I began working on Kuni no Senso in 2016 when the idea for an anime series first sprang into my head. Since that first idea, many aspects of the story have changed. Firstly, the story initially consisted of only what is now the second volume. The first draft’s plot went as follows:

Yukan comes home one day after a date with Ite to learn that his house had been burned down and his family had been killed by a person in a cloak wielding a sword with a checkered design. Seeing an Aotoshi flag in the group near him, he decides to go through Aotoshi and find the man with the Checkered Sword to avenge his family. He is brought under the wing of Kadaina Meiji (then named Goman Meiji), and begins his quest for vengeance, stopping to get training with Kashikoi Masuta (who had a different name that I do not remember). During this training, he finds the Omega Blade. The character of Kunshu Mujihina is introduced much later on in this version, appearing during a broadcast hijacking scene. The war started as a force outside of Yukan’s control. Another major difference is the inclusion of a mascot character in the form of a wolf named Okami. I ended up dropping the character after realizing that it had very little bearing on the plot and seemed more to distract from it than help it move along. The final major differences are that Yukan accesses Deity Mode before the fight against Kunshu; the backstory is much more complex, revolving around Yukan and Kunshu’s ancestors crafting the Fabled Swords to defeat Death itself; Kunshu did not reveal his identity as the man with the Checkered Sword until the final battle; and some character deaths are either delayed or negated entirely.

After I began working on bringing the series to life following a hefty revision, however, I realized that I had come up with some aspects of the lore that I felt that I needed to share. These became the two books that are the entirety of Volume 1, The Man from the Unkempt and Kunshu, thus explaining why, compared to Volumes 2 and 3, the first volume is rather meager. Many characters were removed, such as the aforementioned Okami, and others were added as I saw necessary, such as Zeronius. Although he was not originally planned as being in the series, a collaborator on the series for a manga adaptation in development, Weslee Strickland, proposed the character and we both found the character to be incredibly intriguing as a keeper of balance between the Fabled Swords. Afterward, we created the maila species and they became an integral part of this world. After a while, more people began contributing to the story of Kuni no Senso to make it as cohesive as possible. The largest contributor of all, however, was Katie Sloan. She is the one responsible for writing almost all of the dialogue in the first two volumes since I wasn’t comfortable with writing dialogue during the period where the series’ scripts were being written, which was the basis for this novel. By the time we began writing Volume 3, however, I found myself getting better at writing dialogue and decided to take that duty up myself.

Out of all of the changes implemented into Kuni no Senso, the largest is the heart of the story. It wasn’t until during the writing of the first volume after finishing Volume 2 and showing it to various colleagues that I began to realize that people saw the work less as a grand tale of vengeance and more a tale of people leaning on one another during times of crisis. As a result, I figured out that what made the stories work together was a consistent focus on the dynamics between characters from Oji & Kawata in the first part of Volume 1 to Lanya & Musuko in Volume 3. The entire third volume ended up being rewritten because the ending seemed to clash with the rest of the story, with the ending being rewritten once more later on in response to advice from fellow writers.

A few things ended up coming up while writing the novel that I didn’t expect to have real-life parallels. For example, the plot point in Volume 2 where an airborne pathogen is unleashed upon the people of Central Akuni was first planned in 2018 or 2019 only for the COVID-19 pandemic to start becoming a serious issue after the script had been written for the episode that would’ve contained the plot point. This, as one would have likely guessed, was entirely coincidence. No events within the story were meant to parallel real-life occurrences and no characters within the story are personifications of anybody other than possible inflections that I found in my personality. Any comparisons between a location within Kuni no Senso and a real-life location are made solely to help the reader better develop an idea of what the locations would look like rather than using these locations as an allegory for other locations.

That being said, Kuni no Senso did affect the real world, or at least my own. This tale has followed me through my day-to-day life in such an incredible manner that it still baffles me that I have been working on it for so long. It helped my peers see me as a more serious writer and allowed me to better write for other projects such as the webcomic BaraRonTai, my musical Southampton, and my next novel Manhattan Wilderness. My skills were honed by this work and I would not be as effective a writer as I am today if it were not for Kuni no Senso.

In essence, Kuni no Senso is a work that has changed throughout the many years I had spent putting it into words, while also changing the trajectory of my life as I know it.

Thank you,

-HR