While I’ve said I was going to read やがて君になる 佐伯沙弥香について a few times before, I have actually read it now. With that, I have now read a total of six books in Japanese, and I’d say that this was the best one so far. (In fact, while my reading goal was 15 pages per day, I ended up reading a lot more than that and finishing the whole book in four days).
While it is a prequel/spin-off, I feel like it didn’t really rely on that much at all - other than knowing how it would end(since it’s a prequel), and maybe making me more interested in this book in the first place, I wouldn’t say that having read the main manga series really increased my enjoyment of this book all that much. That said, that’s not really a bad thing, because it worked really well on its own.
The person who helped write the book really doesn’t seem to believe in chapters, though, because it’s only divided into two parts with no actual chapter division or anything like that (there are still occasional breaks in the text though).
Overall, the book definitely made me like Sayaka more!
And difficulty-wise, I feel like it was a little bit harder than Kino. It has similar amounts of unique vocab, and no gun descriptions or anything specialised like that unlike Kino, but I felt like the grammar was a little bit harder and it seemed like there was a bit more variety in the Kanji used. Some words were used quite a bit, so anyone who reads this book would probably learn those! (If they don’t know them already (
Now for more spoilery stuff: I kind of feel like there was a certain point when the Senpai’s actions/words slowly started coming across as the “playing” she later described the relationship as… and then the way she acted slowly became more and more like that, and it also seemed like Sayaka slowly started to suspect things but didn’t want to believe it… and then it eventually just all came crashing down. Not ending the book right away at that point did help give it a slightly happier ending though!
Also, even if I knew what was going to happen in the second part, it was nice to read the first part which wasn’t mentioned in the manga. Even though my own life is pretty different from hers, some of Sayaka’s experiences, and maybe even more so her thoughts and feelings about them, were surprisingly relatable.
Also, It seems incredibly likely that the girl in the book store was Yuu, considering the way she was described, and the fact that she lives in a bookstore, matches up.
Now I’m going to read the second book! I also happened to see that there will be a third book too when I opened it just now (there was an announcement inside the second book)
…and wow, this post really ended up being a lot longer than I thought it would be