Afterword
Hello, this is Yonezawa Honobu.
The most vivid memory of any school Cultural Festival that I've been to was that of a girl in the Literature Club. She would bring a chair out into the dim corridor where the sun could not reach, alongside a few anthology copies, and would sit there all day reading books.
That year, I was put in charge of writing the script for a mystery movie that my class was making. As the movie was completed, I was free to do anything I like. And so I bought an anthology copy from her, but I have no memory of having read it.
This was because I had already brought my own book to kill time with.
The centrepiece for this volume is none other than the Cultural Festival. For a formless event to take centre stage, I had to present it using multiple points of views. This was required not just by the setting, but also by the story, or else the whole book would consist of nothing but the protagonist sitting on his chair.
When this book was finally ready for publication, I was stuck in coming up with a title. Though the story began in the eve of a festival, and ended at the end of it, I just couldn't think of any other title besides "Cultural Festival" or "School Festival". Though it's titled The Kudryavka Sequence, I feel its subtitle would be more fitting for the volume as a whole.
In the afterword of the first volume Hyouka, I said I'd reveal the truth of a certain mystery, which I had intended to do so in the afterword of the second volume. But I ran out of pages.
Anyway, it's been seven years since Hyouka was first published. In these seven years, the series has managed to survive thanks to all you readers. The answer to the "Sushi Incident" which I've mention in the afterword of that volume is actually hinted at in Chapter 2-1 (009 - ♣03), I wonder how many of you had realized that? It's not really that much of a mystery, or it would have taken an entire chapter... Furthermore, in the afterword of The Credit Roll of the Fool in which I mentioned about the meaning of each chapter title, in short, the main theme would be "agitation".
This ends the current volume. I hope you all enjoyed the carnival in The Kudryavka Sequence, and look forward to the next carnival.
Yonezawa Honobu
April 2008