Owari no Chronicle

Volume 9, Afterword

And that was Owari no Chronicle 4-B.

Almost all of the major characters have been gathered now. I have determined I should say “sorry about the wait”. (Who do I think I am?) As for how thick the book was and all that, it’s thanks to all of you that I can do that. Thank you very much.

Also, it may be a little late for this, but I’m often asked where to start reading my City series. To be honest, you can really start anywhere. There is always release order or city order, but you can also go to the bookstore and open them up to the prologue and try reading one if you think it sounds good. The different cities all have their own idiosyncrasies, so you might find one you like even if you didn’t like one of the others. Or you could decide based on Ya-san’s illustrations. That might be another way to find a book to you can read.

Anyway, if you’re interested, I hope you pick one of them up. Thank you very much.

Now for the usual chat.

“This is a pain, so just get straight to a stupid story from your high school days.”

“You aren’t even bothering asking about the book anymore? That’s admirable. …I was too busy to read it, anyway.”

“Wow, you’re just like those other horrible people! You monster wife!!”

“I’m just going to ignore that. Anyway, my school was a boy’s school and we didn’t have air conditioning at the time, so during the summer, it turned into a defenseless zone where about half of us took our classes in just our underwear. But then someone had a brilliant idea to keep us cool.”

“I’m sure I’d rather not know, but what was it?”

“We would take a certain rubber product meant for men, fill it up with water to about ten times the standard size, and hang about twenty of them from the ceiling. It was surprisingly cooling. The drips of condensation were awful, though.”

“Why didn’t the school stop you?”

“Anyway, we started a new game where we would flick mechanical pencil lead at them during class to make them spin. But one day, Nishida (pseudonym) actually broke through the side of one and it began to spin around while spraying water everywhere. That really sent a panic through the classroom.”

That’s what I call a new way of interrupting the class.

This time, I sympathized with Unicorn’s Sugar Boy as the background music.

“Who paved the path to happiness?”

I also thought on that. Okay, a lot is going to start moving next time.

November 2004. A morning of cold rain.

-Kawakami Minoru