Atogaki ー Afterword

Japanese Edition: “花明かりの下で”
English Edition: “Beneath the Blossoms Glow”
243rd Hyper-Imagination Contest: “Hana-akari”

Thank you very much for reading this work.
This is the first piece I have ever managed to write all the way to the end.

The reason I decided to write it was because I wanted this work to serve as a path leading readers to Two in the Abandoned House.

As you may have already guessed, the “Sayuri” who appears here is the same character as the “Sayuri” from Two in the Abandoned House.
In terms of timeline, this story takes place quite a long time before Sayuri arrives at the abandoned house.

As mentioned earlier, since the theme was “hana-akari,” I started writing with the idea that “if I’m going to handle cherry blossoms, I might as well bury a corpse first”—but this turned out to be a heavily overused idea.

The original inspiration, needless to say, is Kajii Motojirō’s Under the Cherry Trees.
What I thought was: “It works for this year, but what about next year? Do you bury a new body again?”
So I decided to make it a cherry tree that devours humans, supernatural beings, and the living or the dead alike.

However, once you include the element of “a corpse buried beneath a cherry tree,” unless you have exceptional world-building skill, you can’t complain if the judges dismiss it with “oh, that cliché again.”
There are simply too many works with that premise.

Based on the results of this contest, I decided to take the approach of creating a “truly one-of-a-kind, outrageous setting.”
To make it through a contest, it is always better to have fewer rivals.

Of course, it’s not that “if no one has done it, it must have value.”
Rather, there are cases where “everyone avoided it because it was obvious it wouldn’t work even without trying.”

For the record, I believed I had successfully differentiated my idea.
However, when I later reread it, the question came to mind: “Is a cherry tree glowing with mysterious power really hana-akari?”
It’s possible I didn’t even make it onto the contest’s stage in the first place.

Let me talk a little about the setting in the story.
In the work, Sayuri is able to communicate with the ghost of the cherry tree.
This is one of her traits: she can generally communicate with someone as long as the other party is a supernatural being.

The reason she, as a ghost, could touch or be climbed on by the nekomata is because the nekomata is a supernatural being.
If it were an ordinary cat, she wouldn’t be able to touch it.
Likewise, the reason she eventually became able to touch the petals—after first passing through them—is that the petals had come to possess some kind of spiritual power.

Some readers may have noticed this, but since I had never stated it clearly, I added this explanation just in case.

At that time, the cover illustrations were generated by ChatGPT with the title included.
Because of that, making small adjustments afterward was rather difficult.
Now I think, “I could have just added the title text with an editing tool,”
but back then—only about six months ago—I either couldn’t do something that simple, didn’t think of it, or was just too lazy…

For the English edition, I used PhotosDirector 365 to erase the Japanese title with AI editing and then place the English title text over it.

Well then, I’ll end things here for now.
I would be delighted if you also enjoy Two in the Abandoned House, where Sayuri lives her peaceful days.

November 13, 2025　Tochika