44

With that, I burned the final version of the file onto a CD, packaged it, and mailed it off to the publishers in Tokyo. I could’ve sent the file directly by e-mail and it would’ve arrived in seconds, but they would never accept anything sent through the Internet. Besides, mailing it would only take a day or two, and the work was nothing urgent, otherwise I probably would have just flown to Haneda for the delivery.

There’s nothing like the rush of emotion for a job finally completed… and there’s also nothing like the exhaustion that follows. I definitely didn’t want to do anything for the next two or three days. Not like that would happen with all the work that had piled up, and I honestly had to wonder how many years it had been since I last felt that real rush of emotion upon completing a job. I guess I’d just been working every single day, waiting for the day that I could take a break… I suppose as long as working is more fun than resting, it’s nothing worth complaining about.

But at the very least, when it came to that particular piece, I did feel a measure of satisfaction in handing over the final manuscript for my editor who was leaving the company to get married, who had been helping me in so many ways for so long. It’s probably a one-sided satisfaction, though. I’m not sure that she really wanted that kind of story.

I handed it over, but there was no guarantee the work would be published as a book… But it’s not uncommon for hard work to go unrewarded in life, and in a lot of ways, it’d probably be better if it didn’t get published. I wrote it based on reality, so there’s not even a hint of the happy endings that I’ve been obsessively seeking as an author for the last ten years. Maybe if I knew U was living a happy life despite being someone who was the spitting image of an abnormal person, then I’d feel a little less burdened. But I could never know.

If someone like me could make it to 30, one way or another, then maybe she could have lived her life those past ten years, one way or another. And if that was true, then perhaps those six days of confinement could stop being a traumatic incident, and be digested and purified into a tale of its own.

That was the impression I was left with once I had finished writing it all down.

But, now that the book itself was finished, it was time to move on to other work. A novelist has a heck of a lot more work to do than just authoring novels. Checking galley proofs, covers and dust jackets, answering interviews and providing official comments, and supervising media coverage are all very important tasks… and now that the one person who had organized it all for so long was leaving to get married, I had to instead hand the completed work to the new hire. I suck at socializing, but I have to be capable where it counts, or I can’t really get the job done. Being an author didn’t mean I could stay holed up in a workspace forever…

I’d been recommended to hire a manager or personal assistant before, but who really thought that such a seasoned misanthrope as I would be capable of following through with a hiring process? A person that can’t trust anyone shouldn’t be put in a place of authority.

With all that was required, I decided to head to Tokyo that day… But I couldn’t get a plane ticket, so I was forced to reserve a bullet train. And of course, when it rains it pours, so I got an e-mail from my previous editor, who was supposed to be there helping with the hand-off, saying that a wedding meeting was going over. Long story short, she would be late for the meeting. I sat in the lobby of a Tokyo hotel thinking how inappropriate e-mail was as a medium for talking about such important matters, but also knew that I couldn’t complain about it over e-mail. Since I was the professional author, complaining in an e-mail reply would really make it sound like I was genuinely angry… not to mention expose me for being so childish as a 30-year-old adult.

But I was suddenly thrust into a first meeting with a new editor, as in someone I didn’t know, all by myself. The task was difficult enough to justify my desire to go home. Rumor had it my new editor was a completely new hire, so I wouldn’t have even had the chance to pass them by in the editorial department… I had also heard that they were a real superstar, with the kind of career that would appear in the type of novels I author, who had been assigned in the spring and was killing it at work… Which only made me want to go home more.

So I was getting ready to do just that, without feeling any kind of mental conflict. I grabbed my suitcase and stood up, but just then, a voice called out,

“Would you be Kakimoto-sensei?”

I missed my chance to escape.

Bitterness sprouted in my heart as I turned around to find a young girl with her hands folded in front of her. She had on a very used suit that I assumed she had purchased for her hiring interviews, and quite honestly it did not look good on her.

She seemed to share my anxiety that our mutual supervisor could not show up, and she flitted around nervously, looking quite suspicious. Still, her eyes were brimming with vitality befitting her youth.

She seemed to be the type of naive young person who thought authors were respectable people, and if that was true, it would be up to me to give her a reality check… The very thought made my heart sink lower and lower, but without any regard for the battle ensuing in my mind,

“Hello. My name is Yuugure Yuu.”

She spoke first.

“I have been an avid reader of your work ever since I was a child. I am incredibly happy that I have the opportunity to meet you like this. I look forward to all that we can accomplish together, and I hope to hear many fun and exciting stories from you.”

I was impressed that someone so young had such impeccable manners. Granted, I could nit-pick that an author’s stories are “read” rather than “heard”, but I could let that slide. She was the superstar editor, after all. But it was possible that her etiquette had to do with her parents’ good education.

But I’m nothing if not a sore loser, so I wanted to return her greeting properly. I had left Yuu’s introduction hanging for ten whole years, after all.

“It is nice to meet you.”

Afterword

I know this is going to sound insane, but the author known as NISIOISIN is not good at writing series or serialized novels. There are even people who say I only write series or serializations, but that’s just not true. For example, this book, Imperfect Girl, is neither a series nor a serialization. But it’s no exception to the rules, and I wrote this book like it was my last, just like everything else I write. I can’t get anything done without that mindset, but after ten long years of the same old pile of work growing higher and higher, I finally got to this book, which was neither a series nor a serialization, and which in many ways can’t even be called a novel. Since it first came out in 2011, I suppose that in another five years I might end up writing a second installment of Imperfect Girl. I think I know just how I’ll start it.

“It’s going on 20 years since I started making a living off writing novels, but I can’t remember writing anything worth being called a novel in all that time.”

NISIOISIN, July 2016

Messages from the translation team

ShwampBam, Translator – This marks the end of my second novel project. Being 1/7th the size of Sakurada Reset sure made this one go a heck of a lot faster. I’ve wanted to work on this book for a long time, and I’m glad I got the chance. I had been worried that NISIOISIN’s well known wordplay and complex writing style would elude me, but this book was more along the lines of an insane man’s ramblings, which are much more relatable to me, so this was a perfect fit.

Another thing I’m grateful for is the slower pace I had for this project. I allowed myself a lot more flex room for working on this book than I did with Sakurada, and I took about twice the time to finish a single volume as a result. But I felt like I was working on it because I wanted to, not because I had to, and I even got my normal breakneck pace back while finishing up the project just due to the natural excitement that getting to the best parts of a story brings. Slowing down really helped in the early stages.

I found this book to be very interesting. For one, I don’t hate the manga adaptation after reading it, which is a very rare occurrence. The manga turned into a more typical mystery story to accommodate the less direct, more visual approach, and added a few scenes to fit. But even so, they really took advantage of the visual medium, and I found myself impressed when checking back. Still, I prefer the novel, probably to nobody’s surprise. The author’s perspective really muddies the waters of the story, doesn’t it? He was a much simpler character in the manga, taken at face value and used just to tell what happened rather than providing perspective. This book actually reminds me of Three Days of Happiness, where the author accidentally tells a story with more complexity and depth than they will admit to.

In many ways, this story is extremely different from Sakurada Reset. I don’t think you could ask for protagonists as different in mindset as the author and Kei. The first-person narration flowed in so many different directions and levels of excitement, providing an interesting challenge compared to Sakurada’s more relaxed and typical style of third-person. But I became just as used to it in the end, and feel quite confident with my portrayal of the author. He’s almost an unreliable narrator, so it was interesting parsing out details like the differences when he refers to his past self personally or impersonally. I had to come up with lots of set phrases and vocab for this one, too, but it all worked out pretty well in the end, made significantly easier by the nature of just being one volume.

But the beating heart of Imperfect Girl’s themes and purpose is where the similarities lie. It’s such an interesting story told from perhaps the worst perspective possible, but that makes it all the more challenging, doesn’t it? I’ll stop there before I get too pretentious, but this book certainly had some parts that were neat to put on the page.

Something that always stuck out to me in this work was the English translation of the title. Way back when I read the manga adaptation, the title reminded me of another manga I had read called For Imperfect People. Now, back then I didn’t know any Japanese, but after looking up a bit of information, even I could tell that the functional word for imperfect in that title, fukanzen, wasn’t the same as the one in this title, fujuubun.

So what’s the difference? Both words start with the prefix fu, which is just a negation. It’s put before many words to imply the “not” state. That leaves us with kanzen and juubun. With the other title For Imperfect People, the kanzen used very directly translates to “perfect”. The characters used are “perfect/completion” along with “whole/complete”. Kanzen means perfect in the most basic usage of the word, and adding the fu prefix negates it into imperfect.

But what about juubun? Although some dictionaries may give the negation fujuubun a secondary or tertiary application as “imperfect”, you won’t find juubun defined as “perfect”. Rather, it’s defined as “satisfactory, sufficient, enough, adequate”, and so on. The characters used are “ten” and “parts”.

When we use perfect in English, we refer to something that is whole, complete, and without flaw. By proxy, we tend to think of imperfect as something that is nearly perfect or was perfect, but has lost its perfection or is just slightly shy of it. But fujuubun is not meant to describe something that is nearly perfect but not quite, or has been slightly flawed. It’s meant to convey something insufficient, not enough, significantly lacking. It describes something that could never have the traits to even try being perfect.

All this to say that the title Imperfect Girl slightly loses the nuance of the girl it is meant to describe. I think the book itself fleshes out the idea clearly enough, and Imperfect Girl certainly sounds more title-y than anything I could come up with, but I’m not sure I would have gone with that outside of sticking to the official English title for name recognition. It’s not a huge deal, but it’s an interesting detail that’s always stuck with me.

I’ll round this note out by sharing two interesting facts regarding my translation of this book. Firstly, as of right now, July 2025, I am closer to the author’s purported age of 30 than I am to the age that I first read the manga translation of this work back in college. It’s quite humbling to think how long it’s been, but I wouldn’t say I’m at all ashamed of getting older or who I’ve become, unlike him. I suppose that’s something to be grateful for.

Secondly, the most interesting word I had to translate in this book. When talking around the nature of freedom of expression and U’s body in the bathing room, the author spoke of U‘s “nadaraka” naked body. I used the word “incipient”, but not because that’s the dictionary definition you’d find of “nadaraka”. Allow me to explain.

“Nadaraka” is an adjective that describes a gentle slope or gradual change. It has obvious applications for scenery or landscape, but can also be used to talk about non-physical things, like changes in wage. Specifically, it has to be describing something that is not extreme or even particularly noteworthy in its change, just gradual, moderate, and easy.

So, what did that mean in the context of the book? The author used an adjective typically reserved for inanimate objects, but applied it to a girl, creating a clear but indirect innuendo suggesting her young, immature body. A very interesting choice indeed.

I spent a good 15 minutes looking for the perfect word to fit. I thought about “blooming” and its synonyms, but we use that for people all the time, and it’s a very direct innuendo in those situations. The same for words like “lithe”, “immature”, or “flat”. After a while, I narrowed it down between “nascent” or “incipient”. I felt that “incipient” was not only a bit more modern-sounding, but also fit the bill better in terms of being used for inanimate concepts or ideas while then becoming in that case an indirect innuendo. Maybe most people would have to look up what it means, but I think that would just reinforce how uncommon the word is for the situation, which also fits the original use case.

Maybe that whole process is uninteresting to a lot of people, but I had a lot of fun with that challenge. And this whole book, too. I hope the readers were able to enjoy this project as much as I did. I’m glad I got to provide this to whoever may have wanted it.

Thanks to the same people as always. Shaggy made another banger cover. I had him include the little detail of highlighting the “im” in “imperfect” that the manga covers did. I thought that was an awesome choice in the manga, which wasn’t even fully brought over in the official English versions of the manga for whatever reason.

And thank you for reading Imperfect Girl. Extra thanks if you got all the way through this. Hopefully there’s more to come. Feel free to reach out and let me know what you thought. It’s a big deal to know that someone enjoyed and looked forward to what I worked so hard on.

Until next time!