Author's Notes
Feh. I think this fic will include Japanese honorifics. Misaki isn’t that close with Tatsuhiro yet, and I think it’s something that bears pointing out. It’s not something I wanted to do, but I think it merits doing.
In this chapter: Welcome to the stream of consciousness!
I’m trying to portray Tatsuhiro as a man with a lot of social anxiety left over, who worries about everything from his job to the economy to his coworkers’ opinions of him—sort of a left-over anxiety from being a Hikikomori, which I don’t think entirely left him—does it ever? And yet, even so, I can see that he has grown up significantly since we last saw him; after all, he no longer has the luxury of simply living at home with his parents’ money, of being a “kidult.”
When I mention manga at the comic store in relation to kanji ability, what I mean is this: Since most manga are geared at a younger audience, often, the kanji will be written with furigana (small hiragana characters—the most common of the two kana alphabets) to help those who might not have learned the kanji yet.
I don’t imagine anybody reading this doesn’t know it, but just in case: Japanese books are read, in relation to American books, back to front. That is, the back of an American book is the front of a Japanese one. Right to left instead of left to right.
Finally, this chapter took many evenings to complete, by which I mean it was written mostly at night when I ought to have been asleep. Subsequently, there are many errors and they will be steadily corrected over the course of the next few days.
And hey, if you liked this, or if you didn’t, think about dropping me a comment and telling me about it!
( Chapter two )