Hataraku Maou-sama! - Volume 5 - Chapter Aft

THE AUTHOR, THE AFTERWORD, AND YOU 
Tokyo Skytree, the official new landmark of Japan, surpassed its old man Tokyo Tower’s height of 1,093 feet in late March 2010. The observation deck was completed three months afterward, and a mere year later, in March 2011, it attained its full height of 2,080 feet. Nearly a thousand feet of growth in the space of a year. All hail the glories of Japanese construction firms and hefty budgets. It’s grown up so big and strong! 
Alongside that, Japan—with the exception of a few areas—switched over to digital-only TV broadcasts in July 2011. 
This book will see its original publication in June 2012, so by the time you read this, it’ll already be nearly a year after the fact and the Skytree should be open for business. Time flies when you’re spending all day writing at home. 
I suppose I’ve gone on in assorted places about how The Devil Is a Part-Timer! couldn’t exist without depicting Japan as it really is, as if I’m some kind of literary genius who knows where the story’s going two pages ahead of the one he’s writing. But I’ve made it this far without explicitly stating which year it is in the Japan Maou and Emi live in. 
That ends with Volume 5, though. Between the under-construction Skytree and the rest of the events in this volume, if we assume Devil fully complies with time in the real world, the story is officially set in August 2010. 
But! 
If you look over the whole series, dating back to Volume 1…let’s just say that Maou and friends have had an extremely busy summer of 2010. 
Every volume I’ve written tends to be a reflection of the time I live in at the moment I put fingers to keyboard. When I was first writing this story on the Web, under a different title—the story that eventually won me a Dengeki Award and this gig—construction hadn’t even begun on the Skytree yet. Contradictions abound across the story’s world as a result. 
These are just novels, of course, so I could just shrug it off and defiantly tell my readers not to sweat the details. But that isn’t the problem. Now that it’s set in a definitive time period, everyone involved with this series has a very specific issue they need to deal with. 
In Volume 1, the Hero Emilia’s friend Rika Suzuki discussed her experiences with the Kobe earthquake of 1995, an experience no one in Japan could ever forget. 
Nor should they, really. But her memories, too painful for her to talk about with most people, were pretty much taken verbatim from those of a personal friend of mine. 
And if the Japan Maou and Emi live in is really going to be the Japan of August 2010, that means there’ll be an event in seven months that will ultimately carve its place in the annals of world history. And when this book is released, it’s doubtful that any of the ensuing memories or effects will have faded from anyone’s minds. 

So as someone who used Rika Suzuki’s memories as a central piece of character development, I have an announcement to make to my readers. 
In the world depicted within the Devil is a Part-Timer! series, I am not going to weave the Tohoku earthquake of March 2011 in any way, shape, or form into the story. 
The Devil is a Part-Timer! is a story, and like any story, it has to end sooner or later. 
I can’t say how far past August 2010–ish the story will proceed, or if these guys are going to even bother staying within the confines of Japan, but either way, the “real Japan” of Devil is a Japan free of the Tohoku quake. 
This is not a case of me attempting to weigh the importance of one natural disaster against another. 
It’s just that the quake, as I write this, is an event of the now, not of the then. It is too early to treat it as a memory, or as a completed piece of history. In my opinion, it is not a matter that a novel series that saw its original launch in February 2011—one whose primary aim is to entertain—should be blithely tackling. 
The Japan of Devil is one where the disturbing memories of the Kobe earthquake continue to reside in people’s minds. It is one where the Skytree has only just begun to outgrow Tokyo Tower, where the government is switching everyone over to digital broadcasting, where smartphones are beginning to take over for flip phones, and where even a Devil King needs to work to keep a roof over his head. Nothing more, and nothing less, than that. 
It may resemble the Japan you and I see with our own eyes at least superficially, but it is also a Japan traveling down its own unique path in history. 
So, going forward, I will continue to not explicitly mention when this story takes place in the real world. I plan to have the characters age in real time, of course, and given the material I cover, I can’t help but pin a time frame to many aspects of this tale. But this is their own story, their own history, and one I hope you will continue to keep close at hand well into the future. 
But regardless of how I feel about it, this volume still tells the story of the Devil King and his cohorts, normally struggling to keep food on the table, engaging in a rare bout of consumerism. 
It may be nothing they need, but having it around expands their perspective on things. I’m just another joe on the street, myself. Instead of having the bare essentials around me in perfect shape, I like having a hodgepodge of things around me as I work. If there’s a little dust on it, that only adds to the character. 
Though maybe I should at least have them purchase a couple of futons for themselves. I can tell Emi won’t abide by that for much longer. 
Regardless, as always, I hope that I see all of you who took this book in hand over in the next volume, and I hope all real-life bums will forgive the fallen Demon General for his misguided diatribe on bumming. 
Until next time!