I wrote a full analysis of what was my favorite of the 31 al|together visual novel localizations, 2008’s May Sky. In order to write that analysis, I turned the script of the novel into a PDF and read it closely while annotating it in the Zotero reference manager. This process allowed me to notice some fine points that are easy to miss while reading the visual novel as it is intended – for example how the localization describes one of the two main characters’ grade in high school. Another thing I found was subtle evidence of when exactly the events of May Sky take place.
May Sky is a novel with a real-world modern Japan setting. The majority of the piece takes place in a certain May. While the novel always notes which day of May (as in number) things transpire, it never specifies a year. Because the base Japanese novel was originally released in four parts in May 2005, I assumed without thinking too deeply about it that the main game was set in 2005 or close to it. My closer reading of the script led me to conclude with high confidence that May Sky almost certainly takes place in 2005 and, in its final part, 2006.
The first key piece of evidence comes in the first few lines of the novel when the view-point character, Haruki Mizoguchi, notes the day his story begins:
May first. Sunday. 4:00 PM.
Because I vaguely assumed that the events of the main part of the novel were set in 2005, it occurred to me to check what day May 1 fell on in 2005. Sure enough, May 1, 2005, fell on a Sunday.
There are many other dates noted in the main May part of the novel, but they are all follow from May 1 being a Sunday.
The final part of May Sky takes place not in May, but in August, 15 months after the events of the main May part of the novel. The August section specifies two dates: August 20 (Sunday) and August 26 (Saturday). Assuming everything is consistent, these two August dates should correspond to August 2006. I checked and confirmed that indeed they did. August 20 and 26, 2006, fell on Sunday and Saturday respectively.
Thus, while May Sky only specifies months and days and not the year in its script, we can be reasonably confident (if not all-but certain) that its main events take place in May 2005 and August 2006. I appreciate the attention to detail – albeit I am uncertain why the original author (assuming arguendo the localization followed the author here) did not specify the year which seems to be strongly implied by the in-game noted days of the month.
Note: For those who are curious, I generated the calendars pictured in the article by running the following command in my terminal (XFCE Terminal in this case):
cal 05 2005 && cal 08 2006I then used my screen clipping utility to collect screenshots of both generated calendars.
This article is part of my collection of posts about May Sky, Insani’s 2008 localization of a freeware Japanese visual novel called Gogatsu no Sora.
