Owari no Chronicle

Volume 8, Afterword

Hello. It’s been a while, but this is Kawakami.

The air felt so very thick this summer and it made 4-A very thick as well. …I’m sorry. I got carried away. This book is so thick simply because I naively thought I could finish all this in a single book.

Now, this story is about plants and dragons, but I am raising(?) a single plant in my home. It started out quite small, but as I gave it water, it grew to over a meter tall and had to say the following:

“D-damn you. Quit trying to assert your presence in this small house.”

And so I am now restricting its growth with manmade rainy seasons and dry seasons. Even when you remove the buds, the stem keeps growing. And it started spreading outwards rather than continuing up, so it’s a clever little thing.

Now for the usual chat.

“Did you read it?”

“I’m just going to say it now. Do the afterwords of this series really help the readers in any way? I’ve been wondering that.”

“You like getting to the heart of the issue instead of talking about the book, don’t you? To bluntly comment about your personality, I doubt you can get married like this. Anyway, did you read it?”

“You just want me to talk about something painful when I was a student, right?”

“Now you’re really getting to the heart of the issue. What a dreadful child!”

“From what I’ve seen in the chats with the others, there’s not much that requires actually reading the book.”

“You’re not supposed to say that, T-kun! It’s just that the others are all a sad kind of person!!”

“Look in the mirror and you’ll find another. Anyway, I’ll ignore all that and just say it. On the way home from high school one day, I smelled some really good curry while passing by an apartment building near the school. I lost track of where I was and started jumping up and down to reach the smell, but a high school girl happened to walk out from a corner and I ran away as fast as I could.”

“Okay, 4-B is next. It comes out next month.”

“Wait, wait! Are you really leaving it at that!?”

You’re a sad kind of person too. Congrats. Anyway, my BGM this time was Halo from the video game Halo. (I like the part with a march tempo and I chose it for this book because it’s from an American game.)

“Who was hiding their true self?”

I also thought on that.

Okay, just wait for the second half.

October 2004. A typhoon-filled morning.

-Kawakami Minoru