Strange Memories With You, My Dear

Chapter 05

Afterword

I decided to write this novel after my editor suggested, among several ideas I had at a meeting in the first half of 2017, that I thought this would be interesting.

This work was conceived and written as a continuation of my previous works, but it was also a major experiment. The central question was how to create a novel in which the relationship between description and narrative (story) is complementary.

There is a famous story that Ryunosuke Akutagawa and Junichiro Tanizaki once argued over whether a story is necessary for a novel. In my own experience of writing novels, I have spent much time worrying about the balance between description and story, and have felt the depth of the problem.

While stories demand a clear flow, answers (endings), and in some cases, even moral values from both author and reader, description allows words to contain a wide variety of meanings that may go beyond them. For example, a single description of the weather that is not necessarily necessary for the progress of the story, such as “It started raining,” can often have a surprisingly diverse range of meanings and emotions in a novel.

What can we do to create works that have such moments?

One answer that came to my mind was to keep the narrative elements simple and narrowly focused on description in order not to limit the freedom of description and the meaning it encompasses too narrowly, which was something I had been conscious of in my previous work.

When I thought about what could happen next, I came up with the image of a work in which description and story interact and intertwine with each other (I had the outlandish motive of wanting to try my hand at storytelling, since my experience and training over the past few years have probably made me somewhat more adept at it than I was before).

When I think about it, I get the impression that our real lives are the same too. I believe that the accumulation of such things as the daily weather, the clothes one wears, the smell of the air in the air, and so on will become an important memory = story that contains a large amount of information unique to each person and that cannot be collected in a “easy-to-understand story” that uniformly processes the various meanings and emotions that such things should contain, and that the novel is a very suitable medium to express such things.

Whether you are reading my work for the first time or have been reading it for some time, I would like to thank each and every one of you who picked up this piece and read it. I hope it is a novel worthy of being read by all of you, and hopefully you will be able to feel the overlap between the stories and descriptions, and the moments when this novel and your precious memories overlap, even if only for a moment.

I would like to thank all the people involved for the time and effort they put into this work, Tiv for the cover illustration that is so beautiful and richly expressive of the world of this work, and the editors who gave me advice on various topics.

If possible, I will see you again in the next novel. See you soon!

Yuu Kutou

久遠 侑

Omkar (Editor): Strange Memories series has been finally concluded. The author has kept the ending open as you can guess that after they go again on the Journey to Search for Fragments of Memories. By the end I found myself looking up to Yukinari. At that specific point where Yukinari, rather than investing time to search for the unusual memories, decided to think about the relationship between him and Yuuko. Now to end this, I want to thank all the readers for following this series till the End. Thank You So Much for all the love given to this Series, KuroNeko (NekoNeko) & Me.

KuroNeko (Translator): Hello there, it’s KuroNeko, the translator for this series. I would like to show my heartfelt gratitude to everyone who has read this novel until its end. I started working on this project eight or seven months ago, in which I encountered many problems such as quitting being a translator and so on, but still, I was able to translate this novel until its end. It’s my first series that I’ve completed and my 5th or 6th series I’ve translated. Thank you everyone who read this, and especially my editor, Omkar, for supporting this series from the very first time. Until then, thank you very much.