#83【ダウ蓮見×朝井リョウ】進まないことが推進力

How Their Long-Awaited First Meeting Finally Happened

Hasumi Sho (蓮見翔) of Daw 90000 (ダウ90000) and novelist Asai Ryo had so many mutual acquaintances that both had long assumed they would cross paths sooner or later. Schedules kept getting in the way, and multiple invitations fell through. Because Asai has no manager and handles work requests himself, he was the one checking his calendar each time — and each time Hasumi's name came up, the timing simply didn't work. What finally broke the deadlock was director Usami making the trip to Asai's book-signing event in Osaka and personally handing him a business card. Asai received the gesture warmly. Hasumi noted that Asai probably would have joined eventually even without it, but Asai credited the director's initiative. Hasumi also revealed, to the room's amusement, that he listens to every radio program in which his name comes up — and he had already heard Asai mention him.

The Fighting Pose and Becoming a "Jiba"

Asai described Hasumi as someone who is "always in a fighting pose." Hasumi pushes back constantly against misunderstandings about his profession and his work, and says he sees no sign that his energy for that indignation will run out anytime soon. At the same time, he admitted to a recent shift: he has started distancing himself from the impulse to "absorb even the people who dislike him." Realizing that 98 percent of people feel nothing particular about him — neither love nor hostility — he has come to think it is enough to reach that 98 percent. The trade-off, he acknowledged with some irony, is that he has become a little less able to fight.

The conversation then moved to a concept Hasumi calls "Jiba (磁場)" — literally a magnetic field. A Jiba is someone whose name comes to you without searching, a presence that exceeds a single human being. He cited Kuruma-san and Asai himself as examples. His own feelings about finding himself in that category are complicated: he never aimed to become a Jiba, he said; he simply noticed one day that he had become one. "I was appointed," he said, and let slip that he finds it slightly disagreeable.

Asai Ryo's Career and Hasumi's First Impression

Asai Ryo was born in 1989 in Gifu Prefecture. He debuted in 2009 with *Kirishima, Bukatsu Yamerutte yo* (桐島、部活やめるってよ), which won the 22nd Shōsetsu Subaru New Writer Award. In 2013 his novel *Nanimono* (何者) took the 148th Naoki Prize, making him the first recipient born in the Heisei era. He has since won the Tsubota Joji Literary Award for *Sekai Chizu no Shitagai* (世界地図の下書き), the Shibata Renzaburo Award for *Nishiogikubo* (西荻窪), and in 2026 the Honda Taisho (本屋大賞) for *In Za Mega Church* (インザメガチャーチ). Hasumi mentioned that he read *Kirishima* during the 15-minute morning reading sessions at his middle school.

When the 2016 film adaptation of *Nanimono* was being cast, Asai found that no name readily surfaced for "a twentysomething actor who lights up the screen the instant they appear." Names of actors with depth and a shadowy quality came easily, but no one fit the brightening type. His internal benchmark was a young Tsumabuki Satoshi (妻夫木聡). Years later, around 2021, when Hasumi's M-1 videos began circulating widely, Asai saw him for the first time and immediately thought: "There's someone with the same air as the young Tsumabuki."

The Limits of "Foreshadowing Resolution" and What Actually Drives a Story Forward

Both Hasumi and Asai expressed discomfort with the buzzword "foreshadowing resolution" (伏線回収) as a description of what stories do. Asai used Kobayashi Erika's novel *Onnanoko-tachi ga Fuusen Bakudan wo Tsukuru* (女の子たちが風船爆弾を作る) as his example. The story follows schoolgirls during wartime who are made to manufacture balloon bombs; throughout the text, descriptions of plants and references to the Tokyo Takarazuka Theater building recur without obvious purpose. Only after finishing the book does the reader realize that every seemingly incidental detail was material for constructing balloon bombs — that everyday life had been converging on weaponry all along. Calling that experience "foreshadowing resolution," Asai said, made him wince. "Not everything that makes you stop and think afterward is foreshadowing. The word doesn't cover it."

From his side as a comedy writer, Hasumi frames narrative propulsion differently: you've won when you make the audience feel "just get on with it already." He pointed to his work on a Crayon Shin-chan screenplay and to director Okuyama Taishi's film *At the Bench* as examples of conversations whose indeterminate direction creates a productive sense of frustration. He tried the approach in the Shin-chan script, though, and reflected that it didn't quite land — it never crossed into actually feeling boring, but it never fully worked either.

Newspaper Serialization and Why He Couldn't Create Cliffhangers

Asai has written two newspaper serials. When he consulted senior novelists, many described a clear strategy: end every installment on a hook to bring readers back. Asai found he simply could not do it. His elders thought of the newspaper as borrowed space and wrote accordingly, with the newspaper reader's enjoyment foremost in mind. Asai confessed he wrote without regard for whether newspaper readers would find it interesting. A book, he reasoned, is a single enclosed object — you don't need to desperately plant a cliffhanger every installment because the whole structure holds the work together. That difference in how he thinks about form, he suggested, is what made serialization a poor fit for him.