Cooking with Wild Game (LN) - Volume 3 - Chapter Aft

Afterword

You have my deepest thanks for picking up this book, the third volume of “Cooking with Wild Game.”

I can’t help but be surprised at how quickly the volumes have started piling up.

It’s thanks to all of you who have continued to read this series.

I’m also deeply honored that this book received a comment from Norimitsu Kaiho-sama, author of School-Live!

Speaking of Norimitsu Kaiho-sama, the script he wrote for the episode “Festival” of Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet left a really strong impact on me.

The heroines dressed in banquet attire, full of even more energy than usual, dancing with a whole different sort of brilliance than always... As I wrote about the banquet this time around, that work came to mind countless times.

Well, in my banquet I had Asuta fall asleep before the girls started dancing, a real screw up that had readers of the web version lament, “What a careless protagonist!”

With that said, Asuta’s life in this other world is only just getting started!

I would be positively overjoyed if you’re looking forward to what comes next!

Just let me finish by giving thanks to my editor at Hobby Japan, my illustrator Kochimo, everyone else involved with the production of this book, and of course all of you who purchased it.

Well then, I hope to see you all again with the next volume!

May 2015,

EDA

Editor’s column

This is Adam Fogle, returning again as editor of Cooking with Wild Game. Well, it’s the third volume, and things are starting to move. We’ve gone beyond the forest, and started to see the culture of the wider world. And even there, it looks like Asuta has a lot to show them about what real cooking is like. Who knows where his skill will take him from here on out. It’s a big world out there.

Last time, I wrote about how I wanted to give the people of the forest’s edge a consistent baseline for the way that they speak, in order to create a sense of shared identity. Something to set them apart from the more blandly-speaking outsiders. Though we haven’t seen much of those people yet, they are actually surprisingly multicultural for a civilization at this stage of development. There are some divisions between the various kingdoms, but there is relatively free movement between them, for those able to make the journey. They worship national tutelary gods, and take them pretty seriously, though religion is not particularly omnipresent in their lives.

Unlike the people of the forest’s edge, I didn’t aim for any particular voice for them, as long as they sounded natural. Something more western. As an aside, our main character, Asuta, contrasts with them by being more actively polite. That’s his Japanese manners showing through. We could have toned that down, as is common to do, but I wanted him to still sound a little different than the people around him.

It’s always important to have this kind of thing as a way to distinguish who is speaking at any given moment - especially because Japanese writing conventions are rather different as to how often the narrator needs to tell us who the speaker is. Sometimes we have to add a dialog tag here or there, but not often. And it’s not like this is an anime, where you can hear the actual sound of their voices.

But there is one thing unique about them that we can kind of see, and that’s their language itself. Of course, there’s not much of it. It’s nearly all magically translated. But the proper nouns aren’t. And those too need to be looked after.

Languages also have characteristics to how they sound. Not just in the phonemes and the grammar, but in the words themselves. If you’re reading this, you’ve likely listened to more than a little Japanese audio in your time. You might have become familiar with some of the words, words like kyou, kirei, atama, and hisashiburi. You can look at that set of words, and even if you don’t know what they mean, you can kinda tell that they sound Japanese. And of course they look completely different than English words. But try a different set, like soneu, enigo, zegurumo, and barapposu, and even though there’s no technical reason why they couldn’t be Japanese words – they fit the structure – there should be something about them that just tells you they aren’t.

Thus, I wanted to make sure that any proper nouns that come up in the story could fit inside a box belonging to their native culture when transliterated. Of course, languages are complex, so there are going to be some that stand out from the others, and also sometimes there’s overlap where a word might reasonably belong to one or another. There’s wiggle room, in other words, if it is needed. But usually it isn’t, since the original author is pretty good at just this sort of thing.

So look at some of these names. Ai Fa, Jiba Ruu, Mia Lea, Darmu Ruu, Dan Rutim, Diga Suun. These are names of the people of the forest’s edge. Most of them are just straight transliterations, but with a few of them there were choices to make. Looking at all of these names, I noticed that a lot of them have a nice flow to them. They roll off the tongue easily. So when deciding whether to transliterate a name as “Darmu Ruu” or “Darum Ruu” I went with the former, because the latter clunked a bit with the ‘m’ followed by an ‘r’. This was the sort of characteristic I went for to define their old language, which they would have spoken before migrating to the forest’s edge and adopting the local language, keeping only their names.

I also made sure that we stuck to fairly simple consonants. Back in the first volume, there was a bit of a joke made about how nobody at the forest’s edge could pronounce Asuta’s last name, Tsurumi. The ‘ts’ is no doubt difficult for them. Related to that, their ‘r’ might be different from the one in Japanese, causing them to stumble on it. But anyway, no ‘ts’ in the language of the forest’s edge, and no ‘br’ or ‘sn’ or ‘fl’ either. A name like Gazraan is allowed because the ‘z’ and ‘r’ are in fully separate syllables. It’s definitely an exceptional name, regardless.

Also, when transliterating, sometimes you double or cut down a vowel because you need to. Like, the Suun clan was originally just “Sun.” It should be easy to see why that would be a problem in English. It’s not supposed to be pronounced the way you’d naturally want to read it.

And then you have these other words and names that are presumably from the language of the Western Kingdom of Selva. Giba, Mundt, Grigee, Giiz, Tara, Tarapa, Apas, Totos, Chatchi, and so on. These words should have some different characteristics than the ones belonging to the people of the forest’s edge. More hard sounds, more consonant combinations, more harshness, less smoothness. It might not be super obvious, but when you look closely, the differences be noticeable.

Although, some readers might have recalled that there’s one other name that’s come up that stands out very strongly from all others: the Duke of Genos, Marstein. For all that the other names in the new world are somewhat strange and alien, this one is almost familiar. It sounds like German, or one of the Scandinavian languages. That alone makes it unlike any other that’s come up so far. Most likely it’s because he’s a noble, and people of his class just name themselves differently. It wouldn’t be a stretch to expect the ruling class to effectively be of a different culture than the common man.

Well, that’s enough of my rambling pontification. I’ll finish by thanking the translator, Matthew Warner, for nodding and going along with all the fussy detailing I’ve been writing about above. And also to the author, EDA, for putting together this story in such a thoughtful way. It’s got a surprising amount of charm, and I’m looking forward to all the rest. It should be a great time.