those words were the trigger that finally brought a memory from a few hours prior—a memory that I’d sealed in the depths of my heart—surging back up to the surface...

“You aren’t a reader, Sagami. You’re just not a writer, that’s all,” said Takanashi. She spoke like she was laying out exactly what made me tick as a character—like a reader, describing a work of fiction.

“What...do you mean by that?” I asked.

“I suppose this is rather conceptual...or perhaps I should say metaphorical? Regardless—don’t you think, Sagami, that everyone has both a reader and an author somewhere within them?”

A reader...and an author? Both of them?

“As creators—as actors—we carefully consider the plot and direction of our own lives, then act out our role in a manner that we hope will prove appealing to those around us. At times, however, we also act as the viewer, observing the world and our place within it as a form of entertainment. Everyone is the author of their own life story, and at the same time, everyone is their own life’s story’s reader as well. We, as humans, carry both of those natures within us.”

“...”

“That being said, Sagami, when I look at you, I can’t help but think that you lack one of those components—the authorial one.”

I was lacking. I’d lost the author within me and been left with only my reader self.

“I believe that your tendency to view everything—from yourself to the world around you—from an excessively objective viewpoint stems from your lack of expressive ability. Your lack of a creative side has left the reader within you to run rampant, driving you to seek out entertainment to an irrational degree, all while never sparing so much as a thought for the entertainment that you could bring to others.”

“That’s...just how readers are, isn’t it? We can’t make anything ourselves, but we’re still perfectly willing to offer our own arrogant tirades about other people’s work. In that sense, we’re terrible by our very nature.”

“Not at all. Normal readers—readers other than you—tend to be quite expressive, if anything,” said Takanashi. She looked me straight in the eye as she harshly critiqued me. Not me by way of readers, but me, myself, as an individual. “Take reviews that people post online, or the impressions of media that people write on Twitter. The purpose of those writings is to express how a work moved them, or perhaps how it displeased them, sharing that sentiment with people far and wide. It allows people to assert the fact that they’re reviewers, so they’ll choose their words with the utmost care, expressing themselves as well as they can—and, in doing so, they transition from reader to author in their own right.”

“From reader...to author...”

“It’s often said that you can tell who someone truly is by taking a look at their bookshelves. In other words, you can evaluate what sort of a person someone is by looking at the books that they read. That, in turn, leads us to think, ‘I want people to think I’m the sort of person who reads books like this,’ or ‘I don’t want people to think I’d read these books’... Before we know it, we begin unconsciously building a persona for ourselves revolving around our preferences. It’s a perfectly normal and perfectly healthy behavior, by my measure.”

“...”

“A reader may desire to be a certain type of reader. They may develop the desire to be perceived in a certain way by the people around them. Take, for instance, a young man with a case of chuunibyou. He may go out of his way to read and praise relatively unknown works, while at the same time insisting that he was aware of the major hits before society at large caught on to them. He may insist that he preferred the earlier works of a now-major author—the ones which were canceled before said author’s big break—on the basis that he felt more of their individuality in them. He may act as if he’s well-versed in the works of Nietzsche and Shakespeare, loudly declare that he only watches Western films subbed, not dubbed, and immediately jump to conclusions regarding the inspiration for each and every story he consumes, playing the critic at the slightest provocation.”

“That...was a very long hypothetical,” I observed. Very long, and extremely specific. She had probably—no, definitely been using Andou as the model for that mental image.

“If I were to boil my point down into a single phrase, then perhaps I’d put it like this: even readers want to be read,” Takanashi concluded.

Even readers want to be read. In other words, they want people to pay attention to them. It was a feeling that I’d never experienced...but not a feeling I was incapable of understanding. I hadn’t quite reached an acceptance of it on an intuitive level, but intellectually, I was finally beginning to grasp it.

“So...you know how idols and voice actors have events where you can get a ticket to shake their hand?” I said. “I go to those every once in a while. I’m fairly dedicated to two-dimensional girls, on the whole, but that doesn’t mean I hate 3D ones, and voice actresses are only 2.5D anyway.”

I would go to those events to see my favorite voice actresses up close and personal, and I’d always thought that everyone else was there for the same reason. They’d pay through the nose for the opportunity to see their favorite actresses or idols, buying dozens of the same CD to get as many tickets as possible—as many chances as they could to see the subject of their worship in the flesh.

After attending a few of those events, though, I’d started to get a feeling that something was off—or, rather, I’d started feeling a strange sense of alienation. It’d dawned on me that there was a distinct gap between how I experienced the events and how the people around me did.

“All the other people who go to those handshake events will say stuff like ‘Did you hear that? She remembered my name!’ or ‘She noticed that I was cheering from the front row,’ or ‘I managed to tell her that I bought her limited-edition poster.’ I guess what I’m saying is that a lot of them are just happy that the person they came to see knew them.”

In complete honesty, I’d never understood people like that at all. I’d found such tendencies downright mystifying. What? I’d think. What on earth are they talking about? They came here to see an idol, so why are they getting worked up over being seen?

“To me, handshake events are all about getting the chance to see an idol—but to a bunch of the other people who go to them, they’re a chance to meet an idol, apparently.”

Not to see, but to meet. To them, the interaction was a two-way street—digital, not analog. The moment I’d realized that, the way that certain groups advertised themselves as “idols you can meet in real life” had suddenly made a lot more sense.

“It’s strange, isn’t it? I mean, sure, those events are all for the fans, but doesn’t it seem like making it about the fans is taking it a step too far?”

“There’s nothing strange about it whatsoever, Sagami,” said Takanashi. “After all, modern handshake events serve a dual purpose: they’re events where you can both see an idol and know an idol will see you.”

The desire to be seen—to know that your idol will witness what sort of fan you are. To know they’ll perceive what sort of consumer you are.

“Everyone has someone they want to be seen by. That’s precisely why people express themselves in the first place—to share with others the self that they have authored,” said Takanashi.

Within every reader is a writer. Within every consumer is a creator. But within me...was neither of those things.

Oh...I see now.

On that day—the day my mom was hit by a truck, right in front of me—I became a reader. For all this time, I’d felt that in that moment, I had been reborn, or remade...but now, it seemed clear that I’d been mistaken. The truth was that, on that day, the writer within me had died. I hadn’t become a reader—I had just lost the part of me that was a writer.

“I don’t know what might have happened to you in the past,” said Takanashi. She spoke with an air of authority—like a reader, presumptuously and pretentiously under the impression she knew it all. “But, Sagami, you lack the authorial desire to express yourself. You don’t feel the need to put yourself out there in the hope that someone will love you, or to have anyone else express their approval of you.”

“I can’t deny that,” I replied. “Frankly, I’ve never felt any desire to be loved by anyone.”

“Is that really true?” Takanashi asked, looking me squarely in the eye. It almost felt like she was looking straight through me. “Are you certain that, in truth, you’re not just afraid? Afraid that even if you were to construct a persona in an effort to endear yourself to others, you’d just be rejected? Perhaps all you’re really doing is defending yourself from the terrible possibility that you wouldn’t be loved, even if you did make an effort.”

“...”

“Don’t you think it’s possible that, in growing so dominant and massive in scale, the reader within you has obstructed the growth of the writer within you?”

What...? What is she saying?

I had spent so, so long looking down on others. I’d played the role of the reader, arrogantly judging the fruits of their labor...so how, after all that, could I ever presume to be an author and write out my own story? It was unthinkable. There was just no way. It would be humiliating. Farcical. Downright terrifying...

“I’d really prefer if you wouldn’t presume so much about me,” I said. “Stop talking like you know me, please.”

“Oh? I was under the impression that presuming freely and acting like you know it all is a reader’s privilege?”

My words caught in my throat. I couldn’t say a thing. I’d brought all of this upon myself. I’d hoisted myself by my own petard. It felt like I’d suddenly been paid back for everything I’d ever done wrong, all in a single instant.

“It’s all right, Sagami,” Takanashi said, speaking slowly and softly as I was tormented by an indescribable sense of shame.

I looked up to find that the piercing look in her eyes—the reader’s look that I so favored—was gone. Now, she was just a perfectly ordinary high school girl, looking at me the way she’d look at a perfectly ordinary high school boy.

“There’s no need for you to be scared. I’m quite certain that you’ll be just fine,” she said. “After all—every writer was born from within a reader.”

Born. Writers were born—and from readers. Every author who had left their mark on history had, without exception, started out as a reader. Did that mean, then, that the writer within me who had long since perished could be reborn from the reader within me who had thrived? Could my own inner writer be reincarnated as an altogether new entity?

“Hey, Kanzaki,” I said. I’d remembered something that I shouldn’t have...and now, I spoke once more to the girl sitting before me. “Think you could teach me how to write a novel sometime soon?”

“Huh?”

“I just, well... This is a little embarrassing to admit, but I have the sudden urge to try writing something.”

I wanted to write my story—a story that was mine and mine alone. To write a story that only I could write. I wanted to write it...and to have someone—someone other than me—give it a read.

“H-How to write a novel...?” said Tomoyo. “I mean, I don’t even know how I’d start teaching that... A-And, like, I’m still just a beginner too. I’m nowhere near the sort of level where I could teach anyone how— Wait...huh?! H-How’d you know I write novels, Sagami?!”

“You said it yourself just a minute ago, didn’t you? Something about writing the stories you want to?”

“Agh! I... U-Ugggh...”

“It’s no problem if you’re that against it. I’m not planning on pressuring you, or anything.”

“It’s not that I’m against it, exactly...but I’m really not sure there’s anything I could teach you...”

“Even just the easy stuff would be fine. Like, what word processor you use, or what the difference between first and third person is. I’d be more than happy if you’d teach me the most basic of the basics. I’ve talked myself up for a very long time, sure, but the truth is that when it comes to being a writer, I really am as much of an amateur as you could possibly be.”

“Well...” Tomoyo said, then shrugged. “If that’s really all you want, then sure.”

“Thanks,” I replied with a grateful nod. Then I stood up from my seat, pulled a thousand-yen bill from my wallet, and set it on the table.

Tomoyo looked taken aback. “Huh...? A-Are you leaving?” she asked.

“Yup. Sorry, but this should cover the check. You can keep the change,” I said as I stowed my wallet in my pocket. “It turns out there’s somewhere I have to go right now.”