By Kumanano and 029. Released in Japan by PASH! Books. Released in North America by Seven Seas. Translated by Jan Cash & Vincent Castaneda.

As you can probably tell by the cover art, the entire first half of the book sees Yuna outside of the bear suit, dressed in a school uniform so as not to attract the attention she did as a bear last time. (She still has the bear paws and feet, just in case.) And what ends up happening is one of the more fascinating psychological examinations of a character I’ve seen in some time. Yuna, throughout the series, has complained about having to wear the bear outfit all the time, as well as the fact that people can’t recognize her if she’s not dressed like that. In fact, that’s a running gag here. But as she walks around the festival looking like a cute and pretty 15-year-old girl, and more and more people stare at her, the reader starts to realize how much the bear suit is a shield she uses to avoid attention. Yes, she’s the most conspicuous thing ever, but she’s conspicuous as a bear. Yuna as a real girl is still “one step away from a NEET”.

Yuna and her group are ready for the second day of the festival, this time walking around it with Princess Teilia, who has been shooed away from her class’s booth for attracting TOO much attention. She realizes that Yuna has the same problem, so forces her to remove her bear suit and attend the festival that day as a regular girl. They watch plays, concerts, and sword dances. And they also watch a sexist knight captain trying to destroy the women attempting to be knights, which requires Yuna, bear suit or no, to fight back and teach him a lesson. After the festival ends and they all go back home, Yuna is asked by the King to take the mana crystal she got from slaying the Kraken to a desert oasis that desperately needs it, and so she moves south, fighting hornets and running into old friends along the way.

I joked on Twitter that you should take a shot every time Yuna deflects or denies when anyone calls her cute, or pretty, or is obviously staring at her in astonishment. The series rarely looks back at Yuna’s past in Japan, and I don’ really expect this to ever be anything but a character tic of sorts for her, but it really shows off how little socialization she has before meeting Fina. We’ve seen her being blase about her astonishing OP skills and deeds before, and calling acts of kindness and heroism “common sense”, but here we see how viscerally uncomfortable she is with being the center of attention, or having the idea that anyone could be attracted to her. Even when we get the “comedy” scene where she has to have her measurements taken for a swimsuit, which is filled with “lol I have small breasts and hate it” patter, there’s a sense that Yuna’s bear suit is a mask that she can use to hide from everything when she wears it. (I don’t think it’s quite at the level of “Yuna hates herself” per se. But Yuna doesn’t like herself all that much either.

Again, for the most part this series is “cute girls doing cute things”, and fans of that will be quite happy. But I do admire the jagged undercurrents in these waters, and though I don’t expect any emotional payoff, it serves to make me more interested than I might otherwise be.

By Kumanano and 029. Released in Japan by PASH! Books. Released in North America by Seven Seas. Translated by Jan Cash & Vincent Castaneda. Adapted by M.B. Hare.

As Kuma Bear has gone on, and gotten more attention, and particularly when it got the anime, the author has been slowly but subtly erasing its past a bit. I had remarked in my reviews of the first few books that one of the more interesting things about the series was the way that it would balance “cute girls doing bear things” plotlines with some very dark storylines. This short story volume features stories that were bonuses with in-store purchases and also some new stories, and also summarizes the events of Books 1-9. The dark storylines are not even mentioned in the summaries, and have zero stories featuring them. The author realizes that this world being terrible and needing Yuna to save it is not really why people want to read this series, and honestly that decision may be for the best. The undercurrent of “and that evil guy has also been raping those women” was always uncomfortable, and as for Yuna’s parents, well, I don’t think we’ll ever return to Japan, so we don’t need to care. In the meantime, there is bear.

As noted, these are stories that were originally either exclusives you got when you bought the books at a specific store, online short stories, or short stories from the original webnovel. There’s also ten or so new stories exclusive to this volume. One or two of them have Yuna’s POV, but for the most part they’re exactly what the short stories at the end of the main volumes are: a chance to see the same events from the perspective of different characters. There’s Fina’s stress about meeting nobles and royalty, Cliff’s stress about the fact that everything Yuna does changes the world, everyone’s stress at not being able to get the ever-so-popular bear books or bear plushies. There are no real revelations in this book except the most obvious one, which is that Yuna is less of a teen in a bear suit and more of an Act of God.

It really gets hammered home in this book how strange and inexplicable Yuna is to everyone who encounters her. Her desire to not attract attention to herself, discussed in previous books, is laughable here – any time she appears, she immediately does something that makes sure no one will ever forget about her. She’s not even an adventurer here: she’s a savior, changing everyone’s lives for the better (except perhaps the aggrieved Cliff, who ends up having to clean up after her when she nonchalantly does things like digging a tunnel through the mountain). We also get a bit more depth to minor characters like the guild masters, etc, though again, it’s only a tiny bit more. The problem with short stories that are exclusives and not part of the main work is that they can’t actually impact the main work – they have to be entirely optional.

So yes, you can probably skip this, but at the same time, if you’re already enjoying Kuma Bear, you’re probably the sort of person who’d enjoy this anyway. Also, it’s pretty long – there’s 50 short stories here, and the book itself is almost 400 pages. Inoffensive fun.

By Kumanano and 029. Released in Japan by PASH! Books. Released in North America by Seven Seas. Translated by Jan Cash & Vincent Castaneda. Adapted by M.B. Hare.

Another light and fluffy volume, though we are given a hint of the next major villain as Ellelaura has a noble who hates her… and hates Yuna, albeit for different but related reasons. He’s clearly going to be an antagonist at some point, but is merely shown off here in order to provide SOME drama in a book that otherwise meanders even more than a volume of Kuma Bear normally does. As for Yuna, she’s still doing her best to be blase about everything, but it’s getting harder, especially when it gets shoved in her face by multiple people that all the things she’s done, such as the tunnel, or the various new dishes, or taking out an entire noble family, cause lots of problems for the King and other nobles afterward… problems that Yuna herself has remained blissfully unaware of. That said, despite her feeling a bit of guilt over this, I don’t expect ‘The Bear Becomes a Civil Servant” to be a subplot here. Yuna is who she is.

The main plot of this volume is that the Academy is having a school festival, and Shia would like Yuna to come. This ends up roping in Noa, Fina, and Shuri as well, with Yuna acting as their bodyguard. Which, of course, means she has to walk around in the bear suit, which embarrasses her more than usual this time around, as the festival feels very much like the ones she… did not go to back in Japan. Honestly, most of the second half of the book is Yuna getting it ground into her face how much she is NOT a normal teenage girl. Yuna helps Shia’s group by suggesting they make cotton candy, an unknown quantity in this land. She also meets Flora’s older sister Princess Teilia, who has been someone upset at the rest of the Royal Family for hearing all about this amazing bear girl but never meeting her.

If that doesn’t sound like a plot, that’s because it isn’t. I’m happy everyone gets to have fun, but the main drawback to this volume is that there just isn’t any conflict at all. Previous volumes had a contract between Yuna’s fluffy antics and some surprisingly dark storylines, but that does make this one seem a bit shallow. I also urge Fina’s parents and Yuna to do something about that girl’s self-esteem, as there’s “I am modest” and then there’s this. Even as Fina shows off how she’s the best monster butcher in the land (and yes, how to butcher a monster is a booth at the festival), she still acts as if she’s going to be thrown in the dungeon the moment she makes a wrong move. She needs some confidence.

We’ve only finished the first day of the festival, so I assume it will continue into the 12th volume. But before, that… yes, it’s 11.5, featuring short stories posted to the web, original short stories, designs form the artist, and more. So I guess we’ll leave Yuna is festival mode for a few more months.