Cooking with Wild Game (LN) - Volume 8 - Chapter Aft

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Afterword

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

I mentioned as much in the afterword last time, but this volume ended up being a collection of short stories. In terms of the contents, it’s like a prequel to the direct confrontation with the nobles. However, it’s made up of main chapters rather than bonus ones, so I hope you’ll enjoy it the same as always.

Looking back on how I felt while writing it, I thought that as the stories about confronting the Suun clan and nobles advanced, the important matter of cooking took a back seat, which is why I think I went ahead with this sort of content. And since last time felt strongly like an ending to one part of the story, I believe I wanted to dig into all sorts of odds and ends before diving into the next chapter.

Perhaps all that sounds like a bit of a shaky analysis, but I originally wrote the content for this volume back around the end of 2014 and the start of 2015, so it’s already been more than a year and a half now.

It always is shocking how quickly time flies.

Well, normally when I go to novelize my work I don’t pay too much attention to when it was originally written, but this time it left a strong impression on me. As for why, that was because for my update on New Year’s Day, I squeezed in Asuta giving a toast. I guess you could say I was playing around in a way that was only possible because the web version was published in real time. That was ultimately cut in this novel version, but I hope you enjoy imagining where it originally fit in.

As for the bonus chapter, I went with a story told from Vina Ruu’s point of view. And it’s a tale I have rather strong feelings about, too. In fact, I had been thinking for quite some time that I really needed to write it someday.

To explain in a way that won’t spoil it, it’s a story from five years before Vina Ruu first met a certain someone. On top of that, it answers a question from the main story of, “Why does Vina Ruu know that person when they live so far apart?”

The women of the forest’s edge don’t have any custom of traveling several hours to visit another house, so people who live a distance from one another may never meet in their whole lives. And even if they do, it could just be as a chance encounter in the post town while out shopping.

Thanks to such thoughts, I made sure to come up with a reason she would be acquainted with Vina Ruu when introducing her in the main story, but I didn’t have a chance to reveal the details up until now.

Looking back, I wrote the part where that character was first introduced back in October of 2014, or volume five of the novels. It took nearly two years, but I’m truly glad to finally be able to reveal her past with Vina Ruu.

And so, I managed to fill up the pages this time around rather quickly. It was all behind the scenes stuff, but hopefully that’s the part of the afterword that you really enjoy.

Now then... As always, 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.