Hataraku Maou-sama! - Volume 11 - Chapter Aft

THE AUTHOR, THE AFTERWORD, AND YOU! 
Plunging into a new environment can always make a person nervous. In academics, maybe it’s changing classes or schools, or graduating to a new grade, or going to part-time jobs or after-school learning centers. When you’re grown up, it could involve changing jobs, departments, or addresses. 
Every time you find yourself in a new environment, it’s easy to start worrying over the unknowns ahead, losing sleep over it. I imagine everyone’s experienced that at one point or another. Before The Devil is a Part-Timer! saw the light of day, I got a phone call saying I was one of the finalists in the Dengeki Novel Prize. I was asked to report to the editorial office in a few days, and during that tiny interval, I, Wagahara, spent every waking moment fretting over nothing, wondering what would happen next. I’d make careless errors at work that I’d never normally commit, and I’d find myself feeling queasy at times. 
I’ll never forget the first day I reported to their office. I arrived at the building a good twenty minutes before my appointment, and as I tried to kill the time, I wound up trotting to the public bathroom in the nearby Shinjuku Central Park, unloading everything I had at full throttle in there, no less than four times in fifteen minutes. 

The days between my first visit and the release of Devil’s first volume meant a return to constant fretting. Being asked to write a sequel set it off again, and I never stopped worrying until that one was on the shelves. I’ve gone through the process over and over again—and before I knew it, The Devil is a Part-Timer! now wraps up its eleventh volume. 
Whenever I write a new story, I sometimes get anxious over whether this is still important to me—whether I’ve forgotten the emotions I brought with me at first. But if we’re here rapping at each other again, I suppose that means I haven’t—which is good. 
This volume is set to be released in May of 2014 in Japan. They say spring is a time for new encounters (as well as a time when students nationwide contract a killer case of senioritis), and I suppose one’s ability to get used to a new situation (or not) is a kind of watershed in their lives. 
In Volume 11, we see the characters expressing frustration over the brand-new environment they’re thrust into, fretting over how to deal with it, and ultimately deciding to worry over how to put food on the table tomorrow instead of obsessing over things they can’t even see. It’s a turning point, one where a few of the mysteries accompanying the story began to unshroud themselves. I hope you enjoyed the eleventh volume, and I hope I’ll see you again in the next one. 
Until then!