Cooking with Wild Game (LN) - Volume 19 - Chapter Aft

Afterword

You have my deepest thanks for picking up this book, the 19th volume of Cooking with Wild Game.

For this volume, the contents of each chapter ended up being clearly divided. We have a tea party for noblewomen, townsfolk being invited to the forest’s edge, and lastly the second Ruu festival of the hunt. I hope that you’ll enjoy each and every one of them. But with the cast changing each chapter like that, I had so many characters I couldn’t fit them all in the character sheet.

In the previous volume, I needed to introduce the members of the Suun clan for the Group Performance, so I was worried that I might not have enough space, but it turned out not to be a problem. I’m really sorry for having so many characters in this work, though.

As for the Group Performance chapters this time around, they are “The Castle Town Incident” and “Their Diverging Paths.” Both of these stories have a pretty different feel to them, with the former being a murder mystery, while the latter is set in the real world.

This is a bit of a digression, but I’m a big fan of mystery novels. My own reading history began with the works of Edogawa Ranpo in elementary school, and in the years since then, I’ve read a huge number of mystery stories. In fact, if I had any talent for coming up with tricks, I would have loved to become a mystery writer myself.

Unfortunately, that’s a talent I just don’t have. I’ve occasionally tried my hand at such works, but they just wouldn’t come together. I can’t help but think that concocting tricks just takes something special.

Still, I’m not the type of person who judges a mystery primarily on how great the tricks are. If I had to say, the thing that charms me the most is the famous detectives and the other characters in that vein who appear in those mysteries. When a work doesn’t make you feel attached to the cast, no matter how superb the trick or logic may be, I’m not particularly moved by it. On the other hand, if the characters are charming, that’s a story I could read over and over again. Even in other genres, I’ll read works I truly love five or six times.

That was a long digression, but “The Castle Town Incident” was a story born out of that love of mysteries. And let me just say as an excuse that it’s more “mystery-styled” than a proper mystery.

The other thing I wanted to discuss was a certain character who appears in “The Castle Town Incident.”

As I mentioned in the previous afterword, in the web novel version, the Group Performance stories were published immediately after the end of the Cyclaeus arc. It’s only natural that some characters who were first introduced in the Group Performances for the web version ended up appearing earlier in the main story for the light novels instead.

To give an example, Lem Dom first appeared in a Group Performance story. It was the one where Ludo Ruu was the protagonist, “The Youngest Ruu Son’s Little Adventure.” Since it would have caused chaos if she had popped up in the main story first, I hurriedly put that story in volume fourteen of the novels so she could show up there.

As for the character in question this time around, she was less involved in the main plot than Lem Dom, so I didn’t bother with all that. But as a result, readers of just the light novels may be surprised to learn that someone they probably thought of as just a minor background character had such a sad history behind her.

That character won’t be all that active in the main story from here on out either. I can’t speak to what might happen in the future, but for now she’s just the kind of character who will pop up occasionally after having been forgotten for a while. I hope you’ll all keep thinking fondly of her.

Moving on, the next volume is finally number twenty. I definitely feel the impact of that milestone, and I’m so grateful that I’ve had the opportunity to reach this point.

As for the contents, the sun god’s revival festival will finally kick off, which synergizes well with the celebratory mood I’m feeling. I hope that you readers will enjoy it even more than usual too. And I will keep on writing tirelessly, working my hardest to make this a story that you will all want to read over and over again.

Let me finish by thanking everyone involved with the production of this book, and of course, all of you who purchased it.

I hope to see you again in the next volume!

October 2019,

EDA