By Ko Hiratori. Released in Japan by Hayakawa Shoten. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by Emily Balistrieri.
Before I begin, let’s state the obvious: this book is for those over the age of eighteen. The review will not have strong language itself, but reader discretion is advised.
Wow. I didn’t know much about this going into it. When I first heard about the license, I thought it sounded absolutely dreadful, but I was assured that it was not actually meant to be a servicey title and that it would reward the patient and tolerant reader. The assurance was correct, as I am very grateful to have read this title, which I thought was excellent. That said, I know several people who started to read this and were unable to get past the first two sections or so, and I can understand why. The premise sounds like your standard isekai: two kids are run over by a truck and die, meet God, and the buy gets cheat powers because this is an adventuring isekai sort of world they’re going to be dropped in. Unfortunately, it’s also virulently misogynistic. The basic roles for adult women are slave, wife, or sex worker. Haru chooses the last.
What follows is Haru going about her daily life, which involves blunt descriptions of the sex work she does. Haru’s narration is one of the main reason to get the book, as she pulls no punches about the sort of life she has to lead. The boy she came from Japan with is an absolute creep, the sort of guy who thinks he would be doing Haru a favor by letting her become his maid. This is not, by the way, a book to read for those who want to be aroused by talk of sex. There IS a lot of talk of sex, but it’s not meant to arouse you in the slightest. There are several rape scenes throughout the book, and they are as horrible as you can imagine. Haru tends to “dull her emotions” a bit during them, but as a reader you’re still horrified. That said, you do also learn to enjoy the happier times in her life as well, such as tea with her colleagues and, in the most positive and fun chapter in the book, playing “Kick the Can” with a group of kids.
About 2/3 of the way through the book there is a spoiler, which I won’t disclose, but it does tie into the main plotline and also makes sense in terms of what’s come before. Aside from Haru and Chiba (the Japanese guy), the most interesting character to me was Kiyori, a pure Japanese priestess type who wants to go adventuring, but is not allowed to without a guy. Kiyori’s the only other one whose narrative perspective we get in the book (which is otherwise Haru’s), and you get the sense as you get to the end of the book that she’d much rather be in a relationship with Haru than with any of the horrible adventurer creeps who are trying to team up with her. Unfortunately, that is not a very likely option either because, as I said earlier, virulently misogynistic world.
There are a bunch of other things in the book I enjoyed, at times the writing is very subtle. (Discussion of a reincarnation made me smile a bit, especially given the plot that leads up to it.) It apparently was a polarizing book in Japan, though not so much for the explicit sex worker content as for being an isekai at all – this is a novel, not a light novel, and fans of the publisher were upset they sank to publishing one. It’s a novel that needs warnings before you read it, but I feel that overall it ends on a positive and forward-looking note. Indeed, it feels a bit open-ended, and the final short story implies the author has a lot more they’d like to write about. If you’re tired of the standard “hero goes to another world and gets superpowers and a harem of girls” stories, this is a grim yet well-told response to it.
To say JK Haru was garbage is a disservice to garbage. That would imply it had anything in it that was worth salvaging, because at least you can recycle garbage into something better. To say JK Haru was shit is a disservice to shit, because at least you can use it as manure, add it to the soil, and grow something worthwhile in it. JK Haru is nothing worthwhile. It is truly and utterly worthless in every possible regard. It is not entertaining. It is not clever. It is not insightful. It repeats the same old criticisms of a genre everyone has known the problems of since the 1990s with the self-righteous certainty a US congressman issuing bills on something he knows nothing about. Hiratori has done the unforgivable. He has forced me to defend isekai. Let me begin by saying I despise isekai. It is my least favourite genre and I consider it to be a waste of bandwidth, paper, and potential and something only losers take seriously. It makes me pity the Japanese people, in addition to their work hours and high suicide rates, their fiction market is oversaturated with low-effort escapist shit instead of anything meaningful. And JK Haru, instead of addressing these concerns, says that every problem caused by their society, every feeling of alienation, is always one hundred percent a moral failing. I won’t mince words, because this is evil. It is cowardly, spineless, dickless, mindless, victim-blaming evil. You have the fucking audacity to claim you are punching up at power, when all you have done is punch down at the people the patriarchy does not reward at all. It is not even effective as propaganda: it simply presents a strawman, and condemns them to elevate another while giving them absolutely no route for redemption at all whatsoever. Chiba is not a human being but a punching bag on which Harutori can infinitely offload his sneering, hateful, bitter, miserable contempt at anyone who consumes isekai. Let me remind you the author is a man. JK Haru reflects badly on its author as much as the state of the Ganges river reflects badly on India. At this point, we should know what kind of man writes these kinds of stories, and they do so to elevate themselves – fucktards like Andrew Dobson who hide behind women thinking it makes them saints. Around the 2010s, many friendless nerds realized they were being judged so harshly by an increasingly feminist culture because they were not living up to their standards as men, and because of their low status were in fact being held to higher standards of woman-worship, which is the social equivalent of taxing the poor more than the rich. So to escape this judgement they began to perform femininity believing it would not only free them from social standards and moral judgement, but give them the right to judge men regardless of their current status and by fucking GOD it worked. Of COURSE they kept making their shitty male power fantasies, condemned people for doing it, and started imagining themselves as hot girls while doing the same. I will say again this is not even marginally convincing at all whatsoever. Communists tell you you’re helping other people, you’re helping society. At least scammers want “GIVE ME UR STUFF!!!” JK Haru on the other hand, is Hiratori demanding endless nonstop worship and adherence towards womens perpetually shifting stupid fucking demands and judjgement that are exponentionally harsher depending on how much you already have. You gain nothing. THEY gain nothing, and if so marginally. Nobody gains anything but you HAVE TO fucking worship them. So fuck you. We are told to “open our hearts” by Haru and then we see Chiba get punished and mocked and called an idiot for doing so seconds later. This is presented as profound, timeless wisdom. That is not fair. Harutori (at this point, Haru is just Hiratori in drag) is demanding compassion and empathy he is completely incapable of giving anyone, yet we are obligated to do so, JUST BECAUSE. And you don’t gain anything from this exchange, thinking you deserve anything like respect is… what’s that word they love so much, aye? Oh yes, “Entitlement”! Not only do they demand ideological conformity, but the fucking GALL for hiratori to say “Oh this is what YOU want, you should be ashamed of it, every atom in your body should be for female approval” (no, it’s not, you presumptuous cunt.” I am not kidding when I say this guy and every shitty potboiler he has crapped out deserves to die alone and forgotten, completely unmourned. His lies are wrapped in so many false and presumptuous assumptions that are so transparently dishonest and it’s almost insulting, he has presupposed everyone’s values even before the novel started, he assumes that we already believe that female approval is the sole fucking measure of your moral virtue. It is not even effectively manipulative. It is just stupid fucking demands and deceitful emotional scenes designed to trick you into feeling certain emotions. You will see brain-dead moronic stupid retarded lobotomized dumbass idiots in review pages and blogs call it thought-provoking. It is not thought-provoking because it only provokes two kinds of thoughts, the exact one Harutori wanted you to feel (to root for his designated good guys and to jeer at his designated bad guys) and the feeling of amazement at how utterly retarded you’d have to be to fall for this shit. If you’re reading this I know you think I’m mad and yes you’re right. And so am I. I’m mad that I had to watch this piece of shit get lauded as a masterpiece before they moved on to the next piece of lesbian torture porn to prove they’re not one of those icky male power fantasy loving incels. As a matter of fact one of this book’s fans is called beep_repair on mangadex, this fat neckbeard (he admitted he looked like a fat isekai noble who got castrated for rape, and as you can imagine he was REALLY excited by that scene) LOVES rape porn, absolutely LOVES it, absolutely marinating his hammy greasy sloppy piggy fat folds in it… at the same time he wants the histrionic harpies to think he’s a good boy, so he moralizes against the very rape porn he masturbates to, calling them “pathetic little creeps” and waxing poetic about their “shrimp dicks” with a rich vocabulary borrowed from femdom humiliation porn… which is how these nerds like to perform femininity as a moral shield. That should give you the idea of the kind of person this book attracts. And I say fuck it. Fuck every single character in this book. I felt nothing but disgust and hatred for every single character, the author, and the ass kissing audience. i do not see human beings, I see puppets that exist to prove his retarded argument, and even with a whole universe that exists to prove Harutori right,he fails. That is the one word I would used to describe JK Haru and Hiratori. Failure. It is a failed work of art with a failed message, a failed work of propaganda by a failed human being, a failed artist, a failed man, who used to write erotica and presumably filled with resentment for his audience, which it also failed to impress anyone but a small group of isekai-addicted faggots who want to prove how much better they are than people who like isekai. Fail. Fail. Failed. Forever. Failure. Faily faily faily fail and fuck you. FUCK jk haru, fuck sumo, kiyori, Chiba, the rainman, shequeraso, lupe, that pimp, those kids from the kick the can arc, killak, the judge, buffness, bisque, god, haru and chibas family and friends, Hiratori, J-Yamada, Aimee Zink (who I might add is an antifa member who was arrested for assault on 23 sep 2020) and whoever else I missed. The human digestive tract is 9 meters long but if I were to fill all of it with shit after I forged on crunchwrap supremes, Abdul kalam’s “agni and Prithvi” extra spicy vindaloo, Gary Carl Simmons Jr’s last meal (1 Pizza Hut Super Supreme pizza: tomato sauce, mushrooms, onions, jalapeño pepper slices and pepperoni, 1 regular pizza: 3 cheeses, olives, bell peppers, tomato, garlic and Italian sausage, 10 (8 oz) packs of Parmesan cheese ,10 (8 oz) packs of Ranch dressing, 1 (16 oz) family size bag of Doritos nacho cheese chips, 8 oz of jalapeño nacho cheese , 4o sliced jalapeño peppers ,2 large strawberry milkshakes, 2 (20 oz) Cherry Coke, 1 super-sized order McDonald’s French fries (extra ketchup and mayonnaise), 2 pints strawberry ice cream) and Russell Brewer’s Last Meal (two chicken-fried steaks, a triple-meat bacon cheeseburger, a cheese omelet, fried okra, a pound of barbecue, three fajitas, a meat lover’s pizza, a pint of ice cream, peanut butter fudge, and three root beers) that would not be 1/10000 enough to show what I feel about JK Haru. FUCK JK HARU.