Toaru Majutsu no Index Volume 1, Afterword

Volume 1, Afterword

Nice to meet you. This is Kamachi Kazuma.

Right about now, I’m starting to feel incredibly embarrassed about referring to myself with a penname. To people who have done things online: it’s a bit like revealing your handle to the world for the first time.

Come to think of it, this book got its start online.

The magicians in RPGs and such that can create balls of fire or revive the dead at the cost of some MP are quite convenient, because the term “magic” lets them do whatever they want. But (for the sake of argument) let’s assume magic actually existed. What kinds of people used magic throughout history? What kinds of rules exist behind the term “magic”? This all started when I typed “magician” and “actually exist” into a search engine in an attempt to answer those questions.

It came up with things like “how to control a black cat with silver vine powder” and “voodoo witch doctors used fugu poison to create zombies that had a state of apparent death”. I got interested when I realized that the workings of the occult seemed an awful lot like science.

Dengeki Bunko’s light novels treat magic like it’s normal, so I thought that a novel that went deeper into the idea of magic might be a new idea.

…Really, this is a work that was more about my personal interest rather than an idea marketed to a certain type of reader (that is, I didn’t try to come up with some catchy topic). My bowed head will never be raised when in front of my editor Miki-san and my illustrator Haimura Kiyotaka-san who both stuck with me on this. I am truly thankful.

And to you readers who picked this book up, I am very grateful that you stuck with my long, drawn-out writing style for this long.

I hope that Kamijou Touma and Index will live just a little longer in your hearts.

And I pray that I will get to make a 2nd volume.

For today, I lay down my pen.

…It’s actually still December 26, 2003.

-Kamachi Kazuma