Monthly Archives: November 2017

So I’m a Spider, So What?, Vol. 1

Leave a reply

By Okina Baba and Tsukasa Kiryu. Released in Japan as “Kumo Desu ga, Nani ka?” by Fujimi Shobo. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Jenny McKeon.

The entire genre of ‘transported to another world’ (isekai) has grown massive and huge. Be it via dimensional portal, game gone wrong, or simply death and reincarnation, Japanese teens and young adults keep finding ways to enter a new world, pick up a sword, and start grinding like it’s 1999. And as you can imagine, it’s becoming harder and harder to stand out from the crowd, to have a premise that does not make the average reader go “oh, this again”. And thus we have the influx of being reborn in another world as something weird. Next month we’ll get slime monsters, and in April we may hit peak ridiculousness with vending machines, but for the moment we have spiders, as our vaguely named heroine (we hear about a mean nickname, but her actual name seems deliberately vague) wakes up after an explosion seemingly destroys her classroom to find… she’s a spider. A tiny, weak spider, the sort you kill in Level 1 of your new game. Now what?

To be honest, the other light novel title I kept comparing this to as I read it is Arifureta. The bulk of the book is similar to the middle of that series, with the spider getting into tricky situations, figuring out how to survive them, and getting increasingly strong, even if she may not realize it. Contrasting this we cut back to her other classmates, who have also been reincarnated in the same fantasy world. Some get off well – Shun is a prince with high magical talent, though he’s still a newbie to actually using it. His (male) best friend from their previous world is reincarnated as a (female) noble, though (s)he seems to take it in stride. And one of the “queen bee” types from their class is a dragon, and Shun’s familiar. We even get the cute but immature young teacher who’s there to help find the rest of her class so that she can show them the right path, which is pretty much exactly like Arifureta.

Whether you like Spider So What (which is what I’ve started to call it) depends on how much you can deal with the spider’s narration, which I would describe as first-person hyperactive teenager. In her previous human life, our heroine was apparently a quiet girl, more comfortable gaming at home than interacting with others. Which is fine, but it doesn’t quite mesh with her personality as a spider, which feels like one two hundred page run-on sentence. The plot is simple – watch her kill and eat things (even if it’s a bad idea), gain more experience and levels (which she (and we) can see, in a manner similar to the Death March books), and gradually get into some pretty badass battles – the fight against the bees near the end was probably the best scene in the book, and shows off how far she’s come. Aside from a “it was me all along” moment when we realize the egg she couldn’t open was actually the dragon egg that housed another reincarnated student, she never meets the rest of the class – their narratives are mostly separate. I’m not sure how long that will go on, though.

So I’m a Spider, So What? is not quite as goofy as I’d expected, and when you remove the veneer it’s actually pretty similar to other titles in this genre. But the fact that the lead is a teenage girl, even if she’s a spider, is refreshing, and she’s certainly plucky. I found this pretty decent, and I’ll read more to see where it goes.

Arakawa Under the Bridge, Vol. 1

Leave a reply

By Hikaru Nakamura. Released in Japan in two separate volumes by Square Enix, serialized in the magazine Young Gangan. Released in North America by Vertical Comics. Translated by Andrew Cunningham.

Some series work better in collected in volumes, and some work better in a magazine next to other titles that aren’t very much like it. I’m pretty sure that Arakawa Under the Bridge is one of the latter. Of course, since we don’t have too much opportunity to read Young Gangan over here, we’re only getting the volumes – and even worse, this is an omnibus edition, collecting two of them at once. I say “even worse” even though I did enjoy Arakawa a great deal, but it is, at heart, a gag comic, with its chapters being approximately 6-8 pages, and such series always have to deal with the question of “can this hold up when we get to Vol. 7 or 8?”. Even Nakamura’s other famous (and unlicensed) series, Saint Young Men, deals with this, as despite its fantastic and slightly blasphemous premise, it’s much the same – it rides on its weird humor. So far, though, Arakawa is worth the read.

The premise is paper-thin. Our hero is a successful, rich young man who lives his life (thanks to his somewhat abusive father) with the philosophy “never be in debt to anyone”. Then, through a series of ridiculous circumstances, he gets his life saved by Nino, a self-proclaimed Venusian woman who lives under one of the city bridges of the Arakawa river (so no, she is not the Arakawa under the bridge). He is thus forced to try to repay her so that he can move on with his life… which proves impossible, and he soon finds himself inveigled in her world as part-boyfriend, part-tsukkomi, meeting a series of increasingly ridiculous people who also live under the bridge. Despite apparently being a young heir with an important job in a highrise, no one from his family or friends ever comes looking for him. The outside world is not important in this. It’s about the weirdos.

Supposedly, Nino is the first of the weirdos that we meet, but she proves to be the calm, stable center of the series, her deadpan earnestness giving it grounding. It also allows the reader to make an emotional connection between her and “Recruit” (their nickname for our hero, which I tend to think of him as because his last name is too long), and I was surprised and pleased to find a few heartwarming, sweet moments scattered in among the zaniness. You actually want to see if they can form a real relationship. Might be a bit difficult, though, given the other cast members, which include a man who dresses as a kappa, a guy with a star for a head, a male nun who looks like he stepped out of the pages of Black Lagoon, a young yakuza wannabe girl, and a farm woman who confuses ‘teasing’ with abusive language.

As you might imagine, this series is for people who enjoy amusing, strange characters interacting. If you want narrative or character development, I’d look elsewhere. But Arakawa made me laugh, and by the end I wanted to see more of them. That’s the important thing.

Outbreak Company: The Power of Moe

Leave a reply

By Ichiro Sakaki and Yuugen. Released in Japan by Kodansha. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by Kevin Steinbach.

It has almost become a running gag to say this, but I went into reading the first volume of Outbreak Company with rock-bottom expectations. The subtitle of the first volume alone made me roll my eyes, and the description of the plot didn’t help one bit. And yet once again, somehow, J-Novel Club has managed to snag a series that sounds wretched and shows that it’s actually pretty readable and entertaining once I get into it. Admittedly, the author is an old hand at novels rather than a web novelist turned published pro, which helps. Sakaki’s previous series include Scrapped Princess and Chaika the Coffin Princess, but we level up a bit here, as Outbreak Company has a Queen. The series is filled with cliches – our hero is an otaku and a bit of a perv, one heroine’s breasts are there to be pointed out every single time, and the Queen is sixteen but looks about eight. Fortunately, the book does things with these cliches.

Our hero is Shinichi, who’s living at home and has not been to school in about a year, but instead spends his life playing games, watching anime, and buying goods. After his parents give him an ultimatum (which may be the funniest scene in the novel, and I think was censored in the anime), he goes to find a job, and winds up interviewing at a sketchy company which tests his otaku knowledge. Mid-interview, he passes out and wakes up in a fantasy world. Turns out it’s connected to Japan, and the JSDF have assigned him to introduce otaku pursuits – anime, manga, etc. – to this fantasy kingdom. For cultural reasons. He’s assigned a maid (from the fantasy world) and a JSDF bodyguard (from Japan), both of whom are cute young women. And the Queen is also a cute young woman, as he observes the moment he sees her – though “little girl” is what her appearance screams. As the book goes on it seriously examines the ridiculousness of the premise, the casual racism and classism that infests the fantasy world, and whether Shinichi is really a good guy or not.

As I said, the series is rife with cliches, but they never actually descend to the creepy or annoying level, much to my surprise. Shinichi is a PG-rated otaku, looking at large breasts and going on about maids because he’s a teenager, but never going further than that, and he also has a genuine sense of right and wrong, which I suspect will get him in trouble in future books. His reaction to the treatment of Myucel, the half-elf maid who serves him (and falls in love with him almost immediately, mostly as he treats her like a real person) and Brooke (a lizardman servant, which does freak him out a bit at first) is not as subtle as the casual reader might like, but after so manty fantasy light novels where the reaction of the hero to slavery existing is “welp”, this is refreshing. And while he has a magic ring to communicate with others, it doesn’t work on other media, so translating is desperately needed – no easy outs in his new job.

This was clearly written from the start to be an ongoing series rather than “do the first one and we’ll see how it sells”, and it ends on a highly ambiguous note that makes the reader want to get the next book. I definitely will. As long as it sticks to gently poking at otaku cliches rather than leaping into them face-first, and keeps on tearing down the class and race-based structure of this fantasy universe, Outbreak Company is worth your time.