Lariat Point 9

Excerpt from Suki, Suki, Daisuki, Cho Ai Shite Iru, by Maijo Otaro.

I stayed by Kakio's bed, still not capable of loving anyone but her. She was very, very weak, and spent the bulk of her days sleeping or throwing up. The medicine she took was no longer designed to cure her - there was nothing left that could be cured. I sat next to her bed, writing novels. My deadline has long since slipped away, and I had to write ten pages a day or the book would miss its release date. The novel I was writing was part of a formulaic mystery series, in which six girls got mixed up in a mystery; each time the girls were assigned to one of six roles - the detective character, the killer, the one in love, the one who would die, the one who'd snap, and the one abducted by her alien boyfriend. The trick lay in which would end up being which. This was the ninth in the series, and it was still cranking along pretty well. Every volume, one of their friends would be murdered, and they'd figure out who the killer was while another friend got carried off into space. I felt a little sorry for them, but this time the girl who had solved the first mystery died halfway through, or at least appeared to die, but then turned out to be the real killer before getting whisked off to a far corner of the galaxy while the girl who'd died in the third volume got resurrected and looked like she was going to be the detective this time but ultimately ended up dying again at the end, and the girl who started out pretty crazy spent the whole book like that and I fully intended to end it with her furiously pointing out that she hadn't done anything but be crazy the whole book, and the girl who'd been snatched by a UFO and vanished across the Milky Way at the beginning of the book, apparently no longer involved in the case, would appear to get herself involved in a romance with an alien even I thought girls would definitely go for, but I planned to have her unexpectedly end up solving the mystery, and because she'd ended up in the detective role would eventually have to break up with the hunky alien, while the girl who'd been the detective in the second novel would be mistaken for the real killer three times before coming out as a lesbian and falling in love with the real killer, and the real killer would spend the entire novel convinced she was about to be kidnapped by aliens. Since one of the other characters was her romantic partner that technically meant I had two characters in the romance role, but when the one had been mistakenly identified as the killer she'd been thrown in jail, unbeknownst to the other characters, and her memories downloaded into a clone grown at lightning fast speed to be the exact same age as her, so it was technically the copy that got involved in the romantic side of things...and this whole tedious mess was called Lariat Point 9: Goodbye to Imazato the Chemistry Teacher.

Copyright Otaro Maijo, 2008, published by Kodansha.
Excerpt translated and posted under the principle of fair use, representing an insignificant portion of the work as a whole.