When I first heard this piece of news, I didn’t actually believe it was real… then the flood of alerts and updates started lighting up the news wires like it was New Year’s Eve. That’s when I realized that we had a bombshell announcement on our hands.
In a surprise announcement posted to social media, the official Haruhi Suzumiya Twitter account revealed that they will publish the first new Haruhi Suzumiya book in just over nine years on November 25th, 2020. Even better is that a few hours later, Yen Press revealed via their Twitter account that they will release the new novel digitally in English on the very same day. A physical edition will be released at an unknown later date!
Titled Suzumiya Haruhi no Chokkan (The Intuition of Haruhi Suzumiya), the new book will collect three short stories including one brand new one. Contained within the new book will be “Atezuppo Numbers” (Guesswork Numbers) which was originally published in a 2013 art book, “Nana Fushigi Overtime” (Seven Wonders Overtime) which was originally published in The Sneaker Legend magazine in 2018, and finally, the brand new story which will be titled “Tsuruya-san no Chōsen” (Tsuruya’s Challenge).
If you’ve only just become an anime or manga fan within the last decade, you might not know the name Haruhi Suzumiya or just how large her role in popular Japanese media was a couple of decades ago, so let’s all take a trip together down memory lane.
Originally a light novel series written by Nagaru Tanigawa and illustrated by Noizi Ito, the first volume was titled The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and was released in Japan in June 2003. Over the next eight years, they released eleven total volumes in Japan along with television and movie anime adaptations, four manga series, two original net animations, and a few video games just for good measure.
The anime adaptations were originally released in English by Bandai Entertainment, but currently the license to the anime franchise is held by Funimation. Yen Press holds the English rights to the light novels and manga.
Yen Press describes the story of the first volume as:
Meet Haruhi — a cute, determined girl, starting high school in a city where nothing exciting happens and absolutely no one understands her.
Meet Kyon — the sarcastic guy who sits behind Haruhi in homeroom and the only boy Haruhi has ever opened up to. His fate is now tied to hers.
Meet the S.O.S. Brigade — an after-school club organized by Haruhi with a mission to seek out the extraordinary. Oh, and their second mission? Keeping Haruhi happy . . . because even though she doesn’t know it, Haruhi has the power to destroy the universe. Seriously.
