Tatakau Shisho

Volume 4 Afterword

Volume 4 Afterword

Hello everyone. This is Yamagata Ishio.

We quickly arrived at the fourth installment of the Tatakau Shisho series.

I hope you will enjoy “Tatakau Shisho to Kami no Sekken”.

Compared to my previous works so far, this one was a bit harder to write.

About why it was hard, it is because I have a relatively short pinky since I was born.

Because of that, when I need to hit the “P” or “-” keys on my keyboard, my pinky can’t quite reach them. By the way, when I need to use backspace, square brackets or the enter key I move my hand and use my middle finger.

So, because of the main characters of this work – Mirepoc, Lascall and Parney – there are now a lot of names with “P” or “-” in them. I also somewhat had this problem with Winkeny.

At first it was only at the level of “this is somewhat hard to do”, but after writing about 100 pages the base of my pinky began to feel unconformable, and after surpassing 200 pages I felt pain every time I typed with it. Apparently I’ve hurt my muscle, as it felt hot to the touch. Using water to cool it relieved me, but the pain relapsed whenever I moved the finger again.

For a while I hit the problematic keys with my ring finger and after letting my pinky rest for four or five days, the pain faded. For now I am relieved since the sense of discomfort and the pain are gone.

In the future, I think that people whose pinkies hurt should refrain from working. While I think so, this would probably intrude on these people’s lives.

Since I never had exercise in either high school or university, my body is not very robust.

It’s not only my pinky, but my head also hurts, my body is languid, and my condition is bad in many other areas.

Thinking that it’s better to move my body on a daily basis, I recently started doing warm-ups when I wake up in the morning.

Since there’s no music, I sing while doing this. Rather than starting by taking a deep breath, I sing from the very beginning of songs, as when I get excited I also get motivated.

Although when I reflect on myself upon getting calm again, enough energy to last a whole day of work seems to leave my body.

This time I was also able to complete the volume thanks to the help of various people. The illustrator Maeshima Shigeki-sama, people of the Editorial Department, designers, and proofreaders, I take this opportunity to humbly thank you.

This time I have also received words of encouragement on the book’s wrapper from Araki Hirohiko-sama.

I have been his fan even before I aspired to become a novelist, and he’s one of the people who have had a large influence on me when I started creating stories, so he’s been one of my goals as a writer.

For him to have read my work was an unexpected pleasure as a writer. I thought from the bottom of my heart that I’m glad I became a novelist. Thank you so very much.

Finally, to those of you who have read this work. I pray that you will enjoy it and that we shall meet again in my next work.

Well then.

Yamagata Ishio

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*In Japanese, a vowel lengthening is represented by ?, which is made with the “–” key. The names of the last two characters are thus typed (when using the most common input method, which converts Latin letters to Japanese) like this: pa-ni and rasuko-ru. Mirepoc only has a P in her name, while Parney has both.

**Creator of the famous manga Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure.

This is the aforementioned text:

“Ishio. I am your ally!” Araki Hirohiko supports this talent!

Araki apparently also made a similar comment on Yamagata’s later series “Rokka no Yuusha”, but I haven’t been able to find an image of that.