I was refreshing my memory about some plot points in Shireishi to prepare for some other projects in the works when I recalled having a number of sketches of scenes and characters from that story. See, originally Shireishi was planned as a comic, so almost every major character had a design. Even after it was turned into a novel/short story series, each story was planned to have its own cover and some were planned to have insert art as well. Since I still have some of the sketches, I figured I’d share some of the more interesting ones that were nearly complete.
(Some potential spoilers for Shireishi below.)
One of the sketches that was the closest to being finished was the cover of the second story, Twisted Love. Here’s what it looks like:
The cover depicts Makoto and Akina, bound together by a blue string. To my understanding, only the original “red string of fate” has a commonly accepted meaning, so the symbolism is potentially a bit obscured by competing ideas of the different string colors and their meanings. To my memory, the meaning that the artist and I were using for this illustration was “two people who are bound by a tragic or unhealthy relationship”. This ties directly into the title of the story, which also refers to the unhealthy romance between Makoto and Akina.
Another sketch that was pretty far along is this one:
This illustration was meant to be an insert during the scene where Makoto goes shopping with Hatsuka. It’s not as clear in the sketch, but there was also going to be a bit of hidden foreshadowing in this piece. Specifically, one of the seemingly-irrelevant crowd members was going to be a partial view of Akina, hinting at Akina being aware of the events of this scene before the narration reaches that point.
There are two other nearly-finished sketches of insert art, but they’re both major spoilers and fairly gory, so I’ll probably hold off from posting those for now. However, I do have one last note about the art for Shireishi, specifically the character on the final cover. But since it spoils the overarching plot, it’s going into an ROT13 cipher:
Gur punenpgre qrcvpgrq ba gur svany pbire bs gur obbx vf Xnzrlb Zvqbevxnjn, gur tubfg gung gbbx ba gur gvgyr Fuvervfuv. Fur nccrnef obgu ba gur fznegcubar fperra (nf n fvyubhrggr) naq vf gur tvey ubyqvat gur cubar.
That’s all for now. I hope these fun facts about Shireishi are interesting!
