Going by what the bookstore owner had told him, Yuuga thought Konoha’s publishing industry was still far too thin.
There were only a handful of popular categories, and some of those were knockoffs chasing Icha Icha Paradise.
Still, that was fine.
Yuuga was rather pleased.
A thin market was the easiest kind to take, and writing books was exactly where he could stretch his arms.
Having gotten what he wanted out of the owner, he stood up and looked over the store’s shelves, and he had a rough picture in his head.
He thanked the owner again, left the bookstore, and started for home.
When he pushed open the bookstore door, the streetlights were still glowing, but there were far fewer people on the road.
Now and then he passed a middle-aged man hurrying somewhere, or a shopkeeper who had already closed up.
Without noticing, he had spent close to two hours talking in there.
Whenever Yuuga ran into someone he knew, he stopped and said hello first.
In the eyes of the villagers of Konoha, he was a hardworking, upstanding boy.
The whole way home, one question kept turning over in his mind: what should the first book be?
As the piece that broke the ground, it would be best if it went off like a shot.
Only with a good start would he have any claim on the market.
Yuuga didn’t want his debut to make no splash at all.
It wasn’t only Konoha, either.
The whole ninja world’s culture industry was developing slowly.
You could see it in the fact that a single Icha Icha Paradise by Jiraiya could sell across the Five Great Shinobi Countries.
Even an elite ninja like Kakashi carried Icha Icha Paradise around everywhere.
Ahem, though it was also possible Kakashi was just a guy who liked reading “blush-inducing prose.”
On the whole, the cultural soil here was frighteningly barren, a desert heaped up out of yellow sand, with the occasional stubborn cactus and pitifully few oases.
Food for the mind was in short supply, and that gave Yuuga an opening.
A chance to “improve the desert,” to turn it into an oasis.
What kind of book to write kept swinging back and forth in his head.
But he firmly crossed the literary classics off the list entirely.
Classics, like great men, were products of their eras, and they carried a heavy load of criticism.
The Greek philosophers were the best example.
The wars between the city-states threw the world into upheaval, the age was treacherous and hard to read, and thinkers were taken in as advisors by rulers, schools of thought sprang up, and each of them set down its doctrines in writing.
The same logic applied to Journey to the West, The Iliad, Les Misérables, and even Crime and Punishment.
Without a great age behind them, what was there to criticize?
Classics reflect reality, and with a completely different social background, what would they reflect?
Hauling a classic into the ninja world by force would come out neither fish nor fowl.
As for rewriting one wholesale, Yuuga wasn’t sure he could handle it.
For a book to sell, it had to strike a chord with readers first, so the classics were simply not something he could put his pen to.
After crossing off the classics and thinking for a bit, web novels came to mind, and Yuuga shook his head to himself and let that go too.
Web novels ran to hundreds of thousands of words, sometimes over a million, which was too much for a newcomer.
Besides, he would still have to take quests for money while writing, otherwise going hungry would be the small problem.
Getting thrown out by the landlady and ending up on the street was the terrifying one.
As for following the trend and writing smut, he hadn’t really considered it.
If his fan base was going to be a crowd of creepy old men and unwashed brutes, it just felt strange.
A cold wind blew past, and Yuuga pulled his clothes tighter and stuck his hands in his pockets before walking on.
He thought of Ino in nothing but that little purple dress, hands planted on her hips.
Women really were amazing.
It was already fall and she was still wearing a little dress.
He shook his head.
Wait.
Women?
His feet stopped.
He smacked himself on the forehead and said, with some regret, “How did I overlook the women’s market?
My brain…”
Konoha’s population was roughly fifty-fifty men and women, so women did hold up half the sky in the village.
But among ninja the ratio was close to five to one, and only a few gifted women stayed on that long road to the end.
Most of them married at a suitable age and became wives and mothers, proper, gentle, well-mannered wives.
Male ninja mostly fought on the front lines to protect the village and the country, and the ordinary villagers had their own work to feed their families.
In their free time they could have a drink, go play a couple of rounds at the casino, and there was even smut written for the male market.
Women, by comparison, had it rough.
As housewives, they had pitifully little in the way of entertainment.
They couldn’t even watch a soap opera.
He hadn’t seen many novels for women back in the bookstore either.
He had glanced at one on the shelf and found dust on the cover, and when he pulled it down and flipped through it, it turned out to be five or six years old.
On top of that, it was the moth-eaten story of a samurai falling in love with a princess and eloping, and the book put most of its weight on preaching the samurai spirit, with not much written about the princess at all.
Nobody was writing a book specifically for women.
Yuuga’s chance had come.
Women were the most absorbed readers of novels there were.
And picture a cute girl hugging his novel with her eyes closed, lost in it.
How to put it?
Adorable.
Before he noticed, he had reached his front door, so he set the planning aside for now.
He climbed the stairs to the second floor, opened the door and flipped the light switch, and the room brightened.
Yuuga’s place was the same as that of Konoha’s most miserable second-generation somebody, Naruto Uzumaki: the cheapest one-bedroom with a living room, kitchen and bath.
Under Yuuga’s own renovations, though, it was clean and tidy.
He didn’t ask much of where he lived, but basic tidiness was a must.
Speaking of Naruto, Yuuga had gone to look him up when he first arrived.
How to put it, the kid was poor and pitiful.
Konoha’s pension was only enough to keep him barely alive, which made Yuuga curious about where Minato and his wife’s estate had gone.
The money those two earned from missions alone would have fed a person for ten lifetimes, so how did Naruto end up that badly off?