MaruMA:Volume02:Afterword
Afterword[edit]
Are you feeling cheerful? This is Takabayashi.
It's all very sudden, but I have been wondering about the reason the LABEL this book is published under is of the name "the BEANS library". Must be because beer is best served with green soybeans. Must be because Jack is best seen with bean stalks. Must be because rather than tough guys or scruffy guys it's the diligent and honest guys[1] that are popular with girls. Well, if left to Shibuya Yuuri, this would probably all come down to "....Takabayashi, exactly how old are you?".
This Shibuya Yuuri I've just introduced to you is the protagonist of this novel. If you want to know what he looks like, please turn the pages to see the introduction of characters at the beginning of this book. And if you want to know what the story reads like, please turn to see the fate-determining seven-rowed short summary on the back cover. All I should be saying here, is that this book is the sequel to <Starting Today I'm in Ma!Freelance Work!!> ("Today MA"for short. It...should be slowly on sale in bookstores all over the country right now.).
"Eeeh?! You mean a sequel?!" "That's right." "Then this means fantasy (which I'm super weak at) plus first person (intensely weak at) plus everyone being beautiful except for the hero (tearfully weak at) once again?!" "That would follow." "And it means GAGs again?!" "You guessed it." "And it means there would be snacks in the banana?!" "The question itself isn't making sense." A conversation like this may or may not have happened, but let's not care about it. What matters is that because of your noble votes, I'm now able to write about His Majesty and his joyful friends once again. Thank you for accepting them. Thank you for giving them your love. Everyone who has dropped me a message, is the PAPER with my reply arriving at your homes?
This time His Majesty takes his entourages SUKE-SAN (Yuu-SUKESAN-tamaria?) and KAKU-SAN (deoxyribo....oh I should probably drop this) and goes on a little trip of adventure.[2] Of course, you don't need to have read the previous book for this one, for I tried very hard to keep the story within one volume. However, if you become interested in things like how they met each other, and go on to check the bookstores, that would make me very happy. Though near my own home no bookstore has the last book.....
Speaking of checking in bookstores, when Today MA was first published, I went into the stores for many times. Because it was the first time my book became a Bunkobon[3] sitting in a sun-lit CORNER of a common bookstore[4], I secretly counted them, and in the store(s) that only had one copy out for display silently rearranged more to tile on surfaces, and did all kinds of suspicious things. Among these the most shady must be the time when I watched for as long as 20 minutes to see if anyone came to buy one copy. I stood half-afar and spied the young adult fiction CORNER, and randomly seized books placed before my eyes pretending to be reading them every time the shop clerk passed behind me. But it turned out I was standing in the CORNER of H-novels for male readers and the NOVELS I opened were all porno ones. Ah--huge breasts! Ah--girl teachers!
There were also times when I set my mind to go to the scene carrying a COMPACT CAMERA feeling "It might not come twice for my book to be tiled in the new arrival corner ever again. I need to keep some evidence of this happening!". But it would have been bad to be mistaken for a business spy by taking photos all of a sudden, and it wouldn't do either to just go "It feels so acamedic seeing young lovers visiting bookstores together, let Ojisan take a picture for you. Ah it looks nice to have that book righ in the middle. Ok I'll take it like this, say Maltese(I'm a dog lover)"at young couples coming into these stores. And time just passed without mercy before I was able to spot any reader of mine, or take any souvenir photo of this publication.
But a SECOND CHANCE has come to me! And that is this book. Life really would suprise you even if it's the second half of the ninth inning and you have two outs. There is no way for me to know if this is your FIRST CONTACT or SECOND CONTACT with Takabayashi when you're meeting me here; but if something in this book attracted you, then that alone would make me greatly happy.
Perhaps it's the illustrations? They were drawn by Matsumoto Temari-san. Matsumoto-san, many readers told me they came to notice my book because of your wonderful illustrations. And I'm extremely sorry to have made you draw nosebleeder characters. Or perhaps it's the summary of the story? The summary was written by GEG(Great Editor Goto-chin). For this book she famously said with a sigh "....Is there not a serious person in here?". Why, isn't the eldest son fairly serious?
And if it's something in the story.....that would be the part written by me. If something in this book made you feel something, please, please let me hear about your thoughts.
It is your words that are essential for Shibuya Yuuri to keep on going.
Takabayashi Tomo
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References[edit]
- ↑ lit. マメな男(mame-na-otoko). The Japanese for "beans"("豆") also reads MAME.
- ↑ SUKE-SAN and KAKU-SAN are both characters from the Mito-Koumonn(水戸黄門) series. For Yuusuke Santamaria, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%C5%ABsuke_Santamaria . For KAKU-SAN-deoxyribo, let's give our thanks to the official Chinese translator for pointing out that this is a joke linking KA-KU-SA-NN which reads exactly the same as "核酸"(nucleic acid) to "デオキシリボ核酸"(deoxyribo nucleic acid).
- ↑ They are the standard A6 sized books in Japan.
- ↑ Person translating suspects this refers to MaruMA being published as a G-rated novel(一般小説) and not a BL novel, considering that by the info we can find, sensei already had at least one BL novel published as a book before MA under her earlier pen name.
