Chapter 532: LWH Chapter 527: Various Matters of the Sawamura Family

"Eriri, you’re back quite late today. Did you go out with friends?"

At the Spencer mansion, Eriri had just returned home when she heard her mother, Sawamura Sayuri, asking her as usual while lying on the living room sofa wearing a kimono.

"Something like that," Eriri said evasively.

Although she didn’t think there was anything wrong with visiting Asakura, he was a boy after all, and it would be a hassle if her mom and the others found out, so she just brushed it off.

"Dinner is ready on the table, go eat it yourself." Sawamura Sayuri was focused intently on the TV screen.

As Eriri passed through the living room, she glanced over and noticed that her mother seemed to be watching a live-action drama adapted from a shoujo manga. These dramas felt a lot like romance novels; while somewhat similar to Korean dramas, they weren’t quite as trashy. After all, for a work to fight its way through the fierce manga market and successfully get a live-action adaptation, it usually possessed a certain level of quality and an audience.

Realizing this, Eriri couldn’t help but think to herself, Looks like Mom is hitting menopause.

"...Hmm?"

Sawamura Sayuri narrowed her eyes sharply. "I feel like someone is saying bad things about me!"

"Eh?"

Eriri was startled and instinctively shrank her neck, then quickly said, "It’s definitely just your imagination, your imagination!"

"Is that so~?"

Sayuri glanced at her daughter nonchalantly and then went back to watching TV.

Relieved, Eriri immediately fled back to her room. After safely stowing her bag—which contained the out-of-print manga by the first-generation Eromanga Sensei and Asakura’s uniform design drafts—she headed out again for dinner.

Meals in the Sawamura household were mostly prepared by a housekeeper, but occasionally Sayuri would do it herself. Judging by the messy-looking dishes on the table, today was clearly a day where she had cooked on a whim. Fortunately, while Sayuri’s cooking didn’t look like much, the taste was generally passable. Since Eriri wasn’t a picky eater, she started eating without complaint.

"By the way, Eriri, your school is on break now, right?" Sayuri’s voice drifted over from the living room.

"Yeah," Eriri replied muffledly, her mouth full of rice.

"Then Summer Comiket isn’t far off... What do you plan to do for this year’s publication, Kashiwagi Eri-sensei~?" Sayuri asked in a playful tone.

Eriri, who had been eating heartily because she was hungry, suddenly lost her appetite when she thought of the massive blank pages of her new manuscript.

"I’m at my wit’s end." She poked at the mackerel in front of her with her chopsticks in a fit of pique, saying self-abandoningly, "Maybe I’ll just throw together a bound volume of my works from the last two years and call it a day."

"Your fans would be very disappointed, wouldn’t they?"

"I don’t care if they drop dead!" Eriri snapped fiercely, then muttered weakly, "But I really can’t think of any plot hooks..."

"...Even though it feels a bit strange for me to say this as your mother," Sayuri’s tone sounded subtle, "Eighty percent of your fans are probably here for the ’corruption’ scenes; I doubt anyone actually reads the plot. So why not just give up on the story and focus all your effort on the ’action’ scenes to make it more... ’practical’?"

"I have standards too, how could I give up on the plot!" Eriri declared loudly. But then she asked with a lack of confidence, "Is my manga’s plot really that boring?"

"It’s the kind where even if you submitted it to a serious magazine, the editor-in-chief would ask you to ’add more smut and skip the plot’."

"Guh..."

"So, Eriri-chan should just keep drawing the parts everyone loves to see."

"I’ve decided," Eriri said, stabbing a piece of mackerel that was still somewhat intact and chewing it.

"Oh? You finally figured out how to draw the new issue for this Comiket?"

"Setting this Comiket aside for a moment! After this, I’m going to submit to a magazine and debut as a serious mangaka!" Eriri said, her cheeks puffed out and her words slightly slurred.

Then she heard a loud clatter from the living room, as if something had fallen to the ground, causing a chain reaction that knocked over the fruit plate and teacups on the coffee table.

"Mom?" Eriri swallowed her food and looked toward the living room in confusion. "Is everything okay over there?"

A moment later, Sawamura Sayuri came limping over.

"Eriri-chan, did something trigger you?" she asked. "How did you suddenly come to such a decision?"

"It’s nothing." Eriri looked away.

My kid is really too easy to read, Sayuri thought to herself.

"Did someone discover your identity as Kashiwagi Eri and say something weird to you?" she pressed.

"No such thing!" Eriri reacted like a cat whose tail had been stepped on, her response so sharp it felt like a reflex. Realizing this herself, she tried to act nonchalant. "I just feel that since I’ve been drawing manga for so long, I occasionally want to draw something I can show to others with my head held high..."

"I think your previous works can be shown to others; didn’t they sell quite well?"

"Mom, look me in the eye and say that again." Eriri bit the end of her chopstick, staring at her mother with an unfriendly gaze.

"Sorry, Eriri-chan was raised by me to be too ’knowledgeable’ about lewd things... I’m afraid there’s no going back to... normal manga and such." Sayuri covered half her face with her kimono sleeve, faking a cry of sadness.

"Don’t pronounce a death sentence before I’ve even tried! And what’s with that phrasing? Don’t make it sound like I have some weird constitution!" Eriri said huffily. "Damn it, in that case, even if you and Dad object, I’m going to head toward the ’all-ages’ world. Sooner or later, I’ll ’go ashore’ and become a real mangaka!"

Seeing that her daughter didn’t seem to be joking, Sayuri could only sigh. It seemed she wouldn’t be able to talk her out of it in the short term... she wondered who the girl got her stubbornness from.

But this kid didn’t have this idea this morning. Why did it suddenly pop up today?

Looks like I need to investigate who Eriri went to see today, Sayuri muttered in her heart.