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Log Horizon - Volume 10 - Chapter Aft




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AFTERWORD 
This is Mamare Touno, bringing you this volume as the second season of the Log Horizon anime has finished airing and is starting to be rebroadcast. It’s been a while… I think? It really doesn’t feel that way, but I wrote this in an environment where time gets compressed and stretched out, like bread dough or something out of sci-fi. Anime really keeps you busy. If things are like this when Mr. Masuda’s here, how industrious must other creators be? I think it would constantly be “Game Over” for me. 
Thank you very much for picking up Log Horizon, Vol. 10: Homesteading the Noosphere. 
In an abrupt change from the previous volume, I wrote about an uproar in Maihama and Akiba. I wanted to put in some kind of pause every five volumes, so I rushed things a little this time (although it did make the book that much thicker), but Shiroe’s unexpected encounter with her, aka Kanami, is in this volume, too. 
There are lots of things I want to say about Kanami, but she’s exactly the woman anime viewers and online readers are acquainted with. She was Shiroe’s guiding light when he was at a sensitive age. In the anime, her most impressive scene is her first appearance, but to Shiroe, Kanami is always “the woman who looks back at him and smiles.” I’d like healthy young men to sympathize with the feeling of surrender—like an odd restlessness, a sense of defeat you can’t quite reconcile yourself to—and with the feeling of wanting to defy it, even so. Ladies, please just think, That’s so dumb… and pretend not to see it, in a tepid sort of way. If you point it out, Shiroe will probably writhe around in agony and die. 
That aside, let’s talk about the Season 2 heroine. 
In other words, my supervising editor, Ms. F?ta. 
Because Yamane Yamamoto was releasing the spin-off story Kushiyatama, Do Your Best! I nonchalantly went along for the advance meeting. It wasn’t my book, so it felt like a bit of a holiday to me. Yamane was pretty tense, so we were talking about all sorts of pointless stuff, when along came Ms. F?ta. 
“Hisssss?” 
She was waving her hand wildly. Could that be a greeting? 
I quickly glanced at Yamane, and he was flabbergasted. There, see? You see? These afterwords aren’t lies. 
She’s little, and she’s bouncing around, right? “Y-yeah,” he said. 
Getting right down to it, we started our meeting/meal in a trendy little eatery, and both Mr. Masuda and I ate. This is off-topic, but although these hip dining areas in Shinjuku do help to raise motivation when greeting someone for the first time, I think preliminary meetings are best held in quiet family restaurants late at night. Does that mean I’m in the process of being poisoned? 
Well, in any case, just when we’d finished our meal and were gearing up to really start the meeting, Ms. F?ta ordered seconds. 
“Huh? You’re still eating?” 
“Yes.” 
“Seriously?” 
“You can keep eating, too, right, Mr. Mamare?” 
“No, I haven’t been able to eat all that much lately.” 
“It’s meat, so it’ll be fine.” 

>choke< 
Yamane, who we’d just met, was shaking next to me. 
His shoulders were shaking. 
They brought out a huge helping of cubed, stewed meat. 
Of course, both Yamane and I partook as well. Yamane had konjac. I had a boiled egg. Ms. F?ta ate the meat, with a big smile on her face. “Hisssss!” 
Still, when I listened to what was going on beside me, the preliminary book meeting had turned into a pretty heated debate. Which direction should we pare this in, should we add to it, what should we do to make it easier for readers to understand—it was useful stuff. I was pretty impressed, but then I realized feeling that way seemed like proof I don’t normally do a proper job, and I regretted it. 
On the way back, Yamane said, “Ms. F?ta was Ms. F?tastic!”, and his smile was fantastic. Great! Now I have another ally. We’ll spread the truth about Ms. F?ta far and wide, inside and out. 
Hisssss. 
And with that report on recent events, this has been Log Horizon, Vol. 10. 
I think about 80 percent of writing a novel is a puzzle of sorts. You have to put preexisting pieces together in a certain way while observing the limits, and although the process is mediated by taste, it’s not really all that creative. If a high-performance artificial intelligence ever shows up, it might manage it better than humans. 
But is it all like that? No. The first 20 percent is the work of building the limits you’ll need to observe with those puzzle pieces. That probably includes the work of creating the problem that needs to be solved. 
This time, Shiroe came up against that same wall. “What should I wish for?” “What do I want to be in the future?” Those aren’t questions that can be solved with puzzles. If you try to solve them with all the possibilities from the statistics and analogical reasoning based on all the conditions, you’ll paralyze yourself. 
That’s the sort of story Log Horizon, Vol. 10 was. Even though neither Isaac nor Iselus worries, Shiroe keeps running into this sort of wall because he’s a pain—correction: because he’s a clumsy young guy. There’s also a theory that abuse from their creators is what makes protagonists worthwhile. 
Now that he’s taken aim, Shiroe is going to head straight for part three. The journey is likely to take him from Akiba to the West… Probably. Whoops, before that, I’ll have to turn the camera on the middle country server for a bit. I’m getting concerned about how Log Horizon’s other bespectacled fiend is doing. That means the online serial is being updated, too. 
This time as well, the items listed on the character status screens at the beginning of each chapter were collected on Twitter in July 2015. I used items from @aiirorakko, @dharma0430, @falco_of_choco, @hige_mg, @highgetter, @hpsuke, @irohaniwoedo, @kazamasa504, @Landerblue_, @makiwasabi, @me_pon, @mimitabu_sub, @mine_ml, @nariril, @pons_k, @strangestar_s, @sunshine_rumi, and @tatara26. Thank you very much!! I can’t list all your names here, but I’m grateful to everyone who submitted entries. 
We got tons and tons of ideas this time, too! It was really hard to narrow them down to three. The presence of quite a few cuter-than-usual items might be due to His Highness Iselus’s soothing powers. 
For details and for the latest news, visit tounomamare.com/. You’ll find information about Mamare Touno that isn’t Log Horizon–related in the blog Mamare Wednesday, which is updated every Wednesday. 
…Finally: Shoji Masuda, the producer, and Kazuhiro Hara, the illustrator. Tsubakiya Design, the designer, little F?ta, and Sakakibara of the editorial department! Oha, who helped me out again this time! Thank you to Tosho Printing! This time, I also got help from the anime’s Studio DEEN; Director Ishihira; Nemoto, who handled the series composition; the script team; and the people of NHK and NEP. I received support for the creation of many different games, too. Thanks to the people of AZITO for creating all the mini-characters. 
And. And. Yamane Yamamoto, with whom I released a book. I wrote about it in the essay, but damn. I confess I’m a bit jealous. It’s exactly as I said. It would be great if lots more spin-off stories were released, though. What sort of story are you going to write next? 
In any case, now all that’s left is for everyone to savor this book. Bon appétit! 
Mamare “Whoever said we’d have a cool summer this year should reflect on their error” Touno 
 



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