Bonus: Editor’s Column

My name is Adam Fogle, and I am the editor of Cooking with Wild Game. I’ve been working with J-Novel Club for about a year at the time of this writing, during which I have also been editing Kokoro Connect. My interests do not include long walks on the beach.

This novel series is a bit of an oddball in the isekai genre, in how relatively grounded it is. In particular, the main character Asuta has to make do with just his cooking skills. No god-given gifts at all, as far as can be seen. With only his normal abilities, he has to carve out a place for himself in his new home. It’s a rather human story, and Asuta acts and reacts like a normal person would, persevering as best he can and trying not to think about it too much.

As we’ve already seen, it’s not going to be that easy. The culture he finds himself in is full of very serious, very opinionated people. They’re not going to let him introduce his own culture just like that. They’ll only accept it if he does it on their terms. There was a big part of this volume that was just Asuta trying to show how he understood and wanted to accept their culture and their way of thinking. That isn’t a step that most otherworldly transplants have to go through these days.

For my part, as editor my job is to curate the text as whole, to make it the best it can be within the bounds of what was there in the original language. The translator, Matthew Warner, sends me a section of text, usually pretty close to being ready for publication already. I then look through it, searching for any way I can improve things. That means removing clunkiness, making the voice more consistent, and finding ways to avoid the same words and phrases being repeated too much (unless there’s a purpose to the repetition). Matt then reviews my edits to make sure I haven’t misunderstood or gone too far astray from the Japanese text. Usually everything gets accepted.

One of the key things I wanted to make sure was established was a sort of baseline voice for the culture of the forest’s edge. For those who’ve done their best to forget those tedious literature lessons from school, voice in the literary sense is the characteristic set of words and phrases that distinguish one person from another. Who a person is will be reflected in their voice in a variety of ways.

The people of the forest’s edge are a simple people with few pleasures in life. Which is not to say that they are unintelligent, far from it. Human intelligence evolved for the purpose of hunting and gathering more effectively, and these people hunt very dangerous prey constantly and exclusively. So what I saw in the writing from the get go, and wanted to make sure was kept fairly consistent throughout, was a certain directness that they have. They avoid using flowery language, have few idioms, and don’t use more words than they need to, but they speak in a way that clearly gets their meaning across. Of course, there are exceptions and individual variations. But this should be about what you’d expect from people who live harsh lives in a harsh world and don’t have time to be dancing around what needs to be said.

Another trait of theirs that I made sure would come through is a certain awkwardness that crops up when talking about the delicious meals Asuta cooks. This is a case where they do tend to repeat the same words, and use them hesitantly, as if they have to reach to remember what they are.

“When it comes to food, there is no good or bad taste.”

Can you imagine? A life so devoid of good, comforting food that the very concept of such a thing can barely be conceived of?

Yes, this isn’t the sort of comfortable world that you can just slot someone into easily, even if they were strong. It really is a foreign culture, one that Asuta has to put some work in in order to really become a part of. I hope the gap between him and them comes across in their voices as the story goes on.

There’s other, more minor details one has to watch out for when editing. In a culture that doesn’t care for precise measurement of time, they wouldn’t say things like “hold on a second” (though Asuta does, frequently). And if they haven’t at least invented gunpowder yet (and don’t have magic), they won’t have figurative expressions like “that really blew up on us” or anything in that vein. If it’s done right, it’s the sort of thing you probably won’t ever notice. But if it isn’t, and you do end up noticing it and thinking about it as you walk to the fridge of whatever, it’ll stick out like a sore thumb. So we have to be really attentive about it. Such expressions are really easy to miss because using them has become so natural to us. It gets you thinking about... word things.

Anyway, time for a concluding paragraph. Thanks to Matthew Warner for providing your skillful translation, and thanks and congratulations to EDA, the true architect of this story. Let’s all hope it does well. Onwards to volume 3. Time for Asuta to broaden his horizons.