By MOJIKAKIYA and syow. Released in Japan as “Shiro Majo-san to no Henkyō Gurashi ~Saikyō na Majo wa Nonbiri Kurashitai~” by Kadokawa Books. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by Amanogawa Tenri.

I wasn’t originally going to try this series – again, contrary to popular belief, I don’t read everything – but I decided to pick it up after I saw it was from the author of My Daughter Left the Nest and Returned an S-Ranked Adventurer, which I quite enjoyed. That one had the author trying out the “raise a daughter that they picked up somewhere” mini-genre, though thankfully without the “and then marry them” part of that same genre. This seems to have the author trying out another genre to write in, that being the “slow life” type, though there’s also a dash of “kicked out of the party” to start us off. It’s very good at the slow life too, for good and ill. Good because I’m not really a fan of “I try to have a slow life but have to keep saving the world” books. Bad because the first half is really pretty boring. And if you’re waiting for our protagonist to do something OP, keep waiting.

Tori is part of the Platinum Adventurer group the Muddy Four Horns. That said, he’s not really a fighter, so provides backline support for them, such as cooking and cleaning. When they decide to combine several parties into one big elite one, Tori is informed by the guild manager and the rest of his party (who seem a bit reluctant) that he’s fired. As he walks along after this, he runs into a huge elderly woman, the famous White Witch, who has literally come looking for him, in order to put her life in order. Despite attempting to be bitter and sarcastic about it, Tori is whisked away to her cottage… where he finds that a) the huge elderly White Witch is a disguise, and she’s actually young and cute; and b) she’s an utter slob and her cottage is a disaster area. But a job is a job, so he gets down to work.

This feels kind of like the gender reverse of a typical shoujo manga, where a bunch of men sleep, eat, fight and make messes until a girl comes into their lives, cleans up, and forces them to straighten up. Fortunately for us, there’s no harem antics here – mostly as Euphemia, the witch, makes it very clear to her other familiars that Tori is HERS. The love story starts off a bit forced, in my opinion, mostly held back by Tori’s self-hatred and Euphemia’s lack of emotional knowledge, but her solution to “how to get him to stay with me forever” not only drives the rest of the book but amused me. If you’re going to attract a man, go big and solve ALL his friend’s problems so he never worries about them again. The other surprise is that Tori is not involved in any of the action – there’s quite a few battles here, especially at the climax, but Tori really DOES have no really good combat ability, as opposed to others in the genre, and so he stays home, cooks, and cleans. And as a reward he gets a hot witch girlfriend. This is still a title written for teenage boys.

Theoretically, this could easily be a one-shot, as it wraps everything up, but there’s a second volume coming, so I guess we’ll see. This isn’t as good as My Daughter Left the Nest, but it isn’t too bad.