Editing Internet Shrine Maiden Tsugumi-chan:Volume1 Afterword

==Afterword==

This is Kamachi Kazuma.

The themes this time were shrine maidens, a city built on the ocean, and exorcism vs. Malign Spirits! Ghosts are a motif that has never been given the center stage in Index. I hope you felt some clammy fear from an atmosphere different from magic used by the living.

The protagonist is a shrine maiden. In an extreme situation where her enemies and allies are both human, she has chosen to side with those who are still alive. The truly good might frown at her choice to not save the spirits of the dead, but if the Malign Spirit lamenting their own murder has taken many more lives, is there no way to punish the dead for their crimes? What about the feelings of the many people killed by that one Malign Spirit? This story depicts the serious battle of the shrine maiden who struggles from a position that doesn’t allow a tearjerking salvation of the dead.

Now, this shrine maiden can’t conveniently choose to attack with different elements and defend herself with a supernatural barrier. It’s important that everything she does has to begin with the Imperial Exorcism Igniter oil lighter, which is still a mystery at the end of the book. It frustrates me that I couldn’t entirely eliminate the convenient concept of a “spiritual sense”, but I tried to keep the supernatural abilities used by the living to a minimum. Making the supernatural a rare thing fits horror better than fantasy. It gives the supernatural more weight.



I’ve probably written over a hundred middle and high school student characters at this point (not that I’ve actually counted), but I feel like I haven’t had a gyaru as a main character very often. Since ghost encounters and rumors go hand in hand, a gyaru is one of the first things that comes to mind when I think about horror.

The protagonist is nervous in her school life and the gyaru sister is nervous at the haunted locations. I wanted her relationship with the shrine maiden to reverse when they entered the haunted locations.



Ghost stories are associated with the summer and the winter, two completely opposite seasons, but I focused on the kind that bring a chill to the summer heat. I somewhat regret that decision when thinking about what kind of city I could have created if the story was set on a snowy winter mountain, though. But if I was going to write a shrine maiden wielding fireworks in the dark of the night, it just had to be a hot summer night. And from there, I knew if she was going to be dancing like that, it had to be a jiggly shrine maiden. You get where I’m coming from, don’t you?

The detective is out of place in the girls’ school life, but he is stepping into the haunted locations from a completely different genre. That means he has no spiritual sense and is fairly useless there, but he’s crazy strong against living humans. He does his work behind the scenes of a world he isn’t suited for, but I hope you can see how there was a time when he was completely untouchable.



The link between hauntings and phone errors was touched upon in Index too, but I focused more on it here. My phone tops the list of things I wouldn’t want to suddenly stop working in a dark abandoned building. Really, smartphones are just so convenient you can’t do horror if there’s even one of them around!! It used to be that a flashlight suddenly dying or a car’s tire blowing was all you needed to trap people in that cruel space. But now you can get a phone signal pretty much anywhere in Japan? You just have to shake your phone and a taxi will come to pick you up? If you see something weird, you can snap a photo or take a video, and ask people about it on social media or a question site and the horror of it all crumbles away!!!



I give my thanks to my illustrator booota-san and my editors Miki-san, Nakajima-san, and Hamamura-san. It must have been tough to combine things as different as cute girls and creepy Malign Spirits in the illustrations. Thank you so much.

And I give my thanks to the readers. Are ghosts scarier when you can clearly see them or when you can’t see anything? These things really come down to personal preference, but the line you see here is my preference. I can only hope you enjoyed it. Thank you so much for picking up this book.



And I will end this here.



I guess there’s also ones like Kisaragi Station where they post a lot but don’t get an answer.

-Kamachi Kazuma

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