[Saito]
Touji, lend me some money.
Just 50,000 yen.
It was hardly the sort of message a father should send to a child about to start high school, but I transferred the money without giving it much thought.
When Saito borrowed money, he usually paid it back the next month.
Even when it took longer, he paid off his debts first whenever money came in.
I trusted him with money.
I slipped my phone into my pocket and headed for the meeting place.
A puff of white breath escaped me.
Maybe it was because it was February. The world was still frozen solid.
When I arrived, I pushed open the café door.
The bell chimed, and the smell of coffee hit me.
I glanced toward the corner of the café.
Just as expected, a man with the expression of someone at death’s door was drinking iced coffee.
I walked over and sat across from him. He set down his drink and spoke.
“You made it.”
“Until recently, Mr. Yoshihiro used to come see me himself. Now you are calling me out near the publishing house. Does that mean I’m washed up?”
“You’re the one who moved to Tokyo, you brat. And when I said I would come to you, you told me you’d come here.”
I ordered a drink.
And dessert.
At my age, I was perpetually short on calories.
The chocolate cake arrived soon after. As I put a bite into my mouth, Yoshihiro seemed to shake off some of his fatigue.
“How have you been lately?”
“You sound like a parent checking in on a kid who just entered the workforce.”
“Judging by how much nonsense you’re talking, not great.”
I laughed and took a sip of hot chocolate.
Chocolate cake and hot chocolate.
It was the kind of combination that made diabetes feel imminent.
I would eat like this only until I became an adult.
As I happily worked my way through the dessert, Yoshihiro let out a pained groan.
“…You can’t write at all?”
“It’s not that. I have written something.”
“Let me see it.”
Japanese writers usually wrote a proposal before getting published.
An editor would read it, approve it, and only then would the author start writing.
That was the usual process.
But I found proposals unbearably difficult to write.
It was a habit I had picked up from serializing fiction in real time during my previous life.
The way I forced stories out of myself was tied to that habit, so it was not something I could change just because I wanted to.
That was why I preferred to write an entire volume in advance and show it to an editor afterward.
Hardly anyone worked that way.
Even writers who, by the standards of my previous life, would have debuted on sites like Narou usually followed a more traditional process.
Serials were one thing, but when they launched a new series after making their publishing debut, they generally went with the old-school method.
It was not as though nobody did things my way, though, so Yoshihiro never made an issue of it.
Besides, an editor had no reason to stop an author who was willing to bring in a completed manuscript.
I sent Yoshihiro the novel I had been working on.
He opened his laptop and began scrolling through the manuscript in his inbox.
Before I could even order an extra croissant, he took his hand off the mouse.
Which meant that, by the standards of my previous life, he had stopped reading around chapter three.
Yoshihiro went silent and stared at the laptop screen.
The person who had done something wrong was sitting across from him, but he was taking his frustration out on the innocent manuscript.
“Is it that bad?”
“…”
“So it is.”
Yoshihiro was great in most ways, but it always took him a while to give feedback.
People I knew insisted he was not like this with other writers.
Maybe he was being overly careful because I was young.
Still, we had known each other for nine years.
He should have adjusted by now.
He knew perfectly well that I did not care what kind of feedback I got.
How much longer was he going to keep this up?
“Just say it plainly. Have you ever seen me get upset over feedback?”
“Really? I didn’t go quiet because of that. I went quiet because I genuinely have nothing to say. It’s just blandly boring.”
“…”
“I thought you said you wouldn’t get hurt.”
“I’m not hurt. What’s wrong with it?”
To be honest, I already knew what the problem was.
That was why I had not sent it until Yoshihiro pushed me.
Still, hearing someone else’s opinion mattered.
When the flaw I saw lined up with the flaw someone else saw, it gave me more confidence.
Yoshihiro continued in a calm voice.
“The structure and prose are solid. All those years of writing haven’t gone anywhere.”
“Thank you.”
“But it isn’t interesting. The protagonist barely has any presence. More specifically, I can’t get immersed in it. All your strengths are gone.”
Only an amateur would shout, “How can you know that after only three chapters?”
Apparently, professionals did it often enough too.
But Yoshihiro and I had known each other for nine years.
By then, we understood what the other person meant without needing it spelled out.
In other words, Yoshihiro was asking me one thing.
Why have you gotten worse?
He was not comparing me to another author.
He was not comparing me to some masterpiece by a literary giant, either.
He was comparing me to my earlier work.
More precisely, to my debut novel—the first thing I had written after arriving in this world.
I had plenty of excuses I wanted to make, but they all had to do with my previous life.
So I kept quiet.
My debut novel, <The College Student from Another World>, was a college romantic comedy.
It had no unusual plot twists.
Ninety-five percent of it was ordinary college life and budding romance with the heroines.
The protagonist was not anything special, either.
The title included the phrase “another world,” so it occasionally misled people, but the protagonist was not actually from another world.
He simply was not Japanese.
The protagonist of <The College Student from Another World> was a Korean international student.
The reason was simple.
I had only recently arrived in this world, I did not know Japan very well yet, and Korea was the only place I knew anything about.
It was not a calculated choice.
And yet…
It became an incredibly powerful selling point.
People wanted new things, but they rejected anything that was entirely unfamiliar.
Readers were greedy creatures.
They wanted both the comfort of familiarity and the thrill of something new.
And my debut novel gave them both.
At first, the reaction had seemed strange to me.
From my point of view, there was nothing especially distinctive about the story.
I did not force the protagonist’s Korean identity onto the reader.
I did not use easy symbols like kimchi or makgeolli.
I wrote as though I had forgotten that he was Korean, going out of my way to avoid even mentioning it.
The reason was simple.
I had been worried that a Japanese publisher might dislike it if I emphasized too strongly that the protagonist was a foreigner.
I was trying to sell the novel in Japan, after all.
So to me, <The College Student from Another World> was an ordinary story with only a slightly unusual premise.
But readers saw it differently.
They sensed something unfamiliar in my writing.
There was a subtle disconnect in the protagonist’s everyday inner monologue.
It felt fresh, as though they were peering directly into the mind of a real student living abroad.
Readers went wild for that.
—And as you may have guessed by now, all of it was an accident.
If I had not been Korean in my previous life, if I had not only just arrived in this world, and if I had not been worried about what the publisher would think, that novel could never have existed.
It had soared so far beyond my actual ability that I could not reproduce it even if I wanted to.
People often called someone’s prime their “Leeds days,” after the glory years of Leeds FC.
For me, the three years I spent writing <The College Student from Another World> were my Leeds days.
Even counting my previous life, I had never shone that brightly.
Every work I wrote after <The College Student from Another World> flopped.
Objectively speaking, they had not been complete disasters.
The royalties still came in regularly enough for me to live on.
The problem was that the writing had been exactly as good as I really was.
And thanks to the name I had made for myself, I earned several times more than I had in my previous life.
In some ways, things had actually gone better.
So I had expected this to happen.
I had lived through the same thing until I was sick of it in my previous life.
The only ones who had not expected it were Yoshihiro and my readers.
Social media filled with reviews dripping in disappointment.
My second series ended early.
The third went much the same way.
At least that one made it to five volumes, so I had written roughly as much as I wanted to.
But it still did not satisfy the readers who had been waiting for another <The College Student from Another World>.
Since arriving in this world, I had written five works in total.
That was quite a lot by the standards of a published Japanese author.
But to my readers, I was still the author of <The College Student from Another World>.
The author whose Korean protagonist had kept the series from becoming a blockbuster, leaving it closer to a respectable hit.
The author who had built up a cult following among a specific group of readers.
The author whose premise had made an anime adaptation impossible to even dream of, but whose manga adaptation had succeeded because an artist who loved the novel had taken an interest.
Put simply, I was a one-hit wonder.
It was an awkward label for a creator.
When you considered how many creators left nothing behind at all, it almost sounded like praise.
But it also carried the meaning: You’re washed up now.
That made it difficult to take kindly.
Not that I saw it that way.
I was fairly good at judging myself honestly.
I had already written a work that ordinarily could never have existed.
Wanting more than that would have been greedy.
So the reason I could not write now was not because I had developed some tortured-artist syndrome.
It was not because I was afraid of being compared to my debut novel.
The reason was simpler than that.
And Yoshihiro was not asking me to write another work on the level of <The College Student from Another World>, either.
He had rejected my new manuscript not because his standards were unusually high, but because it was simply boring.
If his standards had been that strict, my early-ended series would never have been published in the first place.
Which meant I was not even clearing Yoshihiro’s not-particularly-high bar.
For one reason.
“Lately.”
“Lately what?”
“I don’t really know what’s fun anymore.”
Hiiragi Touji.
Fifteen years old.
Diagnosis: a broken fun sensor.