The story opens with the protagonist as a corporate drone, ground down every day by life and his boss, starting to think about ending it all. At the subway station entrance — the Japanese favorite for this sort of thing — he stares at an oncoming train and considers jumping. One little hop and it’s all over. Of course, he doesn’t have the guts, so he keeps scraping by. Right when he’s at his lowest, he meets a girl who asks him to help her get into a mixed-bath bathhouse. Her reason is simple: she’s never been in one and wants to see what it’s like. The girl calls herself Nagisa. She seems cheerful enough, and not only does she drag him into a mixed bath, she hauls him all over the place — eating good food, trying new things, sightseeing by the sea, vacationing on a little island. Maybe it’s some kind of magic spell, but he just lets her pull him along. Total strangers, yet the two of them do couple-ish things together like a string of dates, and eventually they do the thing couples do, too. Then, right after they’ve finished and he drifts off, he wakes to find she’s quietly gotten up and walked out onto the balcony. She thanks him, says she’s an unforgivable murderer, and that her last wish has been fulfilled. Then she jumps. She hits the ground hard and lies there in a pool of blood.

The story starts with our protagonist, Kakehashi Yashiro (宵宮梯子), a truant who’s already stopped going to school. On the road after running away from home, he wanders into an abandoned ruin somewhere in the city and meets an angel with only one wing. The angel grants him a mysterious power through her feathers and asks for his help recovering them, handing him a feather that bestows a special ability. The price: once the feathers are returned, he’ll forget everything.

Around 2016, I think. Google+ was still alive back then, and I had this massive urge to express myself—I just really wanted to write something. I was super active in a Google+ community that had these “three-topic snacks” prompts, where they’d give you three related or unrelated words and you’d write a story around them. Eventually I got it into my head to write this insanely badass novel, serialized. I was still deep in my chuuni phase, and I’d played way too many visual novels, so the stories in my head naturally took on that shape. The idea was a story about an edgy male lead and a heroine at school. Students start dying mysteriously, but it turns out they all killed themselves, and the mastermind behind it is the cute, cheerful, harmless-looking heroine who has a hidden dark side. Using her secret identity, she lures students online, draws out their inner darkness, and talks them into suicide or into hurting each other—all for fun. She keeps her identity perfectly hidden, and since she never directly kills anyone, she can’t really be held responsible. The male lead keeps investigating because of a friend’s death, and the heroine hides who she is and investigates alongside him. The final boss is right next to you—that kind of feeling. Looking back now, that story is chuuni as hell, and a lot of it is immature and childish. But I still don’t think the subject matter is bad. If anything, it’s something you can always write, because I firmly believe that so-called “demonic whispering” really can drive a person to death. Everyone in modern society is under a ton of pressure, facing all kinds of pain, and it’s not uncommon to be unable to take it and momentarily lose hope. But what I want to talk about isn’t the story itself. Recently I realized that someone actually wrote the story I wanted to write back then, and turned it into a game… It’s this Steam hit, Seven Days Until the Protagonist Dies.