The Zashiki Warashi of Intellectual Village

Volume 1, Afterword

It’s a brand new novel!! This is Kamachi Kazuma.

This was created by expanding on the setting I had created for Dengeki Bunko Magazine.

The Intellectual Villages that make the setting here were created using the exact opposite process of Academy City from Index. This is in a world where wholesomeness and nature create the ultimate luxury brand and rural land prices have skyrocketed. This may just look like I took a rural setting and gave it an SF twist, but even the real primary sector is developing all sorts of robots to do things like climb trees and prune the branches. They are very closely related to “smart” devices and technology. I thought that contrast was interesting, so I created this setting as an escalated version of it.

This was also a Youkai story. As they have no sense of a lifespan (or rather, as you can see from Tsukumogami or animal-based Youkai like the Bakeneko, they only grow more powerful as time goes on and therefore have nothing to lose and do not feel the need to rush anything), the Youkai actually are very relaxed about the passage of time despite all the humans sneaking around making Packages and forming different kinds of groups. The monster that showed up at the very end is the only one to whom those Youkai rules do not apply, so she came up with a very human-like plan. Hopefully, you can just think of that as spreading the setting into areas this story did not touch on.

The stronger the character, the more I omitted scenes of them directly fighting. That way, I could leave it to the reader’s imagination. I also expanded the scope of the story with each chapter to give the story a sense of speeding up uncontrollably like a stone rolling down a hill. I tried a lot of different experiments in this novel. You be the judge whether I was successful or not. Just as no one enjoys a test of courage or haunted house by running through it, my focus on speeding things up means it is hard to call this a horror novel despite the inclusion of Youkai. Even so, if you at least felt this was of a different genre from my previous stories, my experiment will have mostly succeeded.

I give my thanks to my illustrator Mahaya-san and my editor Miki-san. I think it is thanks to the power of the illustration from when this was just a magazine project that allowed it to become a novel sitting on store shelves. And it is also thanks to the flexible plan I was given that I was able to bring in the entire manuscript without even sending in a plot summary while still keeping my yearly schedule. (In other words, I used the ninja technique of “Publication Schedule Rearrangement”.) I am truly thankful to both of them.

And I give my thanks to the readers. I attempted quite a few experiments for a single novel, so I thank you for sticking with me for this.

And I will end this here.

I will just pray that I get the chance to write a second volume.

This was a fairly experimental novel from the point that it had a large-breasted Zashiki Warashi.

-Kamachi Kazuma

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