When August truly arrived, Japan's anime market slipped into that familiar - and always loud - pre-season mode. The titles set to premiere in the October cour started showing their teeth, fighting for attention as if every poster glued to a wall were a declaration of war.
At the center of it all were Tokyo's four major broadcasters, who - quarter after quarter - played the same game: each one poured money into two or three anime productions alongside a few live-action dramas, all aiming to bite off the biggest possible share of the nationwide audience. But "investing" never meant treating every project the same.
Not every title got a fat budget, a nationwide campaign, and a decent time slot.
Out of the nine anime scheduled to air across the four networks, only four were clearly the "flagships": productions backed by budgets in the ¥30–40 million range and up, with the networks pushing heavy advertising across the entire country - buying placements, flooding the schedule with promos, making it feel like if you didn't watch, you were missing out on something.
The rest… well. The rest were placed in late-night slots, built around more niche themes, with budgets around ¥10–20 million and much softer promotion - there was some, of course, but nowhere near the same momentum. In general, nobody expected outrageous Blu-ray performance from them; the "normal" result was under forty thousand copies per volume nationwide, nothing miraculous.
As powerful as Tokyo's four major broadcasters were, not everything that aired on them became a phenomenon. When a work wasn't prioritized - when there was no "resource tilt," when the programming department treated it like schedule filler - it was easy to sink. And there were plenty of examples of that.
But with the four main titles, it was a different conversation entirely.
By that point, the networks already had fixed daily slots dedicated solely to "warming up" for the premiere. And within Tokyo, the posters were taking over all the obvious spots: shop windows in Akihabara, corridors in Ikebukuro, panels in areas any fan was bound to pass through.
Tokyo was the heart of otaku culture. When something caught fire there, it was only a matter of time before it spread nationwide - and with the internet, it wasn't even "time" anymore. It was a current.
Among the four flagships, the one drawing the most attention right then was "The Dragon King Next Door!", a project funded by a major network, directed by the veteran Maki, with a script penned by a famous light-novel author. Even at the promotion stage, it was bulldozing the competition as if it had been built for this.
The PV had dropped, and for two days in a row the teaser sat at the top of the most-talked-about forum trends - the kind of places that dictated the fandom's mood. It was impossible to pretend expectations weren't sky-high.
On the other side, Shiroike TV had put ¥39 million into a suspense-and-investigation anime called "Card," produced by the classic director Sonomura Isshin. Its presence was strong, its tone serious, and the campaign made it clear the network wanted it to become the seasonal show people would theorize about.
And the other two networks weren't quiet either. Aobatori TV was pushing the second season of the manga-adapted romance "Aka no Sora," while Kaion TV was betting big on "Maou Tensei," an adaptation of a text-based adventure game with harem routes - backed by a legion of original fans ready to defend every detail like a religion.
It was only August, yet a huge chunk of the audience was already hypnotized by those four campaigns. The rest of the country - other networks, other anime, other bets - had been shoved to the outer edge of collective attention.
It was simple: nobody had infinite energy. In a single quarter, the average fan could follow the big-budget titles from the four major networks and, at most, one or two anime airing on their local stations. Anything beyond that became a second job.
And in the middle of that tide, Sora Kamakawa saw the problem that came bundled with all that noise with perfect clarity.
The recent commotion - sparked by Yumi's anything-but-subtle moves and the friction it created with Maki - had given Natsume Yuujinchou an extra burst of visibility. But visibility wasn't the same thing as ratings. A lot of that attention was just people coming to "watch the circus," comment for the sake of commenting, laugh, provoke, and move on.
If Sora wanted to turn curiosity into real numbers, the performance of the first episode was everything.
He understood that better than anyone.
If the initial broadcast didn't explode through word of mouth and reception, the bold statements he'd made - the ones now circulating like promises - would become ammunition. Perfect material for the fandom to turn him into a meme, and for the most venomous critics to dismiss him as "teenage arrogance."
That was why, during production, Sora's standards for Episode 1 bordered on brutal.
Cuts that any other supervisor would let slide - "because it'll pass on TV" - came back from his desk stamped with a dry verdict: redo it. The genga arrived, and he sent them back without hesitation. Sometimes the same sequence got kicked back two, three times to the animator's hands until it was right - not "acceptable," but right.
And he still ran back and forth constantly to discuss scenery and atmosphere with the outsourced background art studio, Tatsumi Ryū's atelier. It wasn't unusual for him to show up there every other day, revising palette, texture, depth, as if he were trying to rip a kind of silence out of the real world that could fit inside the screen.
In the middle of that obsession, Sora didn't push the music to "later."
And that was when Yumi, still adjusting to the reality of that place, finally took a genuine shock.
She didn't have an official position at Yume Animation - at least not yet - but she had eyes. And one glance was enough to see the absurd amount Sora carried on his own.
He wrote and adjusted the script. He drew storyboards. He checked animation quality. He maintained constant contact with the background studio. He reviewed work from the paint and finishing teams. And every so often he still had to deal with the demands and bureaucracy of regional affiliates - like the Tokushima station, which loved to "review" everything with the anxious diligence of people terrified of being blamed for complaints.
It was too much work even for a seasoned adult, let alone an eighteen-year-old.
But that day, Yumi saw something that went beyond even the "young prodigy" image she'd already started to accept.
Sora had hired a professional band. The musicians arrived with instruments, cases, cables - everything - and walked straight into the company's recording studio as if it were routine. And when he pulled out a thick stack of sheet music - pages and pages, neatly organized and annotated - saying they were compositions created specifically for Natsume Yuujinchou…
It was as if something inside her finally gave up pretending any of this was normal.
Yumi stood outside, staring through the glass window. On the other side, Sora pointed to passages in the score, explained intentions, tested phrases on the piano with the ease of someone who'd been breathing music since childhood, and spoke to the musicians like he was directing a scene.
"Sora… is he always like this?" she murmured, barely realizing she'd spoken out loud.
Sumire was beside her - far too calm for someone witnessing that kind of spectacle.
"'Always like this' how?" she asked, her tone quiet, almost indifferent.
Yumi swallowed.
"He… he actually composes? For real?"
Sumire looked at her as if the question were strange.
"Of course. Aren't you a fan of Vozes de uma Estrela Distante? Didn't you ever check the credits? On that production, Sora's name appears alone as the person responsible for the composition. There was nobody else."
Yumi made an honest face.
"I watch focusing on the anime's quality. I almost never look at staff credits and that kind of thing…"
She looked back inside. She saw Sora play a short phrase on the piano, stop, discuss something with the drummer, then smile faintly and adjust the timing - as if he were building the mood of a scene inside his head.
Something tight pressed against her chest - not anger, not outright envy. It was something else: an uncomfortable sense of inevitable comparison.
Sora would turn nineteen in October. He was still an eighteen-year-old kid - three years younger than her.
And yet he carried the title of supervisor, wrote as the series' screenwriter, and now even commanded the soundtrack as if it were the most obvious part of the job.
It was… absurd.
And she, on the other hand…
Yumi was painfully aware of her own picture: the classic pretty heiress raised for comfort, who hadn't worked a single day yet, living on good food, going out, and watching anime as a pastime.
"He feels like… an enigma," Sumire said, as if she'd read Yumi's expression.
Yumi turned slightly, curious.
"An enigma?"
Sumire nodded slowly, like someone pulling up a memory that still didn't fit neatly into place.
"Before last December, Sora seemed… normal. Just an ordinary kid. Then, suddenly, in December, it was like he 'woke up.' In a matter of days, he wrote the script for Vozes de uma Estrela Distante. At the same time, he composed the music. Three months later, the anime aired - and out of one hundred and seventy titles in the winter cour, it broke through… finishing with an average of eighty thousand Blu-rays per volume, fifth in the country."
She paused briefly, her gaze hardening with a quiet honesty.
"Even now, nobody here understands how he grew that fast. How someone becomes that… in so little time."
Yumi stayed silent, her throat dry.
Sumire took a breath, as if the conclusion weighed on her too.
"In the end, the only explanation we can accept… is that his father's death was the blow that tore that talent out of him by force. Because if he'd stayed just a 'normal guy'… he would've been carrying millions of yen in debt. He would've sunk. And he never would've been able to climb back up."
The piano continued on the other side of the glass, steady and careful, as if every note had been chosen to hold up something that could not be allowed to collapse.
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