Sword Art Online - Volume 22 - Chapter Aft

AFTERWORD 

Thank you for reading Sword Art Online 22: Kiss and Fly. 

This is the first short story collection since Volume 8, Early and Late, and all the stories in this book were written as bonus pack-ins for Blu-rays and DVDs of the anime series. I feel sorry for those readers who bought the discs for these stories, but it’s a very steep price for students and young people to pay, so I asked to have the pieces that have already been available for several years collected in this volume. I beg your forgiveness! 

I have a little note about the title, too. A kiss-and-fly zone is the name for a special parking zone at Western airports, meant for people to share a quick kiss before they leave. Of course, there are no airplanes or airports in this book. But I used kiss to refer to the warm and romantic moments of Aincrad, and fly to refer to the soaring adventure in Alfheim. Overall, the phrase suggests a brief farewell until we meet again. 

Upon reading over these stories again, I realized that I kind of…don’t hate writing short stories. Overall, I don’t think I’m good at ending things, which is why the main series is always “to be continued,” but when you have to set up, execute, and conclude a story in thirty or fifty pages, I find it all comes together the way it’s supposed to. Maybe that’s because I think of each SAO short story as a single quest. That could be a literal quest within a game or some challenge in the real world—but it’s never more evident to me that depicting characters leaping over a hurdle is the very foundation of a story. 

I’m sure that Kirito and Asuna, their friends, their author, and even their readers will be faced with endless challenges, but I believe that with patience, perseverance, and courage, all these challenges can be defeated. I’m sure that my editor checking over this afterword has his own challenges in the schedule ahead, but I wish him the best of luck in surpassing them! (I can hear his voice now, saying, “This is all your fault…!”) 

Lastly, I’m sure that some people are wondering, “If this is Volume 22, what happened to the story you started in Volume 21, Unital Ring I?!” Have no fear. In the coming Volume 23, we will return to the world of Unital Ring. I hope to see you there! 

Reki Kawahara—September 2019