Hikigaya Hachiman

thenonfakeHikigaya, 22 Sept, Official Twitter Account

Remember to check out the new official Love and Coffee merchandise from Animaru on Amazon. New copies of the reprinted version of Volume 1 are also available. (loveandcoffee) (shogakukan)

Replies to thenonfakeHikigaya, 22 Sept, Official Twitter Account

machikomeibestgirl: Hows volume 6 coming along

randaccon: stfu

LandCFaaaannn: Stop tweeting about dakimakura crap and write something.


September 23rd 2023, 5:27 PM

I have no idea why I keep returning to read Love and Coffee, despite being fully aware that what I've been producing- or more accurately churning out- for about five years is intolerably dreadful. Usually, the practice will only bring me frustration for even being convinced that it was worthy of attention in the first place. Praise falls on deaf ears the day you realise that the only opinion you have to live with is your own.

Furthermore, the longer that you write, and the more words that appear surreptitiously on the paper or the screen, the less feeling you invest in them. At least when I typed the first volume, before I had even the slightest premonition that the name Nagatomo Etsuji would become as familiar to thousands as the name Yukinoshita Yukino has to me, it felt like there was something definitively happening as I typed.

But, the emotion that compelled me throughout the first volume, and the emotion that is compelling me even now, is identical. Then again, can I really over simplify things so catastrophically by calling it an emotion? I'm not feeling something specific, per say. More so, the compulsion is Yukinoshita Yukino herself, exploding all around me, surging down into my fingers to be received like one of those electrical transformers.

Her presence forces the words out from within my subconscious. Maybe Yukinoshita Yukino and emotion are just interchangeable to me now, and those two words are no longer proper nouns but abstract nouns. Do words even work like that?

She's my muse, I suppose. My beautiful, strangling muse.

In fairness, when I say that I read Love and Coffee, I only read it for her. That would explain it. Basically, it's me being a pathetic, wistful idiot. People talk about what they found as a meaning in Love and Coffee, but the meanings they find are as incomprehensible as they are utterly pointless and pretentious, because my sentences wander around a meaning that doesn't exist.

They resonate with their author precisely because their author wasn't looking for a meaning, and the presumption that writing has to have one is ignorant and stupid. It is a story about a girl that, most likely, remains on the other side of the planet, wrapped around the pretence of high school romance and a light novel and Nagatomo Etsuji and his three love interests.

I re-read it because I swear that I can feel her on the pages in the same way you can feel heat bursting from a radiator, leaving scorch marks on my hands. Being burned by someone is very probably preferable to missing them with all the helplessness of a soldier's widow.

The girls in Love and Coffee bare those blackened scars too. They're like a theme and variation. A painter will find himself a subject, realise it on a canvas, and then realise it again on three diferent canvases, perhaps in a slightly differing style, or if the subject were a person, with different coloured hair or clothes.

The first girl that Etsuji meets at the cafe, in the second chapter I think (although he sees her and comments vaguely on this), is called Kanawa Kagami. I can't quite pinpoint when Love and Coffee appeared in the recesses of my mind, only that it was blooming on the flight back to Chiba and the prologue appeared a day after I got back. The memories were still sharp in my mind.

I was highly conscious that writing of Yukinoshita Yukino directly would probably bring bile to my throat, so when creating the girls I picked and chose her qualities and distributed them with care, one or two scattered there, one or two scattered here, so that they could seem as generic as the stock characters tropes you see in most light novels, but otherwise be very obviously her to me. They are like ugly, distorted jigsaw puzzles of a once beautiful whole.

The first of these jigsaw puzzles is Kanawa Kagami; the ditsy but well meaning and intelligent waitress. It is her first job, her first step out of her comfort zone, and she is trying to be more active and self reliant instead of reserved and introverted. Etsuji learns later on that she is an insatiable bookworm, scrounging out and consuming them like a vulture to another animal's corpse.

She has long brown hair and chocolate eyes, which I described in the first volume to closely resemble the coffee that she struggles to serve; Ponkan 8 thought it would be necessary to give her huge oppai which I definitely didn't specify in the writing (the illustrations of Love and Coffee are still one of the most irritating aspects of the series).

The second piece appears when, something like half way through the volume, Etsuji is unfortunately paired with a girl for a science project, and they decide to meet up and discuss it after school at the cafe. Machiko Mei is actually quite popular (which triggers a fair few Etsuji monologues), with a range of friends who often interject their meetings with lots of passive aggressive insults.

Still, I intended for her to come across quite intimidating at first, what with her determined and competitive nature, and the impassioned rants on whatever she happened to be passionate about (her and Etsuji's conversations tend to be more along the line of sarcastic quips and arguments... flirty ones later on, but arguments nonetheless). She has shoulder length jet-black hair and green eyes- like tea leaves, Etsuji writes, before using this as an excuse for why he doesn't find her good looking, which by the way, she clearly is.

Again, Ponkan 8's illustration of her is dreadful. I never specified in any of my descriptions that the three girls were beautiful, because really, can a disgusting contortion like them ever be considered beautiful?

Then, you have the final piece. Arakaki Akane. I fully admit that she was most the agonising for me to write about, because although Mei and Kagami have portions of the woman in New York that writhe as if in unbearable agony, it is her that came closest to the genuine article.

I wrote her with long scarlet hair (everyone knows that regular hair colours don't apply in light novels) and brilliant blue eyes. For her figure, I used the word "curvaceous"- the closest thing I could find to a synonym of attractive that somehow didn't quite give the same impression. She is even more unpopular than Etsuji, for even though they're both loners, the riajuu of the year do not ignore Akane, and often torment her out of jealousy for her grades and her looks.

As a result, her personality is conflicted; she can turn from confident and easygoing one moment to shy and socially awkward the next. The treatment and prejudices of others weakened her resolve on who exactly she was.

Ponkan 8's illustrations of Arakaki Akane are the ones I don't mind. Unlike the other two, she doesn't feel fetishised. Mostly because I sent an expletive riddled complaint to Shogakukan after I saw their initial interpretation, demanding they either tone it down or fucking fire him.

Something tells me they didn't actually read my email in its first draught. If I remember, I'll send Katsomoto a four or five year overdue thanks for the censorship.

Since all three of the girls are equal in being a scourge for literature in general, it bewilders me that Love and Coffee would have a best girl debate at all. But, the ferocity of that debate is also a source of great amusement for me, so it's a positive kind of bewilderment. Seriously. Sometimes, if I really want to have a laugh, I'll go and have a look on the most popular Love and Coffee fan website, called The 28 Sins after the on going joke in the series, and look at some of the abuse that the three sides hurl at each other.

They hold a monthly poll to check the popularity of the three characters for some indiscernible reason, and it seems to change every month, which will inevitably prompt another wave of hilariously abusive posts. In fact, the results are so varied that they keep a tally of the character with the most monthly victories. Machiko Mei is currently holding first position, with an almighty lead of one.

The amount of idiots on the internet is surely one of the greatest wonders of the human world. You wouldn't believe the amount of Love and Coffee fanart competitions that take place on DeviantArt. And, get this: there are over twenty thousand fanfictions dedicated to the series on various websites, about fifteen thousand on Archive Of Our Own alone. Twenty fucking thousand.

Some of them are over a hundred thousand words long. Just imagining the amount of time that's been wasted sickens me. These people give me a run for my money.

Do you know what the main difference between Kanawa Kagami, Machiko Mei, Arakaki Akane and Yukinoshita Yukino is, apart from the obvious, that being three of them are fictional are the other all too real? It may seem like a trivial and ridiculous difference to notice at first, but it sticks out to me clearly and painfully, like a bullet to the stomach.

All three of my characters are announced to the audience with these paragraph long descriptions, and in two cases, a dramatic entrance (or, at the very least, as dramatic an entrance as a rom-com light novel series about coffee consumption can manage). Take Arakaki Akane- Etsuji meets her because, while he is sitting down and enjoying a latte, she walks past with her own only to be tripped up by a group of girls opposite to him. She falls over dramatically, coffee spills everywhere, everyone in the cafe laughs like hyenas etc etc.

This was also the scene of the infamous first Ponkan 8 Akane illustration- all I'll say is that the coffee didn't look too much like coffee when drawn over her clothes like that. Unfortunately, I'm not joking.

But Yukinoshita Yukino? When she walked into Pirelli's on the fourth day of my New York trip, unwittingly instigating a tempest that would rage through my life, I didn't even look up. I'd already been sat in my favourite seat, that looked out on the whole cafe, for about two hours and was fixated with my book, the name of which has melted away from my grasp. The light patter of rain crunched on the glass windows, and she took the seat right beside them, slipping into the scene with an unalterable perfection, as if she were what Pirelli's had being missing in all it's time as an establishment without truly knowing that it was missing her.

Yukinoshita Yukino would have that effect on most things. You'll come to learn that, even when we did come to be face to face, it was as if she always remained on one side of the cafe and I on the other, cursed by me insistence that involvement itself was a curse. She was an unobtainable something that one can only long and lust to possess, but such is the nature of that something that it would crumble at unworthy hands if they stopped so low as to touch it.

When I finally looked up, and saw her by the window, staring out at the rain with her hands held primly on her lap, I still didn't really notice her because I was a little too far away, isolated some ten or so tables away. I probably noted that she was absurdly beautiful, and that her hair and face were splashed with droplets of rain water, but not with too much keenness to really note it.

An hour or so passed, in addition to another latte. I returned to my book. The time became five o'clock and then became a minute passed five o'clock and so on and so forth. Eventually, the other minimal spattering of customers collected their belongings and exited quickly and clumsily through the door and were lost to the abysmal weather. Yukinoshita Yukino and I and the bored looking waiter were left alone.

It was around here that I genuinely started to look. Again, not too much notice her. More so, I regarded and acknowledged her existence, and what she was doing, without processing it fully.

Somewhere amidst the fast flickering, fading time, she'd begun to write something. She pulled out a notebook from her bag, just beside her legs, and wrote. She wrote quite frantically. I must've thought it was a reminder about work or something. The urgency only increased. One page increased to two pages and then to three and then, abruptly, she stopped. She dropped her pen and it rolled off the table and she put her head in her hands.

I blinked. She remained like that for a good couple of minutes, as if imploding in on herself. At last, she raised her head and returned to looking out the window, only this time, her hands and her arms were quivering, apparent even from the other side of the cafe, and her feet and her legs were restless underneath the table.

Then, like a broken, rusty old computer in desperate need of repair, I finally realised, about a lifetime too slow. They were droplets of rain on her cheeks no longer. Instead, they were tears. Yukinoshita Yukino was crying. Silently, privately, without disturbing a soul.

I started to feel uneasy. I think it crossed my mind that I should be saying something, or offering my help, but before I could even begin to summon the courage required for such an interjection, Yukinoshita Yukino was standing up, putting on her coat and picking up her bag and walking out the door, leaving a couple of bank notes on the table that was probably far too much.

She was swallowed back up by the monster of New York city faster than it had spat her out, granting me that tiny, insufficient glimpse of her, only to tear it away again as if toying with its prey. I glanced at the waiter. He was fiddling with the coffee machine. I was the only person in the whole world that witnessed her moment of weakness.

Not once did it cross her mind that, behind the pillar in the corner, there sat a bastard that could and should've said something, even then. As far as she was concerned, she'd been alone in the cafe.

The next thirty minutes or so I spent shifting uncomfortably in my chair. All of a sudden, Pirelli's didn't feel quite so much the safe-haven that I'd thought it was the past three days, and my latte was going cold from neglect. It approached five and the waiter informed me that they'd shutting up soon. Gratefully, I made my way to the door.

Just before I reached it, mentally preparing myself for the rain which was only growing in strength, my eyes were summoned back to the table where Yukinoshita Yukino had sat, whose name at the time I hadn't known. Her second mug of herbal tea, peppermint, still steamed slightly, rising to rest gracefully on the glass window. And there, quiet and still on the table, was her notebook. She'd left it behind.

I stared at it. Then, I looked at the waiter. He was clearing tables near to where I sat.

I walked over, snatched it from its place, stuffed it into my jacket. Then, I too was

oh my fucking god

What the fuck am I even doing. Jesus fucking christ.

I need to call Komachi

and I definitely to stop writing this because its making me fucking depressed and why the heck should i do something if its making me depressed, that make sense doesnt it, first time since i started writing

FUCK. FUCKING HELL.

Fuck is a great word. Really satisfying to type and even more satisfying to shout when there's no one else in the house. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fkuck fkcu fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfukcufuckfuck

im gonna make some coffee