Cooking with Wild Game (LN) - Volume 1 - Chapter Pr

Prologue

As I came to, I found myself sprawled out on the ground in an unfamiliar forest.

“Huh...?”

I sat up and took in my surroundings, still in a daze.

Yup, that’s a forest. I was right in the middle of some forest I’d never seen before in my life.

Well, I was born and raised in a shopping district, so I guess there was no such thing as a forest I had seen, though. Plus, I couldn’t imagine this sort of jungle existing anywhere in Japan, anyway.

I could see a huge, oddly twisted tree. There were large palm leaves and flowers that sure looked poisonous. An utterly alien bird cry rang out from somewhere nearby. And the foliage above my head was so thick that I couldn’t even see the sky.

Just where the heck am I?

Then, I looked down at my body, which was half-buried in the verdant underbrush. I was in my chef’s uniform, complete with white apron and shoes. The black “Tsurumi Restaurant” logo was emblazoned on my chest. Finally, there was a white towel wrapped around my head, completing my usual ensemble.

What was I doing sleeping in a place like this, dressed up in this outfit?

At any rate, I sat there cross-legged and tried to think back on what had happened before I lost consciousness.

Just when I went to move, though, my hand brushed against something. It was the feeling of hard, smooth, processed wood. I pulled it out from beneath the underbrush, and found it was a single all-purpose kitchen knife in a white magnolia sheath. The ebony grip showed plenty of use, and the blade was 20 centimeters long.

I knew exactly what this was without even needing to remove it from its sheath. This was the knife that my old man valued more than life itself, which came from the famed old Sakaki cutlery shop in Kyoto.

The second I saw it, I remembered everything.

◇

My name is Asuta Tsurumi. My family name uses the “tsu” from the Tsugaru Strait, and the kanji for “stop” and “look.” The Asuta, meanwhile, is written like “getting fat tomorrow.” I’m 17 years old, in my second year of public high school. I’m 170 centimeters tall, and weigh 58 kilos, so no, I’m not especially fat. And I wasn’t actually born in Tsugaru, but rather Chiba in the Kanto region.

My family runs the Tsurumi Restaurant, an eatery that does pretty darn well for itself. Or, well, at least it did, until those guys started prowling around a month back.

Apparently, the building next door was getting remodeled into some sort of amusement complex or something, so the new owner came over asking us to sell our land. Officially, he wanted to build a parking lot for his new place. It seemed the real reason, though, was that they were going to have a food court in the park, and having a popular eatery next door might have drawn away their customers.

Naturally there was no reason for us to accept such a one-sided demand, so pops politely refused. It seemed we were up against a worse scoundrel than we thought, though. That building’s new owner was apparently the sort of man to have seized ownership of the place through shady means.

And so, around when the remodeling of that building started, we came under fire from some underhanded harassment. We had someone spray paint “poison” on our shop’s shutters, and people calling us but not saying a word, and we even got a dead cat thrown in front of the place... Really, it was all tried-and-true old-school harassment. The only thing they did that felt up-to-date was spread unfounded rumors online about our shop giving people food poisoning.

Of course, our regulars paid this no heed, coming out every bit as often as ever. That said, though, we saw a dramatic drop in new customers and college kids on their way back from school and the like, which had a definite effect on our sales numbers. It really made me feel the power and reach of the internet to a frustrating degree.

My pops, however, just laughed it off, saying, “I just feel bad for anyone who believes that nonsense and misses out on a chance to eat my cooking!”

It wasn’t much longer before he couldn’t just laugh about it, though.

To me, it felt like just a few hours prior.

Pops left the evening’s preparations to me and went to go stock up on supplies, only to be hit by a small truck along the way and get rushed to the hospital. I hurried to go see him as soon as I got that notice, not even stopping to change out of my uniform.

When I saw pops in the hospital bed, he shot me back a hearty smile.

Even though he had a grin on his face, he had compound fractures in both legs. Bandages were wrapped all around his arms and his head, with red spots here and there all over. He had been hit head-on by a truck going at a speed of about 80 kilometers per hour, after all. The attending physician had a look of amazement on his face and said that it was a miracle that he was still alive.

After hitting pops, the truck just kept on going and sped off. There had been a number of witnesses, but the license plates had been removed and the driver was wearing a ski mask and sunglasses to hide his appearance.

It was clearly a deliberate, expertly handled attack. But even so, pops just kept on smiling.

Well, you’d need a dump truck or something to finish off this old man of mine.

“So, how long till I’m discharged?”

The attending physician looked exceedingly troubled, faced with his widely smiling, bedridden, seriously wounded patient.

“No, you see, before we can discuss anything like that, first we’ll need to examine your brain waves, and then we’ll need to perform surgery on your legs...”

“Right. So, how long till I’m out?”

“At this point, I can’t really say... After all, you have compound fractures in both legs, and we don’t know how many months of rehabilitation you’ll need...”

“I see. Well, I’ll leave all that up to you, Doc, but I’ve got a shop to run. I don’t care if it needs to be in a wheelchair or whatever, but please discharge me as soon as you can. If I have to leave things to this oaf, my shop’ll be ruined.”

Naturally, “this oaf” referred to me.

Well, it’s true that my old man would keep on wielding that knife of his until he died, even if he had to use crutches or a wheelchair. I couldn’t help but smile, too, thinking about it.

It was then that I got a call from my childhood friend, Reina.

Her panicked screams came through. “Asuta! Your restaurant is on fire!”

The smile was wiped from my old man’s face for the first time when I conveyed that to him.

“Asuta, my knife! That’s the one thing I can’t lose!”

I flew out of the hospital, heading back home in even more of a rush than I’d been in on the way there.

My dad valued that Sakaki knife more than life itself. He would always yell about how a true chef could satisfy a customer no matter where they were, regardless of the ingredients and tools on hand. “But this is the one thing I just can’t let out of my grasp,” he’d add, clutching that precious knife from the famed cutlery shop in Kyoto.

That was the one thing he couldn’t stand to lose. No matter how much he was harassed, even after getting hit by a truck and breaking both legs, and even having his shop burned down, my pops would stand firm. But if he lost that knife, that would be the final straw that breaks him.

And so I ran, as fast as I could.

By the time I arrived at the shop, there were already dozens of onlookers staring at the spectacle, and the fire engine had gotten to work. But the restaurant was still cloaked in flames, and black smoke was billowing up into the summer sky. There was probably no preventing it all burning down to the ground at this point, no matter how much water they poured on. It was just burning too fiercely, like something out of a nightmare.

“Asuta-chan...”

Reina had been standing there dumbfounded, but when she noticed I was there she clung to me with tears in her eyes.

I grabbed her slender shoulders, gave a single nod... and then dove into the roaring flames.