Shimizu Rin glanced at her watch. 21:27. He would be getting off work soon.
Akira.
It was a nice name.
She hadn't anticipated that he would turn out to have watched Cardcaptor Sakura, and that mentioning it would lead to this.
The thought that he might actually come to hear her perform later settled somewhere in her chest and produced a feeling she couldn't quite account for. A kind of nervousness.
Was it the performance itself? This was the first time she was playing this particular song for an audience.
She took a slow breath and tried to let the tension settle. As she did, her mind drifted back to the conversation earlier that afternoon.
She still couldn't entirely explain why she had asked him about anime songs in the first place. Curiosity, most likely.
He appeared to be about her age, but he clearly wasn't in school. His speech had no obvious regional accent, but something in the cadences, subtle and hard to pin down, told her he hadn't grown up in Tokyo.
He had probably moved here directly after high school, either having skipped university or chosen not to go. It wasn't an unusual path. She had classmates who had done the same.
What she found harder to account for was the combination of things she had observed about him. The face, which was frankly striking. The drawing ability, which was on a level that stopped people in their tracks. And yet there he was, working shifts at a manga bookstore.
What had brought him to Tokyo? With the talent he had, finding something better suited to him should have been straightforward. And the drawing she had seen today, those weren't casual sketches. He was working toward something.
It was that collection of questions, she supposed, that had produced the question about anime songs. A sideways attempt at understanding someone she didn't yet know well enough to ask directly.
Maybe once they had spent more time together, the answers would come naturally.
She filed the thought away and turned her attention back to the performance. Another song ended. She looked out over the gathered listeners, and her eyes found him without difficulty.
He had come.
He was standing toward the back of the crowd, not doing anything to draw attention to himself, but still somehow very easy to pick out. When their eyes met he smiled and gave a small wave.
She responded with a brief nod, pulled herself together, and spoke into the quiet.
"The last song for tonight. 'Tobira wo Akete.'"
After his shift ended, Akira made his way over and listened for a song or two before exchanging a few words with Shimizu Rin and catching the train home.
She sang well. That hadn't changed. The new song suited her, and the first public performance of it had been handled without any visible nerves showing through.
On his part, work had limited him to only a small portion of her set. At some point when the schedule allowed, he would try to catch a full performance from the beginning.
But that was a secondary concern. The more immediate matter was the work waiting at his desk.
Over the past several days, his practice of the Takeuchi Takashi style had reached a point he was satisfied with. His notes and structural thinking for the Fate/stay night adaptation had also accumulated into a substantial body of material. The groundwork was largely in place.
Even so, he wasn't planning to start on Fate/stay night directly.
First, he was going to draw a short manga.
Breaking into Shonen Jump through a first submission wasn't impossible, but it was rare.
The most well-known example was Akimoto Osamu, whose work Kochikame had earned a serialization from its very first submission and then proceeded to run in the magazine for forty consecutive years, from 1976 to 2016, which remained the longest continuous run in Shonen Jump history.
But that was the exception, not the template. Even Toriyama Akira, whose talent was not in question by anyone, had accumulated a long string of rejections before shorter serialization work gave him the foundation from which Dr. Slump could emerge and change everything.
He was confident in what Fate/stay night could do. The story was proven, the art style was ready, and his production capability was not something a typical newcomer could match. But confidence was not the same as certainty, and building in an insurance policy was simply good planning.
That insurance policy was the Tezuka Award.
The award had been established by Shueisha in 1971, named for Osamu Tezuka, and ran twice a year with serialized Shonen Jump manga artists serving as judges.
It existed specifically to surface new talent and had three prize tiers: Selected, at the top, carrying one million yen in prize money; Semi-Selected, at five hundred thousand yen; and Honorable Mention, at two hundred thousand.
Winning works were published in Weekly Shonen Jump, which put them directly in front of the editorial staff. Strong performances at the award level had led more than once to direct serialization offers.
The list of manga artists who had come up through the Tezuka Award included names that were not small. Hojo Tsukasa. Araki Hirohiko. Togashi Yoshihiro. Inoue Takehiko. The award had a track record.
The submission deadline for the first half of this year had already passed on March 31st. He had missed that window. The second half of the year was what he was working toward.
The submission requirements for the Tezuka Award specified manuscript paper dimensions of 330 to 365 millimeters vertically and 230 to 260 millimeters horizontally, with a standard frame of 270 by 180 millimeters.
The work category was shonen story manga, rendered in black and white, with no restrictions on theme, and the submission had to be a complete standalone one-shot of no more than 55 pages.
The requirements were broadly similar to what he remembered, with one notable difference. In his original world, the Tezuka Award had a page limit of 31. This world's version was considerably more generous.
To put 55 pages in context: a standard weekly serialization chapter ran roughly 20 pages. Fifty-five pages was the equivalent of nearly three chapters worth of content, more than sufficient space to tell a complete and satisfying story.
He had many options for what to draw as a short manga. But since the work he intended to serialize on Shonen Jump was Fate/stay night, the choice of what to submit for the Tezuka Award had come to him without much deliberation.
He picked up his pen and wrote a title on a blank sheet of manuscript paper.
"Emiya Kiritsugu."
Fate/stay night told the story of the Fifth Holy Grail War, experienced by its protagonist Emiya Shirou. Fate/Zero was a different matter entirely.
It was a prequel novel, written not by Nasu Kinoko but by a novelist named Urobuchi Gen, working on commission. It covered the Fourth Holy Grail War, the conflict that preceded the events of Fate/stay night, and its central protagonist was Emiya Kiritsugu, the man who would later become Emiya Shirou's adoptive father.
Fate/Zero had eventually been adapted into an anime that was among the highest-quality productions the Fate franchise had generated, widely regarded as one of its best entries and one of its most debated.
The debate was not without basis. The most persistent structural issue with the work was that Urobuchi Gen's characterization of Saber, Artoria, diverged significantly from the version of the character established in Fate/stay night, creating continuity problems that were difficult to resolve cleanly.
Nasu Kinoko had eventually addressed this by officially reclassifying Fate/Zero as a parallel world story, a world line with subtle but meaningful differences from the one Fate/stay night inhabited, rather than a true prequel within the same continuity.
The conflict between Fate/Zero fans and Fate/stay night fans that developed over the years was a separate matter he had opinions about but no particular desire to revisit at length.
His own entry into the Type-Moon universe had not followed the standard path in any case. The first work he had engaged with seriously was The Garden of Sinners.
He had encountered the Fate franchise itself through the mobile game FGO rather than through either of the core visual novels.
By the internal snobbery rankings of the fanbase, that put him at the very bottom of the hierarchy.
Back to the point.
Emiya Kiritsugu appeared in Fate/stay night primarily through fragments of Emiya Shirou's memory and occasional references from other characters, but his portrayal there was always partial, filtered through a child's recollection of a father.
It was Fate/Zero that had given him full treatment, in the hands of Urobuchi Gen, and the result was a character study of genuine complexity.
In his childhood, Kiritsugu had been a boy who believed in heroes and wanted to become one. That belief had not survived his early years intact.
By the time he was an adult, he had become something quite different: a man who still carried the dream of world peace somewhere inside him but had stripped away everything, emotion, morality, personal feeling, that would interfere with the most efficient path toward it.
When confronted with the trolley problem in any of its forms, Kiritsugu would choose to sacrifice the fewer lives without hesitation. He made that choice repeatedly, and he carried the weight of every one of them. The gap between what he dreamed of and what he did to pursue it was the source of everything interesting about him.
Responses to the character had ranged across the full spectrum. Some readers found his circumstances genuinely tragic. Others found him contemptible.
Some argued he was a person of extreme moral seriousness operating under impossible constraints. Others concluded he was simply a man who had built an elaborate philosophical framework to justify his own failures. All of those readings had something in them.
None of that was what mattered to him right now. What mattered was that Kiritsugu's story was compelling, and that in 1999, before unconventional narrative structures had become common in manga, a story built around that particular kind of protagonist would read as genuinely fresh.
The specific story he intended to draw was drawn from the second season of the Fate/Zero anime, episode eighteen, titled "Distant Memories."
It covered a chapter of Kiritsugu's childhood: his father conducting forbidden experiments in a remote village, his childhood friend Shirley becoming a Dead Apostle as a consequence, a creature comparable to a vampire, and the threat of that spreading beyond the village.
Young Kiritsugu, understanding what would happen if his father's experiments continued, applied the same cold logic he would use for the rest of his life. He found his father and killed him with his own hands.
By any standard, that was unconventional material for manga. In the current era, seeking a serialization with content like that would face significant resistance.
But this wasn't a serialization submission. It was a one-shot, and the calculus was different. For a one-shot submitted to a newcomer award, an unexpected turn like that wouldn't be a liability.
In a field of submissions where most entries were playing it safe, something that made the judges sit up and look again was precisely what he needed.
Beyond that, there was a secondary benefit. Emiya Kiritsugu was a character who would appear throughout Fate/stay night in Emiya Shirou's memories.
Running a standalone story about him first was, in effect, releasing a character prequel before the main serialization had even started.
The only limitation was the page count. Fifty-five pages was enough to tell the story up to Kiritsugu killing his father.
The later scene, when Kiritsugu kills the woman who had been like a mother to him, a moment that had lodged itself permanently in the memory of everyone who had seen the anime, would not fit within the available space.
He would have to leave it for another time.
He looked down at the title written on the manuscript paper and felt something settle into focus, the particular clarity that came just before beginning something that had been thoroughly planned.
Come on then. Let's see what this world makes of you.
Emiya Kiritsugu.