Life Reversal ~ I Was Cheated On and Falsely Accused, but Now the Most Beautiful Girl in the School Is Getting Close to Me ~ Volume 1 Afterword

Afterword

For those I’m meeting for the first time, it’s a pleasure. For everyone else, hello. My name is D-Day.

Thank you so much for picking up this book.

I was fortunate enough to receive the Special Award in the Professional Writers Division of the 9th Kakuyomu Web Novel Contest (Kakuyomu Con 9) for “Life Reversal: After Being Cheated On and Falsely Accused, I Somehow Saved the Most Beautiful Girl in School and She Became Attached to Me” (the original title of this work), and with this book, I am making my official debut as an author.

It might seem a bit strange to be debuting as an author while already being in the Professional Writers Division, but I had previously won the ComicWalker Award for a different work in last year’s Kakuyomu Con 8, so I was allowed to enter the Professional Writers Division despite not having debuted as a novelist yet.

I had been posting the web version of this story on Kakuyomu, and starting from around the seventh chapter (the scene where Ichijou Ai appears in the book version), I began to receive a great deal of passionate feedback. I also received thoughts and comments from people overseas, and being able to interact with them, relying on my own clumsy English and translation sites, has become a memory I’ll cherish for a lifetime.

At times, I was helped along by the comments from regulars who seemed to know the story even better than I did. Thanks to them, I was able to safely exceed the required word count, pass the preliminary rounds of the contest, and ultimately win an award. I’m convinced that more than half of the reason I was able to win is due to the support of my readers, far more than my own ability.

Now, the theme of this book is a condensation of the negative aspects of humanity: cheating and bullying. Especially when I was writing the web version, I received many comments about bullying. Even just watching the news, it’s heartbreaking to see stories covered several times a year about young students taking their own lives due to bullying. In the web comment sections and through direct messages on social media, people shared their own experiences with bullying—which must have been incredibly difficult just to recall—and I heard from teachers who were struggling with how to handle it. When they told me things like, “I wish I had met teachers like these when I was a student,” or “Seeing this kind of ideal presented made me feel saved,” it truly made me feel glad that I wrote this story.

With that said, I’d like to talk about this book.

The reason I wrote this story was that in most web novels dealing with bullying, the adults were always just trying to protect themselves. So, I thought, why not try writing a novel where the adults actually act like proper adults? On top of that, I wanted to combine it with the issue of cheating and write a story about a protagonist who is completely broken and then finds a way to recover. So, I surrounded the protagonist with sincere friends, family, and teachers (though the protagonist himself is already like a saint to begin with), and I just wanted to do everything I could to heal this main character who should have been in the most pain.

One character who got a particularly strong reaction in the web version was Miyuki, the protagonist’s childhood friend who cheated on him. Because she’s an honor student, she can’t afford to stray from the path. That’s why she resorted to self-preservation. That self-preservation was then exploited by her cheating partner, Kondou, who is a mass of pure malice, making her the trigger for the horrific bullying that followed. There is a secondary plotline in this story about her, the deuteragonist, and how she will come to face her own sins. Though, it’s hard to say she’s really facing them yet in this volume.

The main difference between the web version and this book is that the book version has more descriptions in the beginning, while also increasing the lovey-dovey moments between Eiji and Ai. As the author, I’m proud to say that I feel I was able to create a “complete version.”

Finally, some words of thanks!

To my illustrator, Higeneko-sama. Thank you so much for the many wonderful illustrations. I was truly happy that you could breathe life into the characters of this work. When I first saw the character designs, they were so divine I was moved. I had to take a deep breath to calm down (lol). I would be delighted to work with you again in the future.

And to my editor, thank you for absolutely everything. You gave me such precise and detailed advice on where to add more content, and I was amazed every time, wondering, “How do you understand the novel I wrote so perfectly!?” Thanks to you, I was able to create a version of “Life Reversal” that has evolved even further from the web version. I can’t thank you enough.

Also, to everyone at the Sneaker Bunko editorial department, the staff running the novel submission site Kakuyomu, the judges of the contest, and everyone else who was involved in the publication of this work, I offer my thanks. Thank you all so much!

I hope you’ll enjoy imagining how Eiji and Ai’s relationship will deepen from here, how he and the others will recover from their deep wounds, or perhaps how the group that orchestrated the bullying, centered on Kondou and Miyuki, will come tumbling down.

I will end this afterword here, with the hope that we can meet again in the next volume.

Thank you all so, so much.

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