S O U L M A T E S (SasuNaruSasu Magazine) Soulmates Magazine Nº2 | Page 16

Rasengan22
Break Free is a CD DRAMA that officially came out in January 2017. It was writ-
ten by Rasengan22, one of the oldest and greatest fandom writers, illustrated by
Shiro Yamada and produced by Leaves and Bonds Enterprises, where Noriaki Su-
giyama and Junko Takeuchi are once again to give life to Naruto and Sasuke!
WHEN DID YOU HAVE THE IDEA
TO CREATE YOUR OWN CD DRA-
MA?
It wasn’t my idea or anything. There is a
production company in Tokyo that produ-
ced “Yours for an Hour”, so I was contac-
ted shortly before that CD came out. This
person had contacted me in 2011, which is
funny, and asked if I’d be interested in tur-
ning “The Greatest Actor” into a screen-
play, but I was sort of busy, didn’t have ex-
perience in that, and wasn’t sure if it was
legit. So, later on, after it had been announ-
ced about YFAH, I received a PM on y-
gallery asking whether I’d like to participa-
te in a project. I said “YES!”. It turned out to
be this producer who was doing YFAH
and she asked if I wanted to write their
next project!
WHAT WAS YOUR MOTIVATION
TO DO IT?
My motivation that it was an effing
awesome opportunity. How cool was it
that the SNS fandom had a CD DRAMA
voiced by Junko Takeuchi and Noriaki
Sugiyama? But, also I’d never written a
story that would then be adapted into a
screenplay. I often like to take on new cha-
llenges in writing, so I was pretty excited
to take on this project.
WHAT WAS THE FIRST MOVE-
MENT YOU HAD TO DO?
Well, for my part, I had to write the story. I
feel like one of my signature things as a
writer is that I’m really terrible at staying
within word limits. It’s more important for
me to get the full story told. Let’s just say
when I wrote the full story of Break Free,
the final draft was maybe 70K-80K
words… and that had to be condensed to