By Buncololi and Kantoku. Released in Japan as “Sasaki to Pi-chan” by Media Factory. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Alice Prowse.

I observed as I was reading this new volume of Sasaki and Peeps that I felt the author had read a lot of the Bakemonogatari Series. Their writing style isn’t anything like NISIOISIN, but this is a story of a guy who saved the world while being surrounded by underage girls, and it also has a tendency sometimes to actively drive its audience away. There’s a scene halfway through the book where Sasaki is trying to rescue the first prince, a rival to Sasaki’s group in the other world, and comes across the aftermath of a sexual assault, which is described in detail. This then turns out to be a trick to get him to lower his guard, and what follows is sort of mind control but also involves homoerotic flourishes and… just describing the scene is difficult. I felt like screaming out, WHY? And yet the rest of the book is quite entertaining. This is, in my mind, very much the same experience I sometimes have with Bakemonogatari, especially when Araragi molests Mayoi for the lulz.

After managing to resolve the cliffhanger stand-off from the previous book, Sasaki, Hoshizaki and Futarishizuka end up spending most of the book dealing with, as the title might give away, a giant sea monster. Sasaki pretty much feels he has to deal with it, as Peeps confirms the monster is actually a dragon from the other world, somehow brought over here. It draws in a worldwide response, which not only brings in Sasaki and company, but the magical girl from previous books, who works with her five-person magical girl team to try to destroy it. Unfortunately, bullets can’t stop it, rockets can’t stop it, we may have to use nuclear force! And then of course there’s also the death battle between angels and demons, which ends up affecting Sasaki very personally when his apartment building is bombed.

As always with this series, I find the neighbor most fascinating, even though it’s been four books and we’re no closer to learning her name. (She in turn does not refer to Sasaki by his name, even after she heard other people use it.) She’s growing more confident and outgoing now that she’s around Abaddon all the time – frankly, he’s a better romantic match for her than Sasaki, though I wouldn’t wish that on him. The aforementioned bomb was meant to kill her, and does kill her mother. Sasaki spends the rest of the book thinking that her somewhat remote attitude is due to processing her grief. In reality, she doesn’t even think of her mother a single time after the bombing. This is not unexpected, given her mother’s abuse of the neighbor girl, but Sasaki’s idea of what she’s like versus her own POV (she’s the only other character who gets POV narration) can be amazing.

As for who Sasaki will end up with in his harem of little girls and girls who look like little girls, if I were a betting man I’d say Futarishizuka, but this volume also makes it clear he has no real romantic or sexual drive at all. That’s not what this series is about. It’s about mashing genres together, making salaryman jokes, and occasionally throwing in truly appalling scenes to weed out the casuals. If that floats your boat, read on.

By Buncololi and Kantoku. Released in Japan as “Sasaki to Pi-chan” by Media Factory. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Alice Prowse.

It’s getting better. There are still a few times where I wince while reading the series, mainly whenever the neighbor girl is trying to manipulate Sasaki into sexually assaulting her (he doesn’t), but for the most part the series is doing what it does best: mashing up genre after genre and watching our deadpan salaryman crush all of them as he flies past. Sasaki may be a bit of a stoic sad sack, but the series wouldn’t work at all if the protagonist were, say, Kazuma from KonoSuba. It not only requires his experience as a Japanese salaryman to drive a lot of the plot, but also his reserve helps the reader glide through the plot without taking anything too seriously. Which is good, because this series is still mostly a comedy, but also bad, because there are a lot of things I think could do with being taken more seriously, such as getting the neighbor girl some therapy.

Sasaki continues to juggle the various light novel plots he finds himself in. In the fantasy world, the count’s daughter Elsa is being taken as a “concubine” by an evil Duke, so Sasaki agrees to help fake Elsa’s death and take her with him to Japan, where she can hide out in a hotel. In the “psychic” world, he continues to investigate mysterious happenings (most of which have to do with one of the other genres he’s in) while trying to get enough blackmail material on his suspicious boss. In the “magical girl” part of the book, he finds her trying to murder another psychic. Sadly, before that gets anywhere, he’s dragged into the “angels vs. demons death game” genre we started to see last time, and finally discovers what the neighbor girl has been up to. Unfortunately, everything completely is blown to hell and back due to one fatal mistake: he lets Peeps get drunk.

I do suspect a lot of the salaryman humor in this lands better in Japan than it does here – he’s constantly apologizing to the girls around him, and thanking them for their support of him, in a way that is meant to evoke the office even as it happens while they’re watching demons blow teenage girls’ heads off. The best part of the book was seeing the neighbor finally get drawn into the main plotline as opposed to being a very uncomfortable side story. She’s still very uncomfortable – I hate using the word yandere, but it does apply here, and her rape/suicide fantasies are deliberately disturbing – but now that she’s involved with everyone else, hopefully she can get a little help? Maybe? The book ends in a four-way Mexican standoff between all of the various underage girls Sasaki has pulled into his orbit – none of whom he’s remotely romantically interested in, but I see what you’re doing there. And that doesn’t even count the traditional “looks nine but is decades older” girl. Which, again, light novel trope.

It appears we’re adding aliens to the stack of plots if the cliffhanger is to be believed, though if I were Sasaki I’d worry more about calming down his not-harem first. This series is absolutely not for everyone, but if you have drenched yourself in light novel plots over the years, it can be a lot of fun.

By Buncololi and Kantoku. Released in Japan as “Sasaki to Pi-chan” by Media Factory. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Alice Prowse.

Content warning before we start: near the end of this volume there is an attempted rape scene of a middle schooler, and it is 100% played completely seriously. It helps to show off the strengths and weaknesses of this series in general. The author clearly wants to take several distinct genres and slam them all against each other. We’ve got isekai fantasy, esper battles, magical girls (and, because it’s the 2020s, they’re dark killer magical girls), and now we’re adding a battle between angels and demons using humans as proxy. This works pretty well when things are ridiculous, with our stoic salaryman Sasaki, his relatively stoic bird, and the amusing Futarishizuka. But it’s also trying to tell the story of an abused, suicidal middle school girl who is also deeply twisted, and it’s telling it with all the gravity it requires. Which… y’know, better than the alternative, but it GRATES against everything else.

As with the first volume of this series, things are slightly more interesting on the Japan side of the equation. This is not to say that the fantasy world doesn’t have a lot of danger, but it’s fantasy isekai danger, which means you have a lot of domineering nobles and sneering merchants. All Sasaki is trying to do is sell off all the modern things he’s bringing from Japan, but now he’s involved in a proxy war between two counts, two princes, and two companies. That said… he’s an experienced Japanese salaryman. This is what he’s GOOD at. He fares far less well when being tasked with his high school girl co-worker to try to recruit a new psychic who has fire powers. This goes disastrously wrong in ways I 100% was not expecting. That said, the most interesting part of the book was when the little princess from the fantasy world stows away when Sasaki returns to Japan… not the last time these two worlds intersect, I hope.

As for “the neighbor”, whose name, we find, is Kurosu, we get a little peek into her horrible, horrible daily life. She has to steal food from school to not starve to death, and it’s middle school, so she also has to avoid the class hottie helping her lest she be in trouble with the other girls. Her mother is sleeping with a guy who tries to rape her. Oh yes, and then there’s the corpse that drops in front of her as she’s walking home. Kurosu’s story has still not really intersected with the main one yet, but I expect that to change in the next book – the “death game” mentioned in the ludicrous subtitle of the volume is hers, not Sasaki’s. We also get a bit more about the magical girl… and it’s not really great news. She’s already killer her comedy animal mascot, she alleges that Sasaki’s employers killed her entire family and friends, and she now doesn’t know whether to trust him or not. So, y’know, just another day at the office.

If you enjoy A Certain Magical Index you might get a big kick out of this, because the chaos is the point. That said, unlike Index, there’s sometimes a realistic and very dark undertone to this series. I’ll read more, but YMMV.