The Novelist Is a Little-Sister-Obsessed

[AI CENSORSHIP BLOCKED THIS CHUNK - RAW ENGLISH RETAINED]

“C’mon, Bro, time to get up, up, uuuup…”

As I opened my eyes to the voice, I was greeted by the sight of Alice, completely naked.

Alice is my little sister. She just turned fourteen years old this year, and her flowing blond hair and ruby-like crimson eyes leave an unforgettable impression. She’s a beautiful girl; nobody could possibly lodge any complaint against her.

“Mngh, morning, Alice,” I stammered, still in a daze. She giggled in response.

“Boy, Big Bro, you sure look sleepy-weepy this morning! And I got just the thing for a sleepyhead brother like you…”

She quickly thrust her face right up to mine…and gave it a smooch.

“…!”

Alice’s soft lips pushed close against my own, banishing any lingering drowsiness I could possibly have had. “Feeling more chipper now?” She withdrew her lips, flashing me a sly grin. Her cheeks were a little reddened. “Today Alice has a super-dee-duper-special breakfast for you! C’mon down before it gets cold!”

“Oh! All right,” I replied. She nodded at me, looking all satisfied in her birthday suit, and left the room. Her butt, soft and supple as a freshly peeled shrimp, jiggled this way and that as she sauntered off.

I had kicked off hundreds of mornings like this before, but it never got old to me. Reflecting upon the pure joy it brought me, I zoomed out of bed, eager to tuck into my sister’s latest culinary masterpiece. On the way, I washed my face with the hot water left over from my sister’s morning bath and wiped it clean with her still-warm brassiere before heading for the dining room table. Yoshiko was there, which was a surprise, considering I thought she had died yesterday.

“Okay, Big Bro,” the achingly nude Alice belted out with a heart-melting smile, “get it while the getting’s hot!”

“Thanks!”

Her fried-rice omelet was, as always, a masterpiece. The milk she served with it overturned all previous notions I’d had about what milk could taste like. The eggs she laid for me and her fresh-squeezed milk couldn’t have complemented each other better.

“Ooh, Big Bro, you got a big dollop of ketchup on ya! Ooh,mee-owww, what will I ever do with you? Um, something to wipe with, something to wipe with…”

Deftly conjuring a transdimensional gate to a parallel universe, Alice took out a warm, fuzzy pair of panties and dabbed at one corner of my mouth with it. The intoxicating fragrance of the Alice from the alternate dimension wafted into my nostrils, exciting them and whetting my appetite even further. Sure wish I could eat these panties. Nom, nom, nom… Oops! Now I’ve bitten into them. Munch, munch, nom, nom… Man, what a culinary delight.

Before long, I had scarfed down the entire undergarment. Alice responded with a bashful pout. “Ooh, Big Brotherrrr… If you wanted to eat my purty li’l panties, I woulda whipped up a piping-hot new pair—along with more of myfarrrrm-fresh milk, of course! Tee-hee! ”

“You got it, Sis! I can’t wait to take a whiff of your fresh-baked, fresh-stripped, fresh-tasting lacy stuff!”

“What in thehellis this?!”

“Whoa! Wha…what’s up?”

Itsuki straightened up as Toki slammed his manuscript against the table and shouted at him.

“What do youthinkis up? …Th-this world of yours is sheer insanity… I thought I was going into the loony bin for a second there!” Toki said, glaring as he attempted to catch his breath.

Itsuki crossed his arms and flashed a world-beating smile. “Heh… Guess my expertly woven world’s found another captive, huh?”

“You…are such a psycho…,” Toki replied, face tense.

Itsuki—to be exact, Itsuki Hashima—was a novelist, twenty years old, and a little small and wiry for his age. His eyes were sharp and villainous looking, but there was still a trace of youthful innocence to his face—even as he stared brazenly at Toki, clearly attempting to annoy him. Itsuki Hashima was his real name; he didn’t opt for a nom de plume like many fellow writers in his genre.

Kenjiro Toki, meanwhile, was Itsuki’s editor and a rather intense-looking man, twenty-six years old, in glasses and a business suit. He and Itsuki were in the midst of an editorial meeting. They kept in contact via text and phone conversations, but as much as possible, Itsuki preferred to see Toki in person and have him read hard copies of his progress. It let him better gauge his editor’s unfiltered responses to the work, he thought.

Today they were in Itsuki’s apartment—not an unusual meeting place for them, since it was only about a five-minute walk from Toki’s office.

“…So just to make sure we’re on the same page here,” Toki ventured, his voice weakened from fatigue, “thisisyour submission for chapter two of what we’re callingDemon Hunter in Scarletfor now?”

“Of course.” Itsuki briskly nodded. It only made Toki wince harder.

“…Well, that’s weird, isn’t it? Because according to the plot outline, chapter two’s supposed to start with the hero being surprised by the sight of the heroine at breakfast, even though she died defending him from a demon attack at the end of chapter…one…?”

“Yep. And I’m following that outline perfectly. A littletooperfectly, if you ask me.”

Toki was referring to a handwritten flowchart of the general plot that the two of them had hammered out beforehand.

“Following that outline how, exactly?”

Itsuki winced a little himself as Toki banged a hand roughly against the table. “What? The hero’s acting surprised, isn’t he? That girl died in front of him yesterday, and now she’s right… Um, what was her name?”

“You can’t forget the main heroine’s name! It’s Yoshiko, all right? Yoshiko! And that’s a pretty generic name, too, don’t you think? Is that really a good name for a woman fighting alone, uncelebrated, in the dark realms against hordes of demons? …I mean, all right, youdidcram her in there and make the hero shocked to see her. I almost skipped that line entirely, but…”

“Wow, some editor you are,” Itsuki said, letting out a light sigh. “I mean, don’t you hate it when you write something plain as day into the story and people forget about it or skip right over it, and then they bitch at you about how there’s no foreshadowing or the story’s all over the place?”

“Don’t makemethe bad guy here!” Toki fired back, voice raised, before taking a deep breath to calm himself. “Sticking Yoshiko’s return in there like an afterthought is one thing, but that’s not even the main issue.”

“What is?”

Toki rapped at the printout with his middle finger and replied, “The main issue is, who’s this new Alice girl? I don’t remember hearing anything about her!”

“She’s the hero’s sister. I wrote it down in the character descriptions, didn’t I? That he had a little sister.”

“Yeah, and that’s all you wrote in there! You didn’t go into any more detail, so I thought she was just a secondary character. No major exposition needed…and then you give me this monster…!”

“A monstrous beauty, right? Ha-ha-ha! I’ll say!”

“No, you dumbass! For the love of…! I mean, it’s creepy enough you have her naked by default, but then there’s all this other crap going on, and I can’t evenbeginto explain what’s the most screwed up about it! You have the hero sniffing bras, literallyeatingpanties… What kind of deranged is this guy? Are you sure you didn’t mean, like, ‘pancakes’ instead of ‘panties,’ or…”

“Well, that’s a silly question. Do you really think I’d make such an amateur mistake?”

“Goddammit, of course you wouldn’t… And what’s all this stuff about Alice’s ‘milk’ or whatever?”

“What? It’s just like I wrote. It’s milk from Alice’s breasts. Really rich.”

“And those eggs…?”

“Yeah, she lays them. It’s, like, a thousand times better than caviar, not that I like caviar all that much.”

“Ha-ha-ha… Both of them are absolute maniacs! And you’re the biggest maniac of all for dreaming up this BS! And I thought the hero was meant to be this average high school student from a cookie-cutter modern family! With this show, readers are gonna forget all about theBlood of the Demon Hunters, along with anything else!”

The extended dressing-down made Itsuki frown a bit. “Hmm… Well, if you put it that way, maybe the whole milk-and-eggs thing was goingjust a little bittoo far… I figured, you know, with all these supernatural fight scenes, I could get away withjust a teensybreak from reality…”

“Just a little bit…? Seriously…?” Toki shuddered.

“You see it all the time in books like this. Like, the hero’s parents are actually famous adventurers, or they’re secretly the hidden successors of some ancient martial art that the hero’s got a talent for, too.”

“Okay, so you’re telling me that these psychopaths laying eggs and chowing down on panties are the same thing as the basic backstory of every fighting-hero manga ever?”

Toki’s head was visibly throbbing at the temples.

“…All right,” Itsuki timidly ventured, “but if you’ve got a younger sister and she takes a bath first, then sure, it’s totally normal to wash your face with the hot water she leaves in there, right?”

“You callthatnormal, you sister-obsessed?!”

Toki screamed at the top of his lungs.

Itsuki Hashima had made his debut after winning a prize for new authors at the age of sixteen. In the ensuing three or so years, he had published a total of twenty novels—five one-shots and three multivolume series.

Even with what he had already written before going pro, twenty releases in three years was a dizzying pace—and with the level of quality he still managed at that speed, he had built up a fairly decent reader fan base. Several titles had made it onto the top-ten paperback bestseller lists released by Oricon, the most well-known sales charts in Japan. You could, in other words, say he was kind of a rising star.

When it came to writing speed, imagination, and ability to formulate a compelling story and engaging characters, Itsuki Hashima had what it took to grow and mature as a popular novelist going forward—but despite that, all his recent works had sold at a decidedly “eh” level.

Yazdığı tüm hikayelerin ortak bir noktası vardı: Başrol kadın karakter her zaman bir küçük kız kardeş tiplemesiydi.

Bu tür romanlarda sıkça rastlanan, popüler bir karakter yaratmanın en kestirme yollarından biriydi bu. Ancak onun bu kalıba saplantılı derecede bağlı kalması, bazı okurların gözlerini devirip, "Yine mi aynı nakarat..." demesine neden oluyordu. Üstelik Itsuki, kendi yarattığı kız kardeşleri diğer romanlardakilerden farklı kılmak için çıtayı her seferinde öyle bir zorluyordu ki karakterler her yeni ciltte biraz daha uç noktalara savruluyordu. Son zamanlarda, baş erkek karakterlerin bile kız kardeşleri hakkında kurduğu cümleler ancak zıvanadan çıkmış birinin ağzına yakışacak türdendi; bu da şüphesiz pek çok okurun hikayeden soğumasına yol açıyordu.

Toki, Itsuki’nin yeniden büyük bir çıkış yakalaması için bu temadan biraz uzaklaşması gerektiğini düşünmüş, onu Kızıl İblis Avcısı —final ismi henüz netleşmemişti— projesi üzerinde çalışmaya bir nevi zorlamıştı. Ancak sonuç tam bir hüsrandı; Itsuki bu sefer de bambaşka bir kız kardeş canavarı türü yaratmayı başarmıştı.

"Öğğ... Adam resmen küçük kız kardeş manyağı..."

Toki, Itsuki’nin evinden çıkmış, ofise doğru yürüyordu. Ocak ayının keskin soğuğunda, havada buharlaşan nefesiyle birlikte derin bir iç çekti.

"Ooo! Merhaba Toki Bey!"

Üzerinde rüzgarlığı, bir elinde market poşetiyle ufak tefek genç bir adam onu neşeyle selamladı.

"Vay, selam Chihiro," diye karşılık verdi Toki. "Ben de tam abinle yeni hikaye fikirlerini konuşmaktan geliyordum."

"Öyle mi? Ona verdiğiniz tüm destekler için teşekkür ederim."

"Rica ederim, ne demek. Asıl o bana yardımcı oluyor."

Karşısındaki kişi Itsuki’nin erkek kardeşi Chihiro Hashima’ydı. Lise birinci sınıf öğrencisi olan bu gencin ensesine kadar uzanan siyah saçları, bembeyaz teni ve mesafeli ama etkileyici yüz hatlarıyla kendine has bir çekiciliği vardı. Itsuki onu derslerinde birinci, sporda yıldız, her yönden kusursuz bir çocuk olarak tanımlardı. Aile evi, Itsuki’nin şu anki apartman dairesine otobüsle yaklaşık yirmi dakika mesafedeydi; Chihiro ise sık sık buraya gelip abisine yemek yapar, etrafı toparlar ve diğer işlerine koştururdu. Bu sayede Toki ile de tanışıklığı vardı.

"Yine akşam yemeği yapmaya mı geldin?"

"Evet, efendim."

"...Valla abin senin gibi bir kardeşi olduğu için çok şanslı. Kıskanmamak elde değil."

Chihiro, Toki’nin bu samimi övgüsü karşısında hafifçe kızardı. "Ben artık müsaadenizi isteyeyim. Abimle ilgili bir ihtiyacınız olursa lütfen haber verin."

Nazikçe selam verip uzaklaştı. Toki, gidişini izlerken ne kadar nazik, efendi ve mert bir çocuk olduğunu düşündü. Hem eli lezzetliydi hem de abisinin üzerinden gözünü bir an olsun ayırmıyordu. Kusursuzdu.

"...Chihiro keşke kız doğsaydı. Belki o zaman Itsuki bu küçük kız kardeş fetişleriyle kafayı bozmazdı... Gerçi öyle olsaydı muhtemelen hiç yazar da olmazdı ya... Neyse, kestirmesi güç..."