touhou drawn by niy_(nenenoa)

Afterword

Niy here. Managed to finish this somehow. What was supposed to be a simple book ended up swelling and becoming a lot of work.

This story was based on the legends of the ten three-legged crows, and the archer of the sun. Originally, when LoLK came out and Junko brought up the archer, I started to think "I bet I could tie Chireiden into this somehow!" Speaking of the yatagarasu, I too love to think of it as a three-legged crow, but apparently in Japanese legends it's actually a one-winged crow with "no evidence of having three legs". Apparently it and its equivalents were always recorded as just plain two-legged. All mentions of there being ten brothers or three legs are from the Heian era or later... Still, Okuu has a spell card named Blazing Star "Ten Evil Stars" referencing the legend of the archer, so I had the wild idea that maybe this guy is just a three-legged crow calling itself a yatagarasu. The real yatagarasu might not have entered fantasy quite yet.

Apparently there really are theories that the Chinese legend's three-legged crow might've been mixed up with Japanese mythology's yatagarasu somewhere in the Heian era. I feel like I've caught a glimpse of just how interesting mythology can be. The legend at the start of the book is a reinterpretation of what I've researched so far. Uneducated as I am, I'm scared that everyone's going to come and complain about it, but I should wrap this up.

Well then, thank you very much for reading "Reiuji Utsuho and the Yatagarasu".