Chapter 271 - 271: Best of Me (Part 2)

Shueisha, the Weekly Shonen Jump editorial department.

With lunch break approaching, the office showed no sign of slowing down.

Editors sat hunched over manuscripts at their desks, phones ringing one after another in every corner.

Someone was murmuring into a phone, negotiating a deadline with an author; someone else was confirming layout changes with the printer; and someone was still digging through a mountain of paper, hunting for a contract buried who-knew-where beneath it.

Editor Oonishi sat by the window, frowning slightly at a submission from a rookie artist.

The artwork was decent enough, but the pacing dragged and the storyboards lacked any real punch.

He picked up the mug at his elbow, found it empty, set the manuscript down, and got up to go refill it.

Just then, he saw a figure walking straight toward him.

It was a young man dressed, by any measure, like a textbook otaku — an itasha-style T-shirt printed with an anime girl, two or three paper bags in hand that were obviously fresh loot from a convention.

Through the open tops of the bags he could just make out doujinshi covered in anime-girl art and all sorts of merchandise.

Oonishi's first thought was: a convention-goer who'd wandered onto the wrong floor?

But the man's steps never wavered. He walked straight up and stopped in front of Oonishi's desk.

"Can I... help you with something?"

Oonishi asked, more out of reflex than anything.

The otaku tilted his head at the question, wearing an expression that plainly said, "What are you talking about?"

"Editor Oonishi, it's me — Oda." The voice that answered was one Oonishi knew all too well.

"...?"

Oonishi studied the man in front of him more carefully.

The otaku getup wasn't exactly a great look, admittedly.

But compared to the disheveled man who'd been hounded day and night by deadlines, too worn down to even shave —

— this practically counted as dressed to the nines.

"Ah — O-Oda-sensei!"

Oonishi finally snapped back to himself, scrambling to his feet and fumbling to pull over a swivel chair from nearby.

"What brings you here out of the blue? Please, sit, sit!"

Oda didn't stand on ceremony — he plopped right down, carefully setting his paper bags by his feet.

"So, uh, what's with the outfit?"

Oonishi asked once he'd sat back down.

"I finished the pages for next issue."

Oda said, turning to unzip the worn backpack behind him and pull out a manila envelope, which he handed over.

"I remembered today was the Comic Market doujin event, and figured since I hadn't been out in ages, I might as well go browse — and drop the pages off while I was at it."

Oonishi took the envelope with the manuscript inside. "Thanks for the hard work. Let me just check it over—"

Just as he was about to open the flap, Oda spoke up again. "Oh, right."

There was a kind of childlike excitement in his voice, the sort you'd hear from a kid showing off treasure.

"I got Xuanyayi's doujinshi."

Oonishi's hand froze.

He pushed the half-drawn manuscript back into the envelope and set it aside.

Then he looked up at Oda.

"Xuanyayi? He was at this Comic Market too?"

Before Oda could answer, Editor Tanaka at the next desk heard the name Xuanyayi and popped his head up from behind a desk piled with manuscripts.

Tanaka pushed up his glasses, his voice thick with regret.

"I heard too. Too bad I couldn't get away today — couldn't go buy one myself..."

The moment he said it, the whole office's mood shifted instantly.

Everyone put down their work as if by silent agreement, and chatter erupted from every corner of the room.

"What do you mean, 'heard'? Xuanyayi announced it himself on Twitter!"

Editor Sato, sitting in the corner, set down his red pen and swiveled his chair around to join in.

"Didn't he go to last summer's Comic Market too? Though back then his identity hadn't leaked yet, so nobody knew Xuanyayi was actually the literary giant Master of Dassai-ya."

"Right — I remember that one was his first real pure-love doujinshi."

Just then, a voice came from the back of the crowd, tentative and cautious.

"Um... Oda-sensei, so what's the story about this time?"

The moment the question left his mouth, every eye in the office turned to Oda.

Watching the scene unfold, Oonishi understood completely.

Ever since Tsushima Kagami's first commercial work had unexpectedly taken off within the office,

it was safe to say that every editor at Weekly Shonen Jump — from the editor-in-chief down to the intern assistants — was a fan of Tsushima Kagami.

The reason was simple: this man had used adult manga to change the entire industry.

Before Tsushima Kagami came along, the adult manga market had been sizable, sure, but in most people's minds it was little more than a "reference manual" for satisfying physical urges.

Story was, at best, decoration nobody really needed.

But Tsushima Kagami's very first work had overturned that notion completely.

With art years ahead of its time, emotional detail so fine it left readers breathless, and stories that were both heartrending and warm, he'd single-handedly dragged adult manga up several tiers.

In the process, even mainstream manga artists and editors had started measuring their work against Xuanyayi's.

Not to mention when his identity was later exposed — that "Xuanyayi" and the literary giant "Master of Dassai-ya" were, of all things, the same person. Oonishi still vividly remembered the earthquake that news had caused in the office.

From that day on, the office's admiration for Tsushima Kagami had gone from mere appreciation to outright fanaticism.

Every issue of any magazine carrying his work got passed around the break room.

Unfortunately, Tsushima Kagami had been busy with pure literature lately and hadn't drawn any manga in quite a while. Without that shared topic, even the mood in the break room had gone noticeably flat.

Thinking about it, Oonishi sighed inwardly.

If only Xuanyayi could come draw something for Jump — what a sight that would be.

By now, Oda wasn't keeping anyone in suspense any longer.

He bent down, pulled three thick doujinshi out of the bags at his feet with both hands, and carefully set them on Oonishi's desk.

Everyone stared at the three identical volumes and sucked in a breath.

"That's... that's way too thick, isn't it?"

Oonishi picked one up and weighed it in his hand — it was genuinely heavy.

"This has to be several hundred pages."

"Three hundred and some."

Oda said with a grin, the satisfaction in his voice practically saying, "I knew you'd all be shocked."

"Three hundred pages?!"

Someone gasped, no one quite sure who.

The editors gathered around exchanged looks, their expressions shifting from surprise to disbelief.

Every editor present, whether once young or still young, had been to a doujinshi convention before.

They all knew that an ordinary doujinshi, even a so-called "deluxe edition," usually ran twenty to thirty pages.

Getting up to fifty pages already counted as showing serious dedication.

Anything past a hundred pages was practically unheard of.

And here was one running past three hundred...

"Three hundred pages... what could it even be about..."

Tanaka muttered to himself, eyes locked on the cover as if he could see through the plastic wrap by sheer will.

Everyone stared at the cover and the title, Just As We Wrote This Story Together, and by pure editorial instinct, they all sensed this one probably wouldn't end happily.

After all, Xuanyayi's screenplay Crying Out Love in the Center of the World had only just hit theaters.

It was, without question, an absolute tragedy.

The overall tone had been pure love as always, but in the end the heroine still died — without even getting to fulfill her wish.

The hero had even scattered her ashes at the end, which had a lot of people slamming Xuanyayi for writing the purest of love stories only to hand it the most beastly of endings.

Little by little, people had started calling him the Beast of Pure Love.

So now, looking at this title and its faintly melancholy cover, everyone had already silently accepted that this one might not end well either.

Everyone in the room wanted to tear off the plastic wrap and dive in right then.

But nobody was bold enough to ask.

This was Oda's own money at work, after all, and the wrapping was still perfectly intact — anyone could tell he meant to keep this copy for his collection.

Just as everyone was steeling themselves to swallow their disappointment and drift back to work,

Oda suddenly bent down and picked up all three doujinshi at once.

"Rrrip... rrrip... rip..."

Three crisp tears of plastic wrap rang out, unusually loud in the quiet office.

Everyone froze.

Oda balled up the torn wrapping, tossed it into the trash can beside him, then picked up one copy and pushed it into Oonishi's hands.

"What are you standing there for, Editor Oonishi?"

Oda said with a laugh.

"It's almost lunch, right? Let's take a look before then."

"...? Are — are you sure?"

Oonishi asked out of reflex, though his fingers had already, quite honestly, flipped open the cover.

"Of course I'm sure. I brought it here on purpose."

Oda leaned back in his chair, arms crossed, thoroughly pleased with himself.

"I just wanted to sit down and read it with you and everyone else right now."

"No fun reading alone — good stuff's only really enjoyable when you share it."

"Well then... we'll gladly take you up on it!"

Oonishi said, and the other editors, laughing and murmuring their thanks, reached for the two remaining copies.

Just then— "The editor-in-chief's coming!"

Someone hissed, voice tight with obvious panic.

In an instant everyone scattered, scrambling back to their own desks.

The screech of chairs, the pounding of footsteps, a muffled grunt as someone banged into a desk corner in the chaos — all of it fell silent within three or four seconds.

By the time the editor-in-chief's figure appeared in the doorway, nearly ten editors were already standing ramrod straight at their posts, forming a line that wasn't exactly tidy but was unmistakably respectful.

"Thank you for your hard work, Chief!"

The greeting rang out in perfect unison, sharper than any choir.

The editor-in-chief's gaze swept slowly across the office as he walked in, finally landing on the three beautifully-covered doujinshi sitting on Oonishi's desk.

The corner of his mouth twitched upward.

"Oda-sensei."

The editor-in-chief walked up to Oda, his tone gentle.

"Long time no see. That's quite the... energetic outfit today."

Oda scratched his head, laughing a little sheepishly.

The editor-in-chief skipped any further pleasantries and looked straight at the three doujinshi.

"Might I take a look?"

Oda immediately picked one up and offered it with both hands. "Of course — go ahead."

The editor-in-chief took the book with a word of thanks, not bothering to be picky about where he sat.

He simply sat down at an empty desk nearby.

He flipped open the cover, and just as he was about to start the first page, he suddenly looked up.

He saw that everyone in the office was still standing frozen in place.

The editor-in-chief blinked, then smacked his own forehead with a laugh.

"It's lunch break already."

He waved a hand, still smiling.

"Everyone go on and do your own thing. Don't mind me."

Everyone let out a breath of relief at the same moment.

Oonishi quickly picked up the copy he'd already opened and started reading alongside Oda.

Then, like a dam bursting, everyone else surged toward the one remaining copy.

"Let me see!" "Me first!"

"No, no — take turns!"

"Whose hands are that long?!"

In the end, someone quick on the draw snatched the last copy away and darted to a corner to flip it open.

The rest split into three groups — one clustered around Oonishi,

one crowded around the person who'd made off with the stolen copy,

and the last, made up of the braver few, edged cautiously up beside the editor-in-chief.

Noticing the extra heads gathering nearby, the editor-in-chief laughed and spread the book flat on the desk so everyone could read together.

So it was that, during lunch break at the Jump editorial office, no one was eating and no one was catching up on sleep.

A dozen-odd people split into three clusters, each huddled around a doujinshi, quietly turning pages.

Every now and then someone would murmur, "This storyboard is incredible," or, "How did he even think of this emotional turn?" — before falling quiet again, sinking back into the world Tsushima Kagami had built.

Just As We Wrote This Story Together was the representative work of the artist [Nakani].

Manga: Nakanishi Yuuta

"Since childhood, she had always been beautiful, spirited, and formidably strong — dazzling to anyone who saw her, the light she gave off unmistakable."

The story employed an extremely bold stream-of-consciousness narrative technique.

The opening pages leapt constantly between reality and memory, timelines tangled together.

That faint touch of the fantastical in its atmosphere, combined with heavy use of first-person-perspective panels, made everyone who opened the book think of one name in particular — Fujimoto Tatsuki.

For that reason, Nakani had earned the online nickname "the Fujimoto Tatsuki of the doujinshi world," and quickly broke out into the mainstream online scene domestically.

This was because the story used a narrative trick that had everyone believing, all along, that the heroine was merely a hallucination — the male lead's longing for a woman who had died.

But in the end came a twist: it turned out the younger sister had been following a script left behind by her dead older sister.

A carefully orchestrated performance meant to help the male lead work through his emotional scars.

No one had expected that everything had actually been planned by the sister from the start.

It was all a script of mutual redemption the sister had written before her death, specifically so her sister and the male lead could climb out of the shadows together — and in the end, it succeeded in bringing the two of them together.

A story steeped from the start in the aesthetic of mono no aware, it ended up delivering a happy ending after all — a small, welcome surprise worth celebrating.

Because of its heavily stream-of-consciousness storytelling and cinema-quality storyboarding,

combined with its literary artistic sensibility, and finally an elegant, faithful translation by a scanlation group, it earned a wave of acclaim once it spread across domestic forums.

But over in Japan, the manga's reception was surprisingly middling — not exactly bad, but nothing special either.

In short, it never really caught fire.

It could only be chalked up to coincidence that it happened to strike a chord with domestic literary sensibilities.

Worth noting: this artist was, in fact, a "little sister" specialist.

His earlier works had all been imouto-themed too, and those first few little-sister titles had actually sold quite well on DLsite.

You had to hand it to the Japanese — they really did have a taste for sibling-taboo stories.

And don't think it's just a genre gimmick, either — apparently the inclination runs deep enough in real life over there too.

Then again, given their history, it's hardly surprising — it seems to be etched right into the DNA at this point.

On top of that, this artist released every single work for free on Pixiv, fully public — you could honestly call that a rare combination of artistry and generosity.

Tsushima Kagami had originally planned to serialize it in Comic Kairakuten, thinking it would generate more buzz that way.

But he himself found the idea of drawing it all in one go too grueling, and in the end made it his piece for the summer convention instead.

As for the manga's flaws, there were actually quite a few, but two stood out as the most important.

The first was that the art was genuinely a bit rough — the original looked like a deadline-crunched rough draft handed in as-is. Tsushima Kagami, however, had done an admirable job fixing that.

The second was that, while billed as pure love, it wasn't really all that pure — there was a whiff of "stand-in" romance to it, some substitute-lover undertones.

Beyond that, plenty of people said the story was so literary that the erotic parts ended up feeling superfluous.

The readers it drew in were nearly all hooked by the plot and atmosphere, and had little interest left over for the racier bits.

Combined with the genuinely rough art, it was hard to get in the mood at all — as a doujinshi in the strictest sense, it was actually something of a failure.

Amid the office's chorus of admiration for the manga's storyboarding, narrative technique, and plot twists —

— and its wistful complaints about why Shueisha's higher-ups still hadn't found a way to bring Xuanyayi on board for a collaboration —

Shimizu Nayotake, meanwhile, was walking out of the theater along with everyone else.

Her mind was still caught on the images from moments ago.

The sea dyed red by the setting sun, the abandoned shack by the window, Sakutaro and Aki sitting side by side on the iron railing, endless twilight behind them.

Shimizu Nayotake hadn't watched all that many films in her life.

In fact, she wasn't even much of a moviegoer to begin with.

But of one thing she was certain.

Even if she watched a thousand more films, ten thousand more, none would ever hold a scene more beautiful than this.

Because what that scene held inside it was eternity.

It was the feeling of a single instant frozen forever, outside the flow of time.

And the image of Sakutaro and Aki huddled together by the bonfire at night —

— brought back the memory of the first time she'd read The Sound of Waves.

The scene where Shinji and Hatsue took shelter from the storm inside the lighthouse.

The feeling had been identical to what she felt today watching Crying Out Love in the Center of the World.

No — not quite the same.

The lighthouse night in The Sound of Waves had been gentle, restrained, full of hope.

But the bonfire night in Crying Out Love in the Center of the World... was searing, desperate — a thing done in full knowledge it could never work.

Watching it, one phrase had come to her mind: a moth throwing itself into the flame.

That sense of fate — knowing you'll be burned alive and being unable to stop yourself from drawing closer anyway.

But in the end, Aki died anyway.

She died so quietly, so helplessly, so... unwillingly.

To the very end, she never got to fulfill her dream — never got to see the true center of the world, never got to stand with Sakutaro atop Uluru's red rock.

And Sakutaro, because of it, would be trapped by that loss for the rest of his life.

Thinking of this, Shimizu Nayotake's steps slowed on their own.

She suddenly thought of Just As We Wrote This Story Together, the doujinshi she'd seen earlier that day.

The older sister, Akasaki Taka, had died too.

But her will had lived on through a diary that read like a script, ultimately helping her sister and the male lead find their way out of grief.

Taka, too, had left behind plenty of regrets she never got to resolve.

But at least her one wish — that the two people she loved would go on living well —

— had, in the end, come true.

Both women had carved the best parts of themselves permanently into someone else's memory.

So what about herself?

"What about me, then? Do I have any regrets left?"

____

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