Cooking with Wild Game (LN) - Volume 26 - Chapter Aft

Afterword

Thank you so much for picking up this book, the twenty-sixth volume of Cooking with Wild Game.

It’s currently August 2021 as I’m writing this afterword, right before the seventh anniversary of the day I started writing the series. I truly am grateful I’ve had the opportunity to work on it for seven whole years, and that I’ve amassed this many volumes. I very much appreciate the continued support all of you have shown.

Looking way back, it was a single dream that first led me to write the series.

At the time, I had already published other stories on the website Shosetsuka ni Naro, but they hardly got any reaction from readers, so I was trying to come up with a new series that would be a better fit.

I came up with all sorts of ideas based on the two data points that isekai-slash-reincarnation series seemed to be the main genre on the site and that cooking series had been popular lately, but nothing really clicked...and then, I ended up having a dream.

Normally, I hardly ever remember my dreams. I remembered them fully as a child, but when I became an adult, only vague images would ever remain. In my dreams, I would visit a bookstore I was a regular at, a hideout, a lake in an unfamiliar forest, or maybe some nostalgic place, but I would only vaguely remember afterward. I got into reading through Ranpo Edogawa’s Boy Detectives Club series, and the famous quote “The living world is a dream, the nocturnal dream is reality” left a strong impression on me, so I’m kind of ashamed of my forgetfulness.

Anyway, at this point I hardly remember the dream I had that night at all, other than that it was a dream of living a survivalist life out in the forest. After I awoke from that dream, that image remained stuck in my mind and pushed me toward creating this series.

Looking back, there isn’t much left in terms of those survivalist elements, but even so, I’ve found I’m able to write this story more easily than anything I wrote before. And now, I’ve been writing it for seven whole years.

I’m remarkably lacking in knowledge about all things spiritual, so I believe that dream was the result of me subconsciously thinking of ideas for a series rather than it being some revelation from the heavens. But the reason behind it doesn’t matter. To this day, I truly feel grateful for the dream I had that night which led me here.

Now then, that was quite the diversion.

This volume carries on from the last one in its depiction of the rainy season. Out of all the events that occur in it, we ended up using Ai Fa’s birthday for the front cover. It makes me happy to see her so full of joy.

Because of that, I also went ahead and made the intermezzo story for this volume one from her point of view, something I haven’t done in a while. I hope you enjoy seeing some of the girlier feelings that Ai Fa has swirling around inside her heart.

We also have two group performances in this volume that are more on the serious side. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy getting to take a look into the differing burdens faced by the two starring characters.

Both of the stories center on the friendship banquet held back in volume twenty-two, so I would have liked to publish them earlier if it had been possible, but for various reasons, they ended up being delayed until now. Still, I feel like it all worked out nicely in the end, since they pair well with the contents of the main story in this volume, and my editor agreed on that point.

With this, the second round of group performances, which were published right after the contents of volume twenty-two in the web version, have come to a close. There were seven of them in total, adding up to enough text to fill a volume all on their own. Thank you so much for reading them.

However, since we’re on volume twenty-six now, the third round of group performance stories is already fast approaching. I sincerely hope that all of you enjoy the main story, group performances, and intermezzos equally.

Finally, I want to thank everyone involved with the production of this book, and of course, all of you who purchased it.

See you again in the next volume!

August 2021,

EDA