In Sora Kamakawa's mind, award ceremonies had always been fundamentally the same: long, exhausting, and painfully dull. In his previous life, he had watched plenty of those supposedly glamorous nights, whether for film or animation. People sat in the audience for two straight hours just for the chance to go onstage for three minutes and deliver a rushed acceptance speech. And sometimes, it was even crueler than that. Two hours of waiting, no award at the end, a quiet walk out the door, and the next day the media would tear into you for it, turning you into a laughingstock for the entire industry.
But that night was different.
For once, Sora had a fair amount of confidence that he would not be leaving empty-handed.
Best Original Score was hard to predict. The Japanese anime industry was full of gifted composers, and that year alone had produced plenty of songs that had exploded in popularity. Best Screenplay for an Anime was even harder to call, since that depended far more on the tastes of the judging panel than on public acclaim. Popularity alone never guaranteed anything in categories like that. What the judges wanted was innovation, structure, and artistic intent.
And in that regard, Natsume Yuujinchou had an overwhelming advantage.
Built around the fragile, deeply human relationship between youkai and mankind, the first season had delivered thirteen small, emotionally resonant stories, each one distinct in tone, each one carrying its own ache. If the criteria were originality of concept, strength of writing, and freshness of subject matter, then Natsume Yuujinchou had been one of the brightest works in the Japanese anime industry that year. The series had practically shown the entire field that a slice-of-life anime could still pursue a healing, deeply moving path and touch people just as powerfully.
By contrast, out of all the awards he had been nominated for, Best New Anime Director felt like the least uncertain of them all.
Practically everyone in the industry was already treating it as decided, and Sora himself saw very little suspense in the matter. Compared to him, the other four nominees were simply operating on a different level entirely.
While the makeup artists finished tidying up his appearance, Sora chatted casually with Rei Hasegawa, one of the staff members from the Tokyo Anime Festival. Between a few light exchanges, she gave him a broad outline of how the ceremony would proceed: the order of the awards, the timing of the entrances, the way each nominee would be called to the stage. Once he was fully prepared, other staff members escorted him to the hotel where many of the festival guests were staying.
Not every nominee had chosen to lodge there. Quite a few had their own plans, their own contacts, or their own accommodations in Tokyo. Even so, most people accepted the hotel provided by the organizers without hesitation. Convenience was only part of the appeal. The bigger advantage was obvious: gathering so many people from the animation industry in one place was, by itself, a rare chance to expand one's network.
After leaving his luggage in the room, Sora was led down to the hotel's common area.
Dressed in a perfectly fitted black suit, he already drew attention on instinct alone. And after the light makeup and the adjustments to his hair, his appearance - ordinarily already clean-cut and pleasant - had gained an even sharper kind of refinement. He still looked young, perhaps far too young for that setting, but now there was a clearer sense of presence about him, something steadier. The kind of face that made people look twice.
There were already several hundred people scattered throughout the room in small groups. Some were nominees for the evening's awards. Others were veterans of the anime industry - retired or semi-retired figures, well-known elders who had been invited simply because of the reputation they still carried.
The moment Sora arrived, quite a few heads turned in his direction.
Not because his standing in the industry was already high enough to dominate a room like that, but because almost everyone in that circle had built their name through years, sometimes decades, of grinding work. To earn real recognition in anime, you had to survive the bottom rung, endure the pressure, and prove your worth over time. That alone meant most of the people present were already in their thirties or older.
Even among the invited creators - especially the authors of manga and light novels that had been adapted into anime - the same pattern held true. Very few reached that level early in life. Most had spent years stumbling, failing, and clawing their way forward before finally creating something popular enough to earn an adaptation.
So when a boy appeared in the middle of that crowd - a boy who, even dressed up and professionally made over, still looked as if he had only just stepped out of adolescence - people naturally could not help but notice him.
And once they noticed him, it was not hard to figure out who he was.
Other than Sora Kamakawa, the eighteen-year-old prodigy from Tokushima, who else there could possibly look that young?
The whispers began almost immediately.
"So that's Sora Kamakawa, the one who made Voices of the Stars and Natsume Yuujinchou? He looks far too young..."
"He's younger than my son, and he already has this kind of reputation in the industry."
"He's the one who got three nominations all by himself tonight?"
"He looks so easygoing. Who would have guessed his relationship with Maki had deteriorated that badly?"
Sora, meanwhile, did not know anyone in the room.
And even if he had, he was not the kind of person who wandered around making conversation for fun. As far as he was concerned, the ideal outcome would have been for no one to come bother him at all. So the moment he realized food had been set out in the common area, he simply picked up a plate and started serving himself, eating alone in peace as if that were the most enjoyable part of the entire event.
Naturally, that peace did not last.
Even if he had no intention of approaching anyone, there were far too many people interested in approaching him.
"Director Sora, it's a pleasure to meet you."
"You are Director Sora, aren't you? Ah, honestly, you're even more impressive in person. A true prodigy."
"I really didn't expect Director Sora to be this handsome. I have to admit, this completely shatters my mental image of anime directors."
And it was not just directors who came over to speak with him. There were production managers, studio presidents, veteran key animators, composers, executives from merchandise companies, directors from television stations - people from every corner of the business. The reason was simple: the potential Sora had shown was too great to ignore. No one knew how far he might go. If a chance to work with him came up in the future, it would be better to have built some kind of bridge in advance.
Sora disliked noisy crowds, but he was not foolish enough to reject contact when it came to him willingly. So he responded to every introduction with calm politeness, chatting while he ate, exchanging a few words here and there without showing the slightest trace of discomfort.
And whenever the questions drifted into professional territory, he handled them without missing a beat.
He improvised with almost absurd ease.
"Why does the music in Natsume Yuujinchou suit the series so perfectly? Ah... well, I'd been thinking about that anime for a very long time. I probably first started shaping the idea back in high school. The story and the music both began taking form at the same time, so the overall tone ended up fitting together naturally."
"And that firework sequence in Voices of the Stars? How did that come about? Well, that goes way back. When I was still in middle school, there was a river on the outskirts of Tokushima. Around New Year's, a bunch of kids used to play around there with fireworks and rockets. One year, two groups stood on opposite riverbanks and started launching them at the same time. Trails of light everywhere, the sky covered in bursts and smoke... it was such an intense scene that I never forgot it. Later on, that image became the inspiration for the scene."
"Your next work? Or season two of Natsume Yuujinchou? To be honest, I haven't decided yet. But if the opportunity comes up in the future, President Hayashi, I'll definitely remember this conversation."
Half sincerity and half beautifully packaged nonsense - that was how Sora kept talking while treating the trays brought around by the waitstaff as his late lunch, seated in one corner of the lounge area.
He had never been the sort of person who, just because he had a system or had come from another world, started looking down on everyone around him. Animation was not an industry where anyone thrived alone for long. It was built on the labor of hundreds of professionals, sustained by money, infrastructure, broadcasters, distributors, and contracts. No matter how capable he was, if he wanted to draw the greatest possible value from the works he had brought with him from his previous life, then he had no choice but to cooperate with capital, with networks, with companies, and with influential people.
The more people he knew in the industry, the greater the chance that one day those connections would turn into something genuinely useful - in production, in promotion, or in a negotiation that came out of nowhere.
That was why Sora accepted every business card offered to him without refusing a single one. And in return, he handed out his own just as readily, each printed clearly with the words: President of Yume Animation, Sora Kamakawa.
An hour passed like that.
And to the surprise of many people there, speaking with him felt nothing like the rumors they had heard. Sora did not come across as arrogant, nor did he seem like a hot-blooded young man with a difficult temperament. Quite the opposite. He naturally placed himself in the position of someone still new to the industry, treated everyone with respect, and spoke without the slightest affectation.
By the time the afternoon began to darken and evening drew near, the crowd that had formed around him gradually dispersed. Not because interest in him had faded, but because the place was full of important people, and no one wanted to miss the chance to widen their network even further.
At last left alone, Sora settled onto a sofa with a cup of coffee in hand, enjoying his first real moment of silence as he waited for the ceremony to begin.
That was when someone sat down across from him.
Without saying anything at first, the newcomer simply watched him with calm seriousness, as if she intended to study him before speaking.
She was a young woman whose beauty was so striking that, for a brief instant, the rest of the room seemed to blur around her. She wore a long, classical-style dress in a delicate shade of pale green, and her hair was pinned up with a wooden ornament. Her skin was luminous and clear, and everything about her carried a quiet, almost old-world elegance that made the eye falter for a second.
Sora looked at her for a few moments, and his expression turned subtly strange.
Even from Tokushima, he had kept a close eye on the fan war between Yumi Noriko and Natsuyuki Shirasawa, the screenwriter of The Dragon King Next Door. Because of that, the name Natsuyuki Shirasawa was far from unfamiliar to him.
After all, the woman sitting before him was none other than Natsuyuki Shirasawa herself - a celebrated light novel author and, now, one of the most prominent names in anime screenwriting as well.
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