Hataraku Maou-sama! - Volume 20 - Chapter Aft

THE AUTHOR, THE AFTERWORD, AND YOU!

From here on in, I’d like to ask a few questions.

When filling out your medical history at the dentist or health clinic, I think a lot of people have been asked how often they brush their teeth—but how often a day do you brush yours?

For anyone past grade-school age, unless you’re so sick that you can’t get out of bed, I imagine it’s at least once a day. But while some people say they brush after every meal, others keep it to morning and night, since they can’t do it at work or school. A lot of people probably do it just once before bedtime. But no matter what your habits, the people who brush after every meal probably can’t believe those who keep it to every evening, and those who stick to once a day might think “Surely you don’t need to do it after every meal, do you?”

Brushing your teeth, of course, is a part of dental hygiene, a habit that can pretty heavily affect how people judge you in public.

Now, let’s zoom over to the next question. How often do you clean the bath, toilet, and sink in your home? Some people clean the bath every time they use it, while others probably don’t feel it’s worth it if they used only the shower. Some people clean the toilet every day, while others don’t bother if it doesn’t look too dirty. With the sink, sometimes it’s an everyday thing; sometimes it’s not seen as a biggie until scale starts to form.

Finally, what do you do with your dishes? Are you okay with having stacks of greasy dishes pile up in your sink? When you put them in the drying rack, do you try to align them all pretty, or do you just toss them in willy-nilly? And when you move them back to your cabinet, do you give them one more wipe beforehand, just in case there’s any moisture left on them?

I’ll go this far, but there are so many cases to consider that it’s just annoying to categorize them all. That, and these days, the debate might be more about whether to just put your stuff directly into the dishwasher after eating, or to give them a quick rinse first.

You might be wondering where I’m going with this, but all these questions have to do with washing. And dishwasher manufacturers may have instructions on how to use them correctly, but with a lot of people, their washing habits don’t really have a basis in logic.

One’s choices along these lines, unfortunately, can affect their relationships to a potentially lethal level—and oddly enough, no two people take the exact same approach with everything. Some people use a stiffer toothbrush, unsatisfied until they’re bleeding from their gums, only not to care about their tub until there’s hair all over the place. Someone who won’t rest until every inch of the tub surface is wiped up and toweled off might let plates with streaks of chili sauce and rice kernels sit in the sink for days. A person might insist on only using water strained through a filter, only to have no problem using leftover bathwater to wash other stuff.

All these personal opinions connect directly to someone’s “cleanliness”—it’s not a matter of what’s right or wrong, what’s efficient or inefficient. But someone’s approach to this is really a representation of the life they’ve cultivated up to now. So unless you’re doing something obviously separated from reality, like not brush for a week or not clean the toilet for a year, there’s no absolutely right answer in modern society, and if you declare your way to be right and push it on others, you’re probably not going to find many friends.

That’s why, in situations like these, you need to talk things out and compromise with each other. Instead of simply refusing any possibility besides your own habits, you need to observe, digest, compromise if you can be convinced to, and if that’s not possible, ask your partner to understand and discuss why you’ve adopted your respective habits.

In the environment I wrote this book in, I often had the strong notion that the secret to preserving your relationship when living together—whether you’re family, lovers, or friends—is not to neglect this kind of thing. In this story, two people who adopted different habits from the day they were born come to live together—an important factor to the tale. This pair, which defaulted to bloodshed at first, is now attempting to talk out a solution, and as the writer, I strongly hope they won’t go back to those bad old days.

The final resolution is left to the future story, and there’s not much of it left! See you in the next volume!