Culinary Chronicles of the Court Flower, Vol. 1

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By Miri Mikawa and Kasumi Nagi. Released in Japan as “Ikka Kōkyū Ryōrichō” by Kadokawa Beans Bunko. Released in North America digitally by J-Novel Club. Translated by afm.

It is somewhat hard not to start reading this and not think of The Apothecary Diaries, which also features a young woman arriving at the Emperor’s palace and featuring a number of young women who are there to be his courtesans, as well as a eunuch who is rumored not to be. Oh yes, and clearly based on Chinese rather than Japanese tropes. That said, the two series end up going in a slightly different direction, as Maomao’s one smart cookie who’s there to be a Jessica Fletcher sort. Meanwhile, all poor Rimi wants is somewhere to prepare delicious food and a sense that she belongs. Unfortunately, getting either of those proves difficult. Despite almost immediately running into most of the “very handsome men” part of the inner palace, she finds her homemade fermented rice in danger, the other women of the palace bully her tremendously, and, oh yes, the Emperor takes one look at the gifts her nation sent along with her and decides to have her executed. How can she make dashi like this?

Rimi can be a hard character to get a hold of. At first I thought she was a “fluffhead” sort of character, but that’s less due to her natural state of mind and more due to her spending most of her life as an extraneous extra. For the last ten years she’s lived with only one other person, her older sister, and cooking was essentially her entire life. Most of the decisions she’s made over the course of her life have involved “I’ll do this so that they don’t worry about me”. Now she’s having severe culture shock (much of the novel is about the differences between this “not-China” that she lives in now and the “not-Japan” she was born in), can’t even really speak the language very well (the translator does a good job of showing off how her attempts to speak to the emperor or Shusei can occasionally be incredibly blunt or even coarse), and, of course, has been threatened with execution multiple times. She faints more than once here, but she certainly earns them.

As for the men, well, this is a reverse harem series, so they’re all very pretty. I’m guessing the main love interest is Shusei, the self-styled culinary scientist, whose attempts at healthy food are not well-loved. He bonds with Rimi over food, and seems pretty smitten with her by the end of the book, though of course he has no idea what that feeling is. The Emperor may threaten to cut off her head multiple times, but shows himself to be a big softie when presented with food he doesn’t hate – which is to say, food in the proper environment. As for the food itself, well, given the ingredients are clearly meant to be the fantasy equivalent of kombu and katsuobushi, we can guess why she’s so desperately pointing out that they are not “planks of wood”. There is much here to interest a foodie, especially if you like discussing the difference between Chinese and Japanese cuisine.

This is 11 volumes total in Japan, so we’ve clearly got a ways to go. but it’s a very good start, and if you like plucky heroines, handsome bishonen, and a LOT of talk about dashi, this is a winner.

Ascendance of a Bookworm: I’ll Do Anything to Become a Librarian!, Part 3: Adopted Daughter of an Archduke, Vol. 5

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By Miya Kazuki and You Shiina. Released in Japan as “Honzuki no Gekokujou: Shisho ni Naru Tame ni wa Shudan wo Erandeiraremasen” by TO Books. Released in North America digitally by J-Novel Club. Translated by quof.

Word of warning: this review is filled with spoilers. If you do not want to be spoiled, you should only read everything above the cover image.

The final volume of this particular arc sees Rozemyne finally managing to achieve everything she needs in order to fix her mana and her body. Given that we’d previously seen the expedition to get the ruelle ingredient, and saw it fail, it should not be surprising that we see it succeed here. The main new plot point is the introduction of the Archduke’s daughter Charlotte, who adores Rozemyne and sees her as a big sister, something that absolutely fills Rozemyne (and, let’s be frank here, Myne) with delight. She is therefore determined to give Charlotte the best possible baptism before she takes her potion, which we are told will require her to sleep for about six months. Unfortunately, things are (again) sent into turmoil by Wilfried being unable to think politically. And then, well… everything turns terrible.

Even with the hint that Rozemyne would be out cold for six months as seen earlier in the volume, I don’t think any of us expected the time skip to actually be TWO YEARS. The fact that it doesn’t even fully heal her (though she is allegedly much healthier now) and also still looks like a seven-year-old makes it extremely easy to understand her stunned reaction at the “end” of the book. Except, given this is a Bookworm novel, we have a bunch of stories from other perspectives at the end, and this time they take up almost half the entire volume. The stories serve to tell us two things: first, that everything Rozemyne does and accomplishes is truly stunning and irreplaceable… and second, that she’;s also set everything up so well that it can run pretty well without her. Indeed, Benno states that this is a good thing in some ways, as having no new innovations for the next while will let the innovations she’s already come up with take hold.

While this book revolves around a serious event, it is not without its humor. Angelica manages to even inject the best joke in the volume into the middle of the tense midair rescue of Charlotte. It is also not without its romance, though surprisingly – though it shouldn’t be – the pairing its’ been teasing for the last few books is the one that doesn’t work out. Bookworm is walking a fine balancing act between showing off the problems with a very class-based system while also showing that this is not something that can be changed overnight by one girl and her books, and The non-marriage of Damuel and Brigitte is an excellent example of this, as it forces them to think harder in order to give the reader more immersion into this very political, very difficult country. On the lighter side, Tulli is suddenly becoming a hot commodity… am I the only one seeing her and Lutz as a pairing? If only as Lutz and Myne was pretty thoroughly torpedoed several books ago.

The next arc has the exhausting subtitle “Founder of the Royal Academy’s So-Called Library Committee”, and is apparently “The Great Brain at the Academy – The Rozemyne Variations”. We’ll see how she copes with her miniature Rip Van Winkle timeskip next time. Till then, this is another volume that reminds you why this series is one of the most popular light novels of the last few years.

My Alcoholic Escape from Reality

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By Nagata Kabi. Released in Japan as “Genjitsu Touhi Shitetara Boroboro ni Natta Hanashi ” by East Press, serialized in Matogrosso. Released in North America by Seven Seas. Translated by Jocelyne Allen. Adapted by Lianne Sentar.

If you have read the previous volumes of Nagata Kabi’s biographical examination of her past struggles, seeing the title and the cover art for this new book probably makes you think “Oh no.” But yes, once again life is not as simple as it seems, and recovery can be a path you walk on that might just lead you to a different wrong path. After dealing with mental and emotional struggles in My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness and My Solo Exchange Diary, and resolving to stop writing memoir-style manga (as she worries it makes her family and friends upset, which it does to an extent), a combination of adjusting to a lot of new medication and a lack of inspiration for fictional manga ideas have led her to stop by the ten bars that are between her house and the nearest station. The result? After intense stomach pain, she goes to the hospital to find she has acute pancreatitis – her reading is TEN TIMES what it should be. And so… she’s admitted to the hospital.

This takes place over a more compressed period of time than the previous volumes, focused very specifically on this point in her life. As you can imagine, a lot of it makes for uncomfortable reading, and going cold turkey on alcohol and fatty foods proves to be far more challenging than anyone can imagine. There’s also some excellent examination of medications and painkillers – the side effects that they can cause, the differences between them, and the depressing realization that some of these may need to be taken for the rest of her life. The hospital staff are very nice, but also seem to be nice in that “I am not personally involved with you” way, so it can come across ass a bit callous at times. There’s also a great discussion of alcoholism just before she’s discharged, as the doctor talking to her notes “Japanese people see alcohol as alcohol” – in other words, not as a drug, or something that could lead to alcoholism.

The other great part of this book is showing us Nagata Kabi’s determination to create new work, and how this can get so frustrating that, well, she can end up drinking herself into the hospital. Good things are happening to her – while there, she finds out that My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness won the Harvey Award – but this does not necessarily translate into ongoing creativity, as she has four partially completed projects with four different publishers, none of which are nearing completion. She’s also feeling tremendous guilt over how others are seeing her memoirs – not just her family, but a manga that she enjoys reading where the protagonist is told “don’t write about our life”. The trouble is… that’s what she excels at. A manga friend of hers urges her to stop pushing her brain to do things it doesn’t want to do and continue writing autobiographical memoirs. Even if it can be painful for all involved.

This is hopefully not the last we see from the author – a new memoir was just published in Japan three months ago. As with other books by this author, it can be difficult to read. But I enjoyed its look at struggling to accept that the body can crumble just as much as the mind can, and that recovery can be just as hard.