PREFACE · WINTER

A whole plethora of words come to mind when discussing Haruhi Suzumiya, naturally, but if I had to describe her in a single sentence, it would go something like the following.

   

Here we have the last person in Japan who should be allowed near the launch mechanism of a nuclear missile.

   

Though common sense dictated that an ordinary girl in high school had virtually no chance of ever gaining access to such an item, we were dealing with a girl who defied the highest of exponential odds. Any outcome was possible when she was in the mix. However, despite the fact that she was a loose cannon on a level that was far more ruinous than that of a time bomb without a countdown or a nuclear reactor that was guaranteed to experience a meltdown, it wasn’t necessary to disable her completely, as the implementation of a “pause mode” would suffice to make her manageable, a lesson that I finally learned after enduring a significant amount of agony.

Long story short, we simply had to prevent her from getting bored and she wouldn’t bother with stuff like nuclear missiles. We simply had to redirect her enthusiasm to something else for brief periods of time, much as I would toss the cap of a plastic bottle to our calico Shamisen so he could nibble on it for three minutes or so, though we would need to devote a great deal of energy to finding that something else for her to focus on—

That more or less summarized the reasoning Koizumi had asserted way back when. And he still subscribed to that line of thought.

Which was why we found ourselves in another ridiculous predicament.

Predicament? Yes, I kid you not. Predicament with a capital “P.” I doubt you’d be able to find a more appropriate situation to apply that word to.

For at the moment we were absolutely, positively, and completely stranded.