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krpalmerAnother collection of short stories holding off the resolution to another cliffhanger didn’t diminish my interest in getting around to the ninth regular volume of the Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki novels. As for one of the reasons I’m interested in this particular series, starting into it I did glance at its credit page, only to notice the translation credit had changed to Jennifer Ward. That left me wondering for a few pages before I’d decided the prose still read about as well as the previous volumes had. Later on, remembering a comment or two about how an editor can be as important as a translator in turning “translated text” into “readable prose,” I found the editor’s name of Anna Powers and checked back to see she’d worked on the previous instalment. (When I went all the way back to the first volume, though, there was no editor credit.)
The real-world wait aside, this volume picked up right after the eighth regular one had, with Fuka Kikuchi having ducked out on Tomozaki after his going to video gamer meetups in between more relaxing time with his girlfriend turned into a suggestive message being sent to his phone. It doesn’t take long for him to seek out help from others, including Yuzu Izumi, who’d wound up with a boyfriend of her own long before in the story. Eventually, Tomozaki manages to understand “I’m not hanging out with these girls the way I spend time with Kikuchi” wouldn’t be obvious to her. He’s brought together with Kikuchi again, and they manage to make up. More than that, afterwards their friends start talking about setting the two of them up to help pass along a student tradition that’ll require them to still be together in a year’s time.
By this point, though, Tomozaki and Kikuchi are worrying about whether they really can keep things working. Kikuchi explains (using a story reader’s metaphor) that she’d thought she could just sort of observe Tomozaki striving to broaden himself, but now she’s not so sure about that. At the same time, she’s not just thinking about Aoi Hinami as “the more obvious end point” even as Tomozaki is getting annoyed at Hinami having supposed “a problem like this will further develop you.”
Towards the end of the volume Tomozaki is wondering if he’s actually capable of the back-and-forth of a relationship and is moving towards a significant action (with Minami having offered her own half-anguished contribution even after having made a show of “I’ll just have to back off, then” earlier on), but there was a surprising and satisfying resolution for me (and a comment that “This isn’t a rom-com anime or a dating sim--it’s just life”). That this story isn’t just a matter of “make a decision and that’s the end” might be part of why I’m now interested in it, although I was trying to keep reminding myself there just might be some element of “having guessed right from earlier clues” rather than “managing to accept what comes,” and there could yet be complications and changes around the enigma of Hinami.
The real-world wait aside, this volume picked up right after the eighth regular one had, with Fuka Kikuchi having ducked out on Tomozaki after his going to video gamer meetups in between more relaxing time with his girlfriend turned into a suggestive message being sent to his phone. It doesn’t take long for him to seek out help from others, including Yuzu Izumi, who’d wound up with a boyfriend of her own long before in the story. Eventually, Tomozaki manages to understand “I’m not hanging out with these girls the way I spend time with Kikuchi” wouldn’t be obvious to her. He’s brought together with Kikuchi again, and they manage to make up. More than that, afterwards their friends start talking about setting the two of them up to help pass along a student tradition that’ll require them to still be together in a year’s time.
By this point, though, Tomozaki and Kikuchi are worrying about whether they really can keep things working. Kikuchi explains (using a story reader’s metaphor) that she’d thought she could just sort of observe Tomozaki striving to broaden himself, but now she’s not so sure about that. At the same time, she’s not just thinking about Aoi Hinami as “the more obvious end point” even as Tomozaki is getting annoyed at Hinami having supposed “a problem like this will further develop you.”
Towards the end of the volume Tomozaki is wondering if he’s actually capable of the back-and-forth of a relationship and is moving towards a significant action (with Minami having offered her own half-anguished contribution even after having made a show of “I’ll just have to back off, then” earlier on), but there was a surprising and satisfying resolution for me (and a comment that “This isn’t a rom-com anime or a dating sim--it’s just life”). That this story isn’t just a matter of “make a decision and that’s the end” might be part of why I’m now interested in it, although I was trying to keep reminding myself there just might be some element of “having guessed right from earlier clues” rather than “managing to accept what comes,” and there could yet be complications and changes around the enigma of Hinami.