It’s been a long time. This is Ishio Yamagata. Did you enjoy Rokka: Braves of the Six Flowers , Volume 4? The manga adaptation of Rokka: Braves of the Six Flowers by Kei Toru-san is currently being serialized in the online Super Dash & Go magazine. I’d love it if you could enjoy that as well. It’s gotten remarkably hotter. I’m all right in hot weather, by nature, so I can basically get through summertime with just a fan. But lately, there’s been something giving me trouble. The apartment building where I live has begun doing major repairs. It’s so loud outside during the day that I can’t open the window. It’s quiet at night, but the time that I sleep is right in the middle of their construction schedule. With the room all closed up, even my ray of hope, the fan, can’t exercise its full power. If I open the window, the construction noise keeps me awake, and if I close it, it gets so hot and humid that I can’t sleep. If I turn on the air-conditioning, I’ll get headaches and a sore throat for the next day. I can’t blame the people doing the construction work. If I keep the window shut, I can live comfortably enough, so it would be unreasonable to ask them to quiet down even more.
Sometimes, I go to karaoke alone for stress relief. I’ll drink a beer or a sour to keep my throat moist and just yell my heart out on and on. It helps me forget the difficulties of work for a while. I hear some people avoid solo karaoke because it’s embarrassing, but I think those people are really missing out. I’ve heard that lately there are even karaoke parlors that specialize in solo booths, though there isn’t one in my area yet. I hope they become more popular. Anyway, my voice is really low, and I just can’t sing at the standard pitch. Of course, this just means you have to sing it in a lower key, but I feel like with all the recent pop songs, anime songs, and vocaloid songs and everything that are popular at karaoke, you really have to sing them high for it to sound good. You can force a key change, but it still never feels quite right, and it doesn’t feel good to sing it. So when I go searching for songs with that feeling, the only ones I can pick are oldies from the Showa era. When I’m singing Dark Ducks’ “Yamaotoko no Uta” (Mountain Man Song) and Miyuki Nakajima’s “Mabataki mo Sezu” (Without Even Blinking) and “Dare ga Tame ni” (For Someone’s Sake) from Cyborg 009 , sometimes I start to wonder what generation I’m from. Presently, I’m in search of a more recent song that I’ll be able to sing well. And finally, the acknowledgments. Thank you very much to my illustrator Miyagi-san, my editor T-san, everyone in the editing department, and everyone else involved in the production of this book. I’ll be counting on you again in the future. And to all my readers: I’ll see you again in my next book. Best,
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