#fafoo

Sugaru Miaki's "The Town of Sakura"

Sugaru Miaki Interview: "On the End of the World"

Ever since I was a child, I've had a clear picture in my head of "when my future self looks back on his adolescence, these are probably the sort of regrets he'll have." And in fact, I was exactly right. Perhaps that would make them less "regrets" and more "pregrets" - I feel a consistent sense of powerlessness, like a time traveler who couldn't change the future. You could call it a life regretted in advance.

For people who want memories but don't want to bother making them, a memory-making service agency was created. However, whenever they made memories that were hard to let go of, staff members would frequently abscond with them, and illegal memory duplication resulted in many incidents when people with the same memories met, so it apparently shut down shortly thereafter.

I can hardly muster the will to want to change my life anymore, so I can't think to myself "I want to turn back time," nor "I want to switch lives with someone," nor "I want to be reborn in another world." My ability to imagine the unrealistic is becoming increasingly devoted to withered fantasies like "I want to play on the swings in a children's park at night with a ghost who has a wonderful smile, while we envy each other's privileges." In an alternate world where despair can be directly converted into offensive power, the people of the world desire for their hero be unhappy, so the hero despises humanity more than anyone, and the only one who can truly understand what makes him happy is the dark lord. It's commonly theorized that the hero defeated the dark lord with a self-destruct spell, but it's also thought he may have taken his own life from the sadness of losing the only one who understood him. The end.

Following trends is perfectly fine and healthy, but when I see people with very little constancy, I find myself thinking "I bet if something bad caught on, they'd be badly influenced." And when I see people who always exclusively follow their personal interests, I'm relieved with the thought "I bet they'll keep talking about incomprehensible stuff up to the Earth's final day."