Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill

The Sizzle of the Submundane

If you’d told me MAPPA—the studio behind the beautifully miserable chaos of *Jujutsu Kaisen* and *Chainsaw Man*—would spend its energy on a show about buying soy sauce online, I would’ve assumed you were delirious. But *Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill* is exactly that, title and all. It’s an isekai where the stakes rarely rise above dinner, and I ended up finding that weirdly irresistible.

In a genre clogged with chosen-one teenagers and kingdom-saving destiny, director Kiyoshi Matsuda pulls a sly little feint. Tsuyoshi Mukohda, a 27-year-old salaryman, gets summoned alongside actual heroes and turns out to possess only "Online Grocery," which is basically magical Amazon Prime for Japanese supermarket food. Once he realizes the local royals are shady as hell, he opts out of the grand quest, plays dumb, and leaves. No demon lord, no prophecy, no noble sacrifice. He just wants to make a decent pork dish in peace.



That’s the whole engine of the show: the sensual pleasure of cooking. MAPPA, usually so eager to splatter the screen with operatic violence, repurposes that craft for frying pans and sauce. In the first episode, Mukohda accidentally tames Fel, a legendary Fenrir, with nothing more than cheap sausages and bread he bought through his digital menu. The camera lingers on browning meat with the same intensity other anime reserve for finishing moves. You can practically smell the grease. The hiss of food on hot metal drowns out the forest. He isn’t summoning magic so much as coaxing flavor out of onions, and the show treats that as worthy of awe.

Yuma Uchida is a huge part of why the joke stays fresh. Anime viewers know him as the voice of cooler, tougher guys—Megumi in *Jujutsu Kaisen*, for one. Here he strips all of that away. His Mukohda sounds like a worn-out adult one inconvenience away from a stress headache. He hunches through scenes vocally, if that makes sense, letting every line fray into worry or irritation. The result is a guy who feels less like a hero than a millennial who accidentally became personal chef to a divine beast.



Fel, meanwhile, is perfect comic counterweight. Satoshi Hino gives him booming mythic authority, which only makes the gag funnier. This gigantic, city-leveling creature turns embarrassingly dog-like the minute food appears. Watch how his body edges closer to the pan, how he drools, how he throws little tantrums when the steaks aren’t ready. It’s a classic odd-couple setup, but it works because the show commits without blinking. Over at Anime News Network, one reviewer dryly observed that with the amount of fried meat Mukohda serves, "he's going to die of heart disease at a young age." They’re probably right, though it’s hard to argue with meals that buff your companions into gods.

Does the show have flaws? Sure. Anyone hoping for propulsion or deep character change is probably going to get restless. The structure is basically travel somewhere, let someone else kill a monster, then figure out how to cook it. Whether that sounds numbing or soothing depends on your tolerance for slice-of-life repetition. And the product placement for actual Japanese brands—Aeon gets a lot of mileage here—can feel less like texture than sponsorship.



Even so, *Campfire Cooking* has a very specific comfort to it. Beneath the jokes, it understands how tired modern life can make you. In worlds that are always demanding labor, courage, ambition, greatness, Mukohda’s big act of rebellion is to stop and make something warm to eat. He’s not out to save society. He’s just trying to make the day taste a little better for himself and the people nearby. Honestly, that might be the fantasy that lands hardest.