365 Days of a Novelist and Dazai in Love

New serial: "The Boss's Widow in Yokohama, Where Her Lovers Compete for the Job"

My name is Mori Yukino. I live in Yokohama, work as a novelist, and have a boyfriend who's a bandage-wrapped weirdo.

I'm perfectly happy with my life, but when my friend heard what my boyfriend and I are like together, they cried out:

"That's not normal! Not normal at all!"

Huh? Don't ordinary couples spend every day talking in riddles and trying to guess what the other means, not care how many women their partner flirted with today, and just think about eating beef rice bowls?

My friend diagnosed me as an introvert. An introvert is someone reserved and sensitive, with strong boundaries, whom few people can get close to.

In other words, my boyfriend still hasn't gotten into my heart.

My boyfriend Dazai, on the other hand, is a social phobe, short for social terrorist, and unquestionably a textbook extrovert.

So here's the question: Can an introvert and an extrovert have a romantic relationship?

Dazai had thought his little girlfriend was an unremarkable girl who was only dating him on a whim.

Later, he realized Mori Yukino genuinely wanted to be with him.

[Which personality type is the best match for an INFP?]

[Are ENTPs and INFPs the best couple?]

[Eighteen little tricks for understanding ENTPs]

Dazai: "Instead of searching, just ask me directly."

He was wrong. He was only one element in Mori Yukino's writing material.

"Ship of Hope"

[A great ship bound for the abyss, given the name Hope by a scoundrel.]

"A Whole New World"

[Do you like the glittering new world? You're the media's darling, the brightest star in a sparkling galaxy. Dressed to the nines, you hurry to the gluttons' table.]

"The Tower Is Falling"

[A sixteen-year-old high school student dies after a misdiagnosis by the chief physician. This is just the tip of the iceberg of patients who die from misdiagnoses every year across the country. As long as he is still there, doctors can rest easy.]

"Honeysuckle Project"

[Winter on the Shiretoko Peninsula isn't so hard to bear. Honeysuckle blooms, and young boys and girls run hand in hand across the snowy fields.]

Seeing the sketch tucked beneath the pages, he crushed the manuscript on the desk, its ink still wet.

"Yukino."

"So I'm just a poor substitute."

The final work: "I Go On My Way"

[Thank you so much for coming into my life. The woman strokes her belly and waves to the man across the road. In an instant, blood splatters.]

Reader's Guide

1. The whole story is told in first person (I).

2. The romance develops slowly.

3. My own take on introverts and extroverts. The speculation about Dazai's MBTI comes from the internet.

4. Contains a story within a story, but not much of it.

That's all. A bow.

Theme: Love fills people with hope and a zest for life