By Choko and kaworu. Released in Japan as “Tanaka-ke, Tensei Suru” by Dragon Novels. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by Sasha Schiller.

It has to be said, if you’re going to have a family consisting entirely of airheads, it’s best to have them not only incredibly overpowered but also on the side of the angels. And make no mistake about it, the whole family are wacky. Emma is the poster child and the worst one, but her father is right behind her, followed by her two brothers. Melsa is easily the most sensible in the family, and we see that here in a book where she gets far more focus than the previous two, but at the end of the day she too is basically saving the world so that they can eat rice and miso again. That said, airheaded does not mean dumb, and all of these folks are rather brilliant, which is also why they know it’s a bad idea to get so many honors from royalty. Emma grasping at straws and asking for the rights to the slum district as her reward is a way of showing off the family’s compassion and observation, and the fact that they’re not going to be “normal” nobles.

We pick up from where we left off at the end of the last book, as Emma has accidentally revealed that she can speak the foreign language that no one else seems to be able to. Indeed, this becomes a more important plot point than I thought, as it’s suggested that it’s not just the diplomats being lazy but some inherent world thing that makes the language incredibly difficult to grasp. This also makes Emma phenomenally valuable. And so the rest of the family have to admit that they can also speak it, which causes even more of a fuss. (Fortunately there’s an in-world handwave they can use so they don’t have to pull out the isekai card.) Now, while Emma continues to socialize, be so kind and caring that she has people thinking she’s a literal saint, and getting bullied in a way that she’s gonna love, her mother is off to the Eastern Empire, where she discovers this is not just a simple famine, and that if something is not done fast the entire nation may be wiped out, people and all.

I usually enjoy a story where everyone is misinterpreting what’s going on, and the Tanaka Family makes that its bread and butter. Everyone except her family assumes Emma is this fragile maiden who is at death’s door after her tragic accident, when really most of the time she’s just overworking herself and avoiding reality. When petty nobles Robert and Brian decide they’re going to get revenge on her, I immediately knew exactly what was going to happen, but that does not diminish the humor of it, and it helps that it also ties in with a more serious plot. Most of all, Emma can get it together, usually when she’s not being stared at by hundreds of nobles. Her forced engagement of the tailor and seamstress was a thing of beauty. (I could have done without another “fantasy worlds don’t know about scurvy” plot, though.)

I assume the next volume will send our family off to the Eastern Empire to battle plant monsters, and I beg them to avoid the obvious fanservice. The fetishes of the leads are bad enough. Still, this remains an absolute hoot, and I can’t wait for the next book.

By Choko and kaworu. Released in Japan as “Tanaka-ke, Tensei Suru” by Dragon Novels. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by Sasha Schiller.

I was a bit reminded of the Dirty Pair while reading this, mostly as Emma tends to think that it’s not her fault a lot of the time she gets into these situations. It kind of is, though? When you create misunderstandings by being an airhead, even if they are good misunderstandings, you have to accept the consequences of your ditzy actions. Here we see Emma take control of the low-level villainess trying to ruin her debut and end up befriending her (and not in a Nanoha way either), we see Emma destroy a noble trying to traumatize her through simply seeing the trauma as a sweet treat, accidentally solve a crime by watching a guy paint, and finally, fail to realize that all these fantasy worlds always have a Japan equivalent, and accidentally just start speaking perfect Japanese to the agog crowd. Sorry, Emma, just as with your brothers, who are also doofuses of their own making, it pretty much IS your fault.

The Tanaka family have arrived in the royal capital, though MUCH later than planned, mostly as Emma can’t stop looking for rare bugs. They barely have time to move into their gigantic mansion they all feel uncomfortable in before Emma and her brothers have to attend a royal ball, where… she’ promptly has wine spilled on her by a petty noble girl… who, admittedly, has been ordered to do it by higher-up petty noble girls. Fortunately, Emma salvages the situation and ends up making a friend of her tormentor, as well as twin sisters from a wealthy port city, a handsome girl who likes to wear the boy’s uniforms, and of course the various boys in love with her, which now includes the handsome girl’s brother. Are there any bad nobles in this series? No fear, we’ve got a nasty one.

There continue to be a few things that I’m not fond of. William as an 11-year-old lolicon is less funny than it sounds, and Emma being a 13-year-old who loves older men is not much better. Mostly it just assures us that this series is not going to be about romance, despite all the men in love with Emma, it’s going to be about the Tanakas upending society. Which has already started, but seems to be getting a few pushes in this book. Emma’s complete lack of trauma after her near-death experience is read my all and sundry as repressed trauma, which works out well for her. Finding that red paint/dye sounds like it will lead to more innovations for their business. And I suspect Emma’s “wait, women just stop education after they get married?” question will be relevant later. Nothing, though, will be as relevant as that cliffhanger, because “I know a foreign language” is going to be hard to explain away.

All this and twins who speak the same thing twice, which I found cute rather than annoying. This remains completely loopy fun.

By Choko and kaworu. Released in Japan as “HTanaka-ke, Tensei Suru” by Dragon Novels. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by Sasha Schiller.

OK, this was an absolute hoot. I suspected I would enjoy it when I first saw the license announcement, but I wasn’t aware just how much fun I would have. It’s not perfect, but the things that annoyed me are things that I tend to get annoyed at in most light novels, rather than being unique to this one (obsession with large breasts by the heroine, the lolicon stuff). Our heroine is fun, the family in general is in that “stupidly competent” genre, where people tend to magically be fantastic at everything and solve everyone’s problems while being blissfully unaware of it. There’s also a really good and deadly serious fight in the third quarter of the book, allowing the author to show that this isn’t just going to be for laughs. I even enjoyed the worldbuilding, which at first suggests this family is reincarnated from our Japan, but as the volume goes on we realize that our Japan is not quite as cat-obsessed as the Tanakas’ Japan, and that something has it in for our heroine.

The Tanakas, consisting of the 65-year-old parents and their three middle-aged children, are sitting down to dinner at the daughter’s condo when they are all killed by what seems to be a massive earthquake. Minato, the daughter and our protagonist, wakes up to find that she is now Emma, a cute 11-year-old noble who is absolutely obsessed with bugs. To her surprise, she finds that Emma’s younger brother William is her own younger brother… and yes, the rest of their family are all Tanakas as well. They’re actually quite wealthy, thanks to their silkworm cultivating, but they’re located, for the moment, out in the sticks. And now they all have past memories, particularly Emma, who was eccentric in Japan and is even more so here, and she’s going to take this new world by storm… after finding a pet cat.

The Tanakas feel like an actual family that’s grown up in close proximity, and I howled at how they all realized that they were actually all Tanakas reincarnated, rather than it just being them with some other family. The siblings act like siblings, with George and William trying desperately to not have Emma somehow blow everything up – especially as she’s a gorgeous little girl in this world, so everyone pays a lot more attention to her. I also loved the subplot with Rose, the king’s favored concubine, who after giving birth to two children is unceremoniously shipped out to the sticks, and has been having a very bad time of it. How she ends up bonding with Emma may annoy me a bit (hint: she’s stacked), but I appreciated how she no longer felt anyone saw her as anything but an extension of her children. As for the monster which leads to the biggest threat in the book, this is another reversal that relies on the reader knowing their light novel lore, and I appreciated the threat – and how it leads to permanent damage, if thankfully less than expected.

The next volume has the family all moving from the countryside into the capital, and I have a suspicion we’re getting a magic academy arc, even if magic is super rare in this world. And yes, I haven’t mentioned the giant cats, and where they come from. Or the giant spider, who would get along well with Mr. Crawly Wawly. Basically, assuming you don’t mind the usual Japanese light novel cliches, this is a huge winner, and I can’t wait for more.