Afterword
Maybe this is just me, but it feels like the more one devotes oneself to the act of reading, the more one begins to naturally develop the desire to be seen as a discerning reader by society at large. To put that in more simple terms: everyone ends up wanting to act like a critic.
So then—who, exactly, would society consider to be a first-rate reader? “A reader who can evaluate books entirely objectively” seems like the natural answer. People who only ever talk about their own preferences—the sort of people who’d say “I don’t like it when the main character’s a girl, so that book sucks,” for instance—are right out of the running. Nobody would bother listening to the opinions of a food critic who judges dishes based on their picky preferences without even trying them, and the same principle applies to books.
In order to be accepted by society as a critic, a reader must be able to analyze a book’s strengths and weaknesses objectively, suppressing their own preferences to as great of a degree as possible and evaluating the work in clear and transparent terms. They have to allude to the author’s previous works to gain an air of perceived expertise, mix in opinions that ever so slightly oppose those held by the general public just to generate a little controversy, and so on and so on. I can’t help but think that when one goes to extreme lengths like those, experimenting through trial and error to find the best way to convince others to acknowledge them, they’re acting less like a reader and more like a certain sort of specialized author in their own right.
And with all that said, it’s been a while! This is Kota Nozomi speaking. This time around was the thoroughly improbable Sagami volume, of all things. Sagami is a character I’m personally quite fond of, but if you were to ask me whether or not he was really in demand with my readers, I’d definitely struggle to give an answer. As a result, writing this volume was no easy task, to say the least. Sagami himself would probably say “What? No way—who would want a volume about me?” but in the end, I decided to just go for it and write the story I wanted to. I hope that you enjoyed it!
Next up, an announcement: I have a new series starting soon! Its title: Giant Killing Dark Hero. To describe it in simple terms, it’s about a protagonist who’s the lowest of the low in terms of general stats but the mightiest of the mighty in terms of mental strength, and he goes around kicking the everloving crap out of a bunch of peace-addled fools using the least honorable means possible. Please look forward to it!
Last but not least, some thanks! To my editor, Nakamizo: thank you once again for your hard work. I submitted my proposal for the Sagami volume fully prepared for it to be shot down from start to finish, and deeply appreciate you green-lighting it without question instead. Next, to 029 and Trigger’s Nakagawa Hideki: thank you for drawing such wonderful illustrations! This ended up being a pretty tricky volume to illustrate, but both the cover and the insert illustrations turned out incredibly well. And, finally, I give my greatest and most sincere of thank-yous to all the readers who have stuck with this series for the past eleven volumes.
And that’s all! May we meet again, if the fates allow it!
Kota Nozomi
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