Maria-sama ga Miteru:Volume22 Afterword
Afterword[edit]
Blank Map of the Future?
It seems like the title of the last book in a series.
Hi there. Konno here.
And that was something my editor said when we were talking about the subtitle over the phone.
It really sounded like the end, he had said. And when I thought about it, I realized he was right.
"After this book each of the girls would go on to follow their own paths in life."
So, it was The End then. That's what the title made you think.[1]
Well first look at the word "Future". We could have said "Tomorrow" instead. Future is just one of those words that sounds like it wraps things up.
And then "blank". We could have used "blue" but that felt a bit suspicious. There are more suspicious colors out there though. But if you had used colors like red, or yellow then they wouldn't have made it sound like the series was ending. At least that's what I think.
And then finally we come to "map". Do we even need to talk about this one?
But this isn't the last book.
For those of you who've been following the series since the beginning, you'll be thinking "No way, it's still not done?!" No it hasn't ended yet. The problem is that there's still a lot of stuff left to cover. To sort through it all will take some time.
Also this was the first time I talked about a stitch.[2]
The stitch I talked about is one used often on those green caterpillars. When I was growing up, it was all over those frocks and blouses. It's the stitch that you look at and say "this is what a rose should be", and then you try to think of the name of the stitch and you just can't. I looked through my Embroidery Book at home and finally found it. "Oh oh, I finally found it. It's the Baiorin Stitch". So I added Baiorin to the draft of the book. So then when I thought I should try to confirm the stitch, I tried looking up the stitch on the internet and I got no hits. Then was it a Violin Stitch? So I tried changing the Ba to a Va but still nothing. Could this be some weird custom name that my book gave to the stitch? So I went to the local bookstore and I tried looking in another book of stitches. "I found it!" I thought when I checked the index under "Rose" and found "Barion Rose". And then I thought "Wait, what?" That's when it dawned upon me.
It wasn't Baiorin! It was Barion!!!!
All the search results I was getting were based on Baiorin.
I was as angry as I could get. If I hadn't searched the internet, the book may have been written with Bairon instead of Barion.[3]
Also I want to talk about a little misunderstanding we had regarding Maria-sama ga Miteru.[4]
-- Begin Snip --
-- End Snip --
And while we're talking about misunderstandings, I'll mention another one. Recently I received a letter from a male fan saying "Please thank your Onee-sama editor". Of course, my real editor would be more like a "Onii-sama". I had mentioned this in an Afterword for another book I had written, but that was a book called "Slippy Shoes", so I thought there would be people who wouldn't know. Or maybe he came to one of my book signings where the Shueisha Onee-samas were standing next to me and just fell in love with one of them so he thought that she just had to be my editor.
But then again, if a male fan would write "Please thank your Onii-sama editor" it would make you feel a bit uneasy wouldn't it?[5]
Well, that's all I have this time.
-- Konno Oyuki
This is a work of fiction. All similarities between real people, groups, and occurrences and those in this book are completely coincidental.
Translator's Notes[edit]
- ↑ (TL Sukoshi: To follow the below conversation, you need to understand a bit of Japanese. The title of the book in Japanese is Mirai no Haku Chizu. Mirai is future, and Haku Chizu is blank map. But Haku is the same character used in the word Shiroi or White. Chizu is the same as a generic map.)
- ↑ (TL Sukoshi: Violin is Vaiorin in Japanese.)
- ↑ (TL Sukoshi: If you haven't figured it out yet, the English name for the stitch is the Bullion Stitch not the Barion Stitch.)
- ↑ (TL Sukoshi: I've completely omitted the following section. It deals with inane Kanji details about how the title is canonically read, and how Konno Oyuki-sama always uses non-standard Kanji for the name Kanji for her characters. The discussion is absolutely byzantine for the reader not acutely aware of the details of Japanese, and cannot even translate correctly to English without a copious amount of translator's notes. If you're really interested in it though, shoot me an email and I'll try to translate it.)
- ↑ (TL Sukoshi: Onii-sama means older brother, like Onee-sama means older sister. Also in Japanese, the phrase "Please thank your Onii-sama editor" has more sexual connotations than the English one does.)
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