I heard its sales were poor because the censors thought its female lead was drawn too young and that it carried a hint of lolicon.

But I have to say that it holds an irreplaceable place in my heart.

I place it somewhere among people, ghosts, and fox spirits. The first volume may be a little dull, but by the second I remembered the dreamlike feeling I had when I used to read Xia Da’s Zi Bu Yu. Dreamlike—like when its heroine dreams that a tiger in a painting leaps at her, and her mother casually drives it away with a stroke of her brush. This book does not have many strange-tale elements, yet the moment when the heroine meets the old woman again moved me.

An eight-hundred-year-old old woman with the face of a fourteen-year-old, falling in love again after everything she has been through~

To me, this book completes Zi Bu Yu. The romantic element missing from Zi Bu Yu and Natsume’s Book of Friends is made whole here. I love it; it is beautiful. They are no longer separate works, but part of one complete image.

Its sales may be low, and perhaps some people will see it only as a simple, sugary romance and forget it quickly. But for me, it may be one of a kind. Every book may have readers like me: people whose attention is suddenly caught, who fall in love without noticing. The feeling is not intense, and that is why it can last. (Zi Bu Yu and Xia Da; Natsume and summer vacation.) Rather than love, it is a combination of gentleness, imagination, romance, and dreaminess.

And I thank it for giving me a pleasant evening.