Transcriber's Foreword
Things to Know Before You Begin

What you're looking at here is indeed a full transcription of the written work "Curiosities of Lotus Asia." The work was originally written by Zun, then translated by TouhouWiki, and transcribed from there by yours truly; all 23 chapters plus the original full-size Japanese-version scans for your perusal (in the Original Full-Size Scans folder).

Speaking from a 2011 viewpoint, though it's still a rather good read (or I wouldn't've bothered transcribing it), CoLA is one of Zun's older works, its events transpiring around the time of the earlier Windows games; as a result, you won't be seeing any of the modern cast members who would be the type to show up at Kourindou (such as Sanae, Nitori, or possibly Byakuren); if you wanna see more newly-added characters, read something more recent (like "Wild and Horned Hermit").

If you compare my transcription to the original TouhouWiki translation, you can tell I took a fair, though clearly not overdone, number of liberties with the text, including some formatting restructuring and correcting the occasional grammatical or spelling error, basically doing what I could to make it easier to read and understand. As with any translation or transcription project, it's obviously impossible to catch every tiny little thing, but I think you can tell that TouhouWiki (in their translation) and myself (in my transcription) have put as much love and care into this as we possibly could; I know that I, for one, love the Touhou universe very much myself, and, having played all of the games and read many doujins, know the characters very well, so I believe you can see that where I did make dialog corrections, they remain in-character.

There are four fonts used in this transcripted presentation, included in the Fonts folder, which you've hopefully installed at my multiple suggestions:
* The main font used for Rinnosuke's writings (and as the header font) is Uzura_Font, as it looks somewhat like a guy's printing. (Looks like mine, anyway.)
* The font used for the first section of Chapter 4, where the speaker is Marisa, is Segoe Print, since that looks a bit more like a girl's writing.
* The font used for Zun's Afterword is Cirno, which font was used in "Phantasmagoria of Flower View," making it an official Touhou font, suitable for having Zun as the speaker.
* The font used for my own Transcriber's words pages (this Foreword and my Afterword) is Calibri, because I like it.

So you know, the text is never supposed to overlap any of the pictures; if for some strange reason a page loads weird such that the text overlaps a picture, do a refresh (hit F5); that should clear it right up.

It's important to note that the original work was technically 27 chapters (you can tell this if you look at TouhouWiki or in the Images folder); the reason why I present it here as 23 chapters is because four of the chapters were originally written as shorter two-parters due to size restrictions in their original serial publications (what you see here as chapters 1, 3, 4 and 5); thus, they are presented here combined into single chapters as I believe was originally intended. Besides, even as TouhouWiki notes, Zun never really seemed to keep track of the proper numbering either, screwing up or starting the numbering over almost every time it changed to a different magazine, so I don't really think my presentation as 23 chapters really makes any arguable difference aside from the fact that I had to pick which cover to use for each of the chapters that were originally two-parters (I chose the one that portrayed the proper mood for the chapter in these cases).

You will also note that Chapters 13 and 14 have a different cover art style than the other chapters, because those were originally released on the web; you'll also see that Chapter 8 has absolutely no pictures whatsoever, because that is the chapter Zun contributed to a doujinshi, and scans for that chapter are unavailable as a result - not even TouhouWiki has any.

I also did not include any of Zun's chapter-based afterwords; though they're cute, I felt they cluttered things up too much, taking away from the flow and liminality of the volume.

These things said, I hope that for all the effort I put into its presentation, you are able to enjoy this English iteration of "Curiosities of Lotus Asia."