2024年8月24日放送 朝井リョウと加藤千恵のオールナイトニッポン0

A Third One-Night Revival, Eight Years in the Making

Asai Ryo (朝井リョウ) and Kato Chie (加藤千恵) originally hosted All Night Nippon 0 (オールナイトニッポン0) every Friday for a full year from April 2015 to March 2016. After a six-and-a-half-year gap they staged a one-night comeback in October 2022, returned again in September 2023, and tonight marked their third consecutive revival. The invitation comes each year through a personal connection with Tomiyama-san, a staff member at Nippon Broadcasting — not, as the two freely admitted, because of any particular audience response. "Does an annual one-night regular slot even exist?" they joked. Neither had a precedent for it. As has become its own tradition, Asai slipped out to the bathroom right before airtime, leaving staff waiting for his return until two minutes before broadcast.

The Love-Talk Gathering at DJ Matsunaga's Apartment and Its Memorable Lines

Earlier in August, Asai, Kato, Wakabayashi Masayasu (若林正恭) of the comedy duo Audrey, and DJ Matsunaga (DJ松永) gathered at DJ Matsunaga's apartment for an alcohol-free evening of love-talk. The four participants totaled roughly 150 years of age between them and spent hours debating whether a "fated partner" truly exists. The night's most celebrated line — "Love is like kokkuri-san" — had Asai and DJ Matsunaga high-fiving with delight. On the separate question of how relationships develop between non-drinkers, Wakabayashi and DJ Matsunaga settled on a definitive answer: "It's just taking walks." Kato's child, affectionately nicknamed Chie Junior, was present but dissolved into tears, unable to follow the adult conversation. Kato ended her account of the evening by saying she was genuinely glad to have people like that in her life.

A Novelist's Circle and Some Self-Reflection

Asai, Kato, Nishino Kanako (西加奈子), and Murata Sayaka (村田沙耶香) share a LINE group that is active almost daily. Kato is also contributing to a charity anthology organized by novelists Imamura Shogo (今村翔吾) and Ogawa Satoshi (小川哲), with a deadline at the end of August. Reading online about how the organizers first connected, Kato learned that the bond formed at someone's post-Naoki Prize "consolation party" — an event she had skipped — and felt a pang of regret about having "slacked off." While her friendships with writers she met ten years ago remain deep, she acknowledged that her network among recently debuted novelists has barely grown, and resolved to talk more seriously about fiction and literature going forward. On a lighter note, writer Nemoto-san (根本さん) had looked up details of Tsuji Hitonari's (辻仁成) October Paris exhibition to prepare the script, only for Kato to hear the information for the first time during the live broadcast itself.

Tonight's Card Theme: "Scary Stories" — and the First Card

Listener emails are called "cards" on this show. The card address is [email protected] and the show hashtag is #akann0 (all lowercase). Borrowing the phrasing that author Kanehara Hitomi (金原ひとみ) once used as a selection judge — "Send me whatever you want, as long as it's a novel" — tonight's call was: "Send us whatever you want, as long as it's scary." The first card read aloud came from a listener in Yamagata Prefecture who goes by the name Shiitake-Kirai (Mushroom Hater). On the day of their Coming-of-Age ceremony, they were asked to hand a bouquet to their homeroom teacher at a junior-high reunion afterparty. They texted back, "Sure — I probably haven't been invited yet, but okay." The reply was immediate: "Sorry, forget it." They did.

Scary Stories from Both Hosts — and One They Made Together

**Kato Chie's scary story:** Working alone at home, Kato kept hearing an intermittent beep from the kitchen. It wasn't the fridge or the microwave; tracing a red warning light brought her to the gas stove. Hours earlier she had put a kettle on to boil and walked away — the water had evaporated completely. The stove's automatic shut-off function saved the day, but Kato went pale imagining what would have happened with a pre-Reiwa-era appliance. Her kicker: "This wasn't the first time." Conclusion: "The scariest thing of all is that people don't learn."

**Asai Ryo's scary story:** Asai's beard-removal clinic occupies two floors — reception on the fifth, waiting room on the sixth. Arriving one day to find the large shoe lockers gone from the fifth floor, he was told his patient card was being replaced, and in the same breath was handed a laminated card promoting AGA (male-pattern baldness) treatment, presented as though it were a routine giveaway. He assumed everyone got one. Upstairs, not one of the seven male patients already seated was holding a card. The receptionist had decided, on her own judgment, that Asai was the one who needed it. "You should be worrying about your hair, not your beard," Kato told him.

**Their joint scary story:** At an award celebration for Nishino Kanako, who won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature in the essay category, Asai and Kato delivered a two-person speech. Asai planned to close with a joke tied to the word "kumo" in the title of Nishino's winning work. Assuming it meant "cloud" (雲), he signed off with "The chance of precipitation is 100%," and the room laughed. It was only after he got home that he realized "kumo" in the title referred to "spider" (蜘蛛). Every novelist and editor in that room may well have noticed he had not actually read the book.