Jan 23, 2026
To:lolitroy
This is a truly lovely comment. Thank you friend. I'm very happy you enjoyed your time with Kaho and Shuhei, and I'm glad you enjoyed my writing style.
This was a fun project for me. From the beginning, not even related to deadline, I set out to do this in 1 draft. This is almost legitimately the first pass, save for glaring typos and small punctuation aspects I fixed in the editor as I uploaded. My vision was to be like ikebana, to celebrate the imperfections and to focus on the meditation and emotion of the experience. So, the story was left as a first draft, flaws and all. I wrote it in 19 days but I never wanted to feel pressured. It was a full, meditative challenge.
There are definitely some things I could adjust, but overall I truly love what I created in the brief run, even if I didn't resonate with the prompt (just kidding judges I totally loved it...)
For pacing, I wanted that slow, methodical aspect to permeate everything. Small, small details were the big points in some cases. Obviously that's not going to work for a lot of people, but I imagined this as a slow, gentle read by a fire.
Definitely could have spent more time with the host club, but my idea was that the narrative followed Shuhei and Kaho's interests. With Kaho not really vibing with it, and Shuhei being over it, I wanted the story to reflect that.
I'm glad you liked Shuhei and Kaho. I became very fond of them. The story definitely became more intense for Shuhei when he got back to Tokyo, and I feared his grandiose moments and the direct challenges he faced might overshadow Kaho's. Shuhei's hurdles were mostly from external forces. Kaho's were internal. For her, it was the grieving and acceptance that she'd mutilated her body into something she now despised. It was being okay being Deaf in public spaces. It was daring to go back into public after years of near isolation. It was daring to volunteer at the ikebana school, and daring to make friends with Sayane and in some ways the young hosts. All of those things were what she had to go through, because there was a very real chance her and Shuhei didn't wind up together.
But to our earlier comments, I do fully acknowledge they may have gotten off "too easy" because I was only partially interested in those hurdles. For me, their biggest challenges were within. Even Shuhei. His peace is still underway, but he'll get there.
In the end, he and Kaho helped one another. They didn't "Save" one another, because they had to save themselves first. That's why Kaho's arrangements were called What I learned 'With' you. Not 'from' you, etc. Because they learned together.
You last few sentences are very touching. I know this story isn't perfect, and I imagine it is definitely not a strong contender for the contest, but for the novel that I personally wanted to write, and the peaceful, melancholy story of gentle hope that I imagined, I cherish it. I'm really grateful you joined me on the journey, and here's to a quiet, simple life for our two beautiful leads, somewhere far far away from Kabukicho.
