I remember the summer of 2003, right after I graduated middle school. Around August 15th, the rain started in Zhengzhou and just wouldn’t let up. After that, summer left and never came back. My closest friends from middle school scattered too, and we lost touch. The next time we met was Chinese New Year. That was the first time I felt like I was “abandoning the past and opening up a new world,” but I wasn’t all that keen on opening that new world. I still liked my old friends better. August is over again this year, which means summer’s over. Maybe there’ll be a late-summer heat wave, but every autumn rain brings a chill with it. I didn’t do much in August either — just worked. Hard to believe my job actually has busy periods. Probably the whole country’s been fucking around lately. I originally wanted to stir things up and then keep pushing, but in the end I chose to give up on fixing things. My health isn’t great, so I figured I might as well rest.

《终わる世界とバースデイ》 is a visual novel put out by Wataame-sha, and good luck finding anything about it — even in Chinese-language circles the info is scarce, and basically nobody seems to have reviewed it. I played it partly because Kiritani Hana is in it, and partly out of curiosity about the story setup. Played it raw, too — so thanks are due to VNR, a Casio Japanese-Chinese dictionary, and the surprisingly useful Baidu Translate. How should I even rate this game? Hmm, let’s just say it’s one of the few recent works I’ve come across that genuinely takes its storytelling seriously.