Afterword―To the Reader

To: The esteemed reader

This is Morimi Tomihiko. I hope you are doing well.

I’m writing this letter to commemorate the publication of the paperback version of The Art of Writing a Love Letter. Winter is over, and spring has come at last. My nose is always running because of the pollen. In between sentences I have to stop to blow my nose; my sinuses have become a place of cosmic horror. What a depressing season.

This is my eighth book, and my very first epistolary novel.

In this age of cell phones and email, writing a letter might seem like a ponderous, hopelessly outdated way to communicate. But then again I’ve always been a ponderous kind of man, and I am perfectly content with being hopelessly outdated. That’s why I wrote this novel.

The other day someone told me, “At one point in their career every author wants to try writing an epistolary novel.” Maybe that’s true. But it wasn’t what I was thinking when I wrote this novel; I simply enjoyed Natsume Sōseki’s collected letters a lot and wanted to try emulating them. I highly recommend you read them.

It’s been some years since this book was serialized, and to see it published in novel form makes me reminisce about those days I spent with the lovably eccentric Morita Ichirō. I visited the Noto Peninsula to research the book and made some fond memories of the place.

In this book, this Morimi Tomihiko character seems incredibly unreliable. But pause for a moment. He only seems that way because you’re viewing him through the lens of Morita Ichirō. I sincerely hope my discerning, doting readers will keep in mind that the real Morimi Tomihiko is not nearly such a paltry being.

In fact, I’ve already discovered the real art of writing a love letter. But I’m afraid I can’t spare the time to disseminate it to you all. And furthermore, an afterword is far too confined a space to elucidate such an advanced technique.

It'll take far more than reading a book or two to grasp such a life-altering technique. I hope you all find an opportunity to start a correspondence and discover your own art of writing a love letter, just as Morita Ichirō did. And for those of you who insist on forcibly extracting from this charmingly compact volume some pithy aphorism of immediate efficacy, please chew over the following maxim by Morita.

Some stories don’t have morals.

Good day to you all.

Very sincerely,

Morimi Tomihiko

March 6, 2010