Swedish meatballs were delicious when dipped in cranberry jam.
“Hey, Touji. This is seriously good.”
“It’s what I always feed guests when they come over.”
“Mustard? It cuts through the richness, so it feels different.”
I had thought this Riku guy was only surprisingly decent at watching movies and reading writing, but he unexpectedly knew how to eat properly too.
As expected, my greatest friend was different.
I made cocoa and handed it to Riku, then soon handed cocoa to Shiori as well and asked.
“Did you enjoy the food?”
“…Yes.”
“I’ll make it again, so feel free to stop by anytime.”
At my words, Shiori fiddled with her cocoa mug. Like a person who wanted something.
Riku looked at Shiori for a moment, then calmly parted his lips.
“Touji. I’ll finish collecting the sound effects. You hang in there too.”
Riku sat in front of the computer in the living room and put on the headset. The faint sound leaking from the headset filled the quiet apartment like white noise.
Inside that, as though following a fixed procedure, I mechanically opened my laptop.
“Then I’ll read the novel you wrote, Shiori.”
“…”
No answer came back. Anyone would be nervous the first time they showed their novel to someone else. I understood.
I had not wanted an answer either. I had asked because it was only polite to say something before reading.
I moved the mouse and opened my inbox. After finding the freshly sent email with a Word file attached, I downloaded the file.
The file name was <Seasonal Weathering>.
It was clearly the title of the novel.
The moment I saw the title, several contents came to mind.
And from the title alone, I also realized who had influenced Shiori.
Again, the author of <One-Character Series>.
That man really is something.
Well, fine.
First, the opening sentence.
“We wander through flowing time in search of a summer that will shine.”
When browsing the internet, you sometimes encounter images about “works with excellent opening sentences.”
I have lived a life full of shame.
The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.
Call me Ishmael.
Of course, this is a memoir.
And so on.
There were many examples. So many that it made me wonder whether I had misunderstood the usage of the word “excellent.”
And my position on the opening-sentence series had not changed from the first time I saw it until now.
“What meaning does this have?”
I had never once in my life been moved by an opening sentence alone.
Occasionally, I did get the feeling of “This is pretty good,” but as I said earlier, the feeling of something being pretty good ultimately meant nothing by itself.
The opening sentence was not what mattered.
What mattered was the sentence that came after it.
So I continued reading the writing that followed the opening sentence of <Seasonal Weathering>.
“October 1999. Unlike the world shouting that two months remained until the end of the world, Asahina Motobe’s day was quiet again today.”
Hmm.
I stopped for a moment, then slowly scrolled the mouse wheel down.
For those who could not tell whether my reaction just now had a good meaning or a bad one, I will attach an explanatory edition.
Usually, when you are reading something and think it has a hook, you go back to the previous sentence. Because you want to read it one more time.
But I did not scroll up. I scrolled down.
What did that mean?
If I had encountered this writing in the wild.
If I had been reading it not because someone I knew had asked for feedback, but because I was exploring in search of an entertaining piece of writing.
It meant I would have hit the back button here.
In other words, Shiori’s opening worked very badly on me.
All stories are consumed around expectation.
Stories with high entertainment value and stories with high artistic value were no exceptions to this law.
Works heavy on entertainment were consumed with the expectation that they would give me visceral fun.
Works heavy on artistry were consumed with the expectation that they would give me a fresh shiver.
Maybe because Shiori’s authorial role model was an author hardcore nerds went wild for and literary writers loved.
The novel Shiori had written, even if it had genre elements mixed in, clearly leaned… To put it in a way easy to understand, toward pure literature.
A brief aside: I disliked the expression pure literature.
It was a term that naturally made me ask, “Then are genre novels impure literature?” and pure literature in the dictionary sense was an old, worn-out faction that had died decades ago.
So how about making regular use of the expression literary-establishment fiction, which people these days—or rather, this had also been around for quite a while—pushed instead?
Because “what sells is justice” was a sentence literary-establishment fiction actually believed in even more.
Anyway.
For that reason, I looked at Shiori’s writing from the perspective used when appreciating literary-establishment fiction.
Now, here was the question. What did I expect from Shiori’s writing?
Artistry? Polish? Philosophical thought? Sharp criticism of the era?
The answer was.
Traces of thought.
And Shiori’s writing had no traces of thought.
More precisely, they existed, but the level of thought was too shallow.
How did I know that?
“We wander through flowing time in search of a summer that will shine.
October 1999. Unlike the world shouting that two months remained until the end of the world, Asahina Motobe’s day was quiet again today.”
I could tell just from this.
Now look. Look at Asahina Motobe, who had become a young man wandering at the end of the century simply because a young man wandering in the present day felt tiring.
Do not misunderstand. I was not saying the end-of-the-century setting itself was bad.
What was bad was that she had simply chosen the end-of-the-century setting without long consideration.
If Shiori had chosen the current setting after deep thought? The details would have been different.
October? The novel would have begun in December, not on such an ambiguous date.
The direction would have been different too. In a world where the day of the end was fixed, the best direction was “D-DAY.”
The moment Shiori’s novel failed to slam the “D-DAY” direction into the beginning, it was disqualified. Normally, there would have been no need to read further.
In fact, until now, when I had nearly finished reading, not a single thing outside my expectations had appeared.
At the end of the novel. After confirming the protagonist, who felt a strange emptiness at the world remaining intact even after the year 2000 arrived, I raised my head.
I saw Shiori clutching her completely cold cocoa mug.
Did she feel my gaze? Shiori met my eyes.
Looking at her slightly wavering blue eyes, I first smiled.
“Is the cocoa not to your taste?”
“…I’m sorry.”
“No. I was going to give you something new if it didn’t suit you. There’s a lot to eat in my house. Maybe because I’m scheduled to get taller soon. These days, food keeps going in.”
After lightly changing the mood, I took the cocoa mug from Shiori and put it in the sink.
Then I took out snacks and placed them in front of Shiori. Apple juice was a bonus.
First, I put a cookie in my mouth and ate it with a crack. Only then did Shiori seem to relax, and she sipped the apple juice.
And only then was I ready to speak to Shiori.
Strictly speaking, I had been ready at any time, but for things like this, the listener’s readiness mattered more than mine.
Only now that Shiori had relaxed could I critique her novel.
<Seasonal Weathering>, about one hundred thousand characters.
If I evaluated it honestly, it fell below the standard.
Because there had not been enough thought, the development, protagonist, characters, direction, everything was conventional and plain.
Therefore, there were three things I could say to <Seasonal Weathering> in total.
“It isn’t bad.”
“It’s okay.”
“It isn’t entertaining.”
Among these, what should I say to Shiori?
That had actually been decided from the start.
“It isn’t entertaining.”
“…”
The corners of Shiori’s eyes trembled.
Shiori must have roughly expected the reaction to her own novel, but if criticism felt sweet just because you expected it, then there was an error in the laws of physics.
I continued quietly.
“The total amount of thought was insufficient. The setting, protagonist, characters, development, all of it was decided moderately by feel according to the flow, right? How should you write it to make it better? First, think about that. Until you find your own methodology, you’ll probably keep producing writing like this.”
There were many ways to say nice things.
It was not bad. It was readable. It was okay. It was impressive that a first-year middle-school student had already completed a full-length novel.
In fact, none of those would be wrong. A mere first-year middle-school student completing a piece of writing in the form of a novel really was impressive.
However.
They were not words I should say to Shiori.
To Shiori, who kept thinking about how to become a novelist, stayed up all night, and at the end of it all was so desperate that even the stepbrother she had just met seemed like welcome rain in a drought.
Saying that kind of empty flattery.
Doing something that toyed with the other person’s sincerity.
It absolutely did not suit my nature.
“In the end, I’m fundamentally a genre novelist. My method isn’t necessarily the correct answer either. So filter it appropriately and take only what seems to suit you. First, direction. In a world where the end has been decided, the most effective thing is—”
I told Shiori every part that would be good to fix, then put another cookie in my mouth.
Shiori wrote down what I said in a notebook and kept reading. As expected of the land of analog systems. Even now, when smartphones had spread across the world, she used a notebook.
Once I relaxed, I let out a breath inaudibly and drank cocoa.
Immediately afterward, my eyes met Riku’s.
Riku sounded impressed.
“Touji, so the reason you use polite speech is because if you don’t, your words sound harsh?”
As expected of my greatest friend Riku.
He really did see surprisingly well.
Seriously.
I said to Riku.
“How many sound effects did you collect?”
“A lot. Want to hear?”
“In a bit. Oh, I forgot to tell you, but a movie isn’t made just because it has sound effects, okay? You have to do other things too. You know that, right?”
“Of course I know.”
As long as he knew.
I stood up.
We had eaten, and I had given feedback, so I was planning to take Shiori home soon, then work on the scenario and my new novel.
But then I stopped at Shiori’s reaction.
Shiori was… uh.
She was reacting exactly like a girl her age might.
In other words.
It meant she looked interested.
After thinking briefly, I asked Shiori a question.
“Shiori. Are you interested in filming a movie?”