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Uchi no Musume no Tame naraba, Ore wa Moshikashitara Maou mo Taoseru kamo Shirenai (Light Novel) - Volume 3, Afterword
Volume 3, Afterword
This chapter is updated by NovelFree.ml
“I’ve heard some of the ol’ festival music, so I’ll just have a beer and head on home.” Back in the day, I never imagined I’d become such a useless adult who’d have such pathetic thoughts... Well, for whatever reason, I can’t quite state that definitively.
For most of you, this is probably our first time meeting. I’m CHIROLU, and I’d like to sincerely thank you for picking up this work, the third volume of If It’s for My Daughter, I’d Even Defeat a Demon Lord.
I currently live in a certain part of the Kanto region, but I was born and raised in the Shitamachi area. As I’ve grown up, I’ve come to realize that my common sense may differ from that of the world at large, but Shitamachi was an area that was always holding some festival or event. It was only natural to expect to see festival carts set up for two months straight. I recall having conversations with my friends when we were young, full of statements like, “This week, we’ll go to the festival at our shrine, and then next week, we’ll go to the festival they’re having over at that shrine.”
My memories of living there are too strong, so when I think of festivals, I remember those events happening at the start of summer, but conventionally, it may be more common to think of them as occurring in the fall. When writing this volume, I unthinkingly took it as a given that the festival would be at the start of summer. My editor pointed this out to me, but when I saw how I had written that without even thinking about it, it made me realize just how deeply ingrained such “common sense” could become.
I’ve become accustomed to not just walking about and eating from the stalls, but also taking in the festival music and lively atmosphere while taking a groggy stroll. I’ve come to mistakenly feel like if I don’t go to seasonal events like the Tori-no-Ichi festival, winter will never come. I enter into the start of summer in a similar mental state, so it’s become an unskippable annual event for me to sit down with a pack of takoyaki and a can of chuuhai in one hand. Even if takoyaki’s just made with a bit of red pickled ginger and some flour, I feel like there’s just something to it that you can’t get from a specialty shop. I got ready to argue when I saw a place that claimed to put a full octopus in each one, but when
I saw that it was a baby octopus, I burst out laughing and was satisfied. However, I remember feeling disappointed that it was hard to eat.
Such carts also chase after fads, so when there was a pancake boom, for example, plenty of carts serving them popped up. They disappeared before long, though. I enjoy walking along and looking for such differences. In the last few years, I get the feeling that the number of carts serving ethnic dishes has been on the rise. I even saw a pho cart with a huge line in front of it when it got cold. Such things can be hit or miss, but it was doing better than I would have expected.
And then there’s poppo-yaki, which isn’t actually squid. [ED: In most of
Japan, poppo-yaki refers to grilled squid.] It’s a staple of the carts in the Kaetsu region of Niigata. I’ve heard even people from other parts of Niigata say they’ve never heard of it, so it’s apparently limited to being quite a small local snack. Even if you ask what sort of food it is, it’s rather hard to describe. It’s light brown, has a brown sugar flavor to it, and has more of a springy texture to it rather than being fluffy. When I attended an event in Kaetsu, it left quite an impact on me to see five carts in a row, with three of them serving poppo-yaki. Just how beloved was it for over half of them to be serving it?
This is straying from the topic of festivals, but as I mentioned in the afterword for the last volume, my family outings always took the form of strolls through picturesque scenery. Being able to eat while walking around such places was something I got to enjoy that you generally can’t do in your everyday life. In fact, before my siblings learned how to eat fish with chopsticks, they learned how to eat grilled sweetfish on a skewer without dropping it. Having seen children manage such a thing, I can’t help but tilt my head at the rising trend of people who dislike fish because of the bones.
My parents were the complete opposite of those folks who decide they don’t like a food without even trying it, and they always tended to take the initiative when it came to chowing down on dishes they’d never seen before. I get the feeling that that may have been a big part of what made walking about and eating at our travel destinations so much fun. When my family all went to a buffet-style restaurant the other day and I saw that we all had palm sprouts on our plates, I realized that my parents’ teachings had been passed down. Let me just note that the texture was like that of bamboo shoots.
Even though the titular daughter wasn’t supposed to be a gourmand, she ended up eating anything and everything without me even thinking about it, so perhaps the problem is with me.
Even so, I’d be glad if my story was able to get across some of those special events from my childhood and how they excited me.
Thank you so much to everyone who helped make this book a reality. Thank you for always putting up with my strange hang-ups and for drawing an adorable “daughter,” Kei. And more than anything else, to those of you who chose this book out of so many options, you have my deepest gratitude.
As long as this book brought you at least a little joy, then I’ll feel truly blessed.
February 2016,
CHIROLU
