Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest, Vol. 4

Leave a reply

By Ryo Shirakome and Takayaki. Released in Japan as “Arifureta Shokugyou de Sekai Saikyou” by Overlap. Released in North America digitally by J-Novel Club. Translated by Ningen.

We’ve been waiting for some time for Hajime’s path to intersect with the rest of his high school class, and it finally arrives in this volume, which appropriately has Kaori on the cover. It also provides us with a nice comparison between the two lives the groups are currently leading. Hajime, at the start of the volume, is trying to date his rabbit girl (with Yue’s permission, of course), but cannot help but accidentally get caught up in a string of ludicrous situations that end up with him semi-adopting a small mermaid-ish girl and also casually destroying an underground slave ring and mob over the course of, oh, an hour or so. Meanwhile, his class has gotten down to the 90th floor, and suddenly run into a demon with a bunch of monster minions, many of whom are invisible, and get their clocks absolutely cleaned. It’s serious and dramatic and… you’re counting the pages waiting for Hajime to show up again.

There are a few interesting characters among the class herd, of course. Kaori is still just as obsessed as she ever was – in fact, we get a hilarious extra story showing off how obsessed with Hajime she was from the moment she first saw him – and it’s no surprise that the volume ends with her joining Hajime’s party, though not without difficulty – it’s hard to topple Yue from the top, and she doesn’t, but like all the other girls, Yue’s absolute strength of love for Hajime gives her the courage to confess her own. Shizuku rises from “snarky best friend” to top-tier in this volume, proving smart, capable, and wielding an amazingly sharp tongue. The way she gets Hajime to promise not to mistreat Kaori is the funniest part of the book, and I won’t spoil it. She also gives excellent advice to Kouki, the actual cliched “hero called to save the world”, though I’m not sure it will stick. Kouki sounds like the author will always want him to be teeth-grindingly wrong in a Dudley Do-Right way, so I suspect the next time he meets Hajime things won’t go well – particularly after that cliffhanger.

But yeah, I had a lot of trouble remembering who was who in the rest of the class, and those I did remember didn’t appeal to me (sorry, Suzu, you need more in your quiver than “comedy lesbian”). And to a degree that’s the point. Interesting as it was to see the class struggle and mostly fail against a string of monsters far beyond their abilities, and deal with the idea that they’ll actually have to kill enemies, that’s not what we’re reading Arifureta for. The reader wants Hajime impaling monsters with one blow, Yue burning everything in sight, and Shea swinging her hammer around (and also riding Hajime’s faux motorcycle, the other contender for “funniest moment” in the book). Like other ridiculous isekai series (hi, Smartphone), it works best when it’s ridiculous. That said, the contrast between ridiculous and desperately serious here made this an excellent volume.

Unmagical Girl, Vol. 1

Leave a reply

By Ryouichi Yokoyama and Manmaru Uetsuki. Released in Japan as “”Hihou” Mahou Shoujo no Sonogo no Nichijou” by Ichijinsha, serialized in the magazine PoniMaga (Pony Canyon). Released in North America by Seven Seas. Translated by Beni Axia Conrad. Adapted by Gretchen Schrafft.

Expectations can be tricky. It’s almost impossible to go into reading something without an idea of what you’ll think of it. When I first saw that Seven Seas had licensed Unmagical Girl, my first thought was to dismiss it as another one of the endless series of “let’s kill of magical girls in a grimdark way” series that the companies have been licensing in an effort to have the next Madoka Magica. I was therefore pleased to see that that isn’t the case for this title. This is the sotry of what happens when a magical girl ends up in the real world, and the fallout from such. The cover depicts the titular magical girl walking through a shopping district, looking pensive. I was thus expecting some sweet yet melancholic soul searching. Wrong again. Now I’ve actually read the title, and it’s clear that we’re going after broad comedy. If you liked Aho Girl, you’ll like this.

Our heroine – or, more accurately, our straight man – is Mayuri, a plain glasses-wearing girl who “doesn’t have any friends” in the best protagonist of a manga tradition. Her father used to direct anime that was known for being “niche”, which is to say not very popular. He did have a title called “Pretty Angel Nirvana” which is now very popular… about five spinoffs later, and now no one really remembers or cares about the original. Oh, and he’s dead. Her mother sends Mayuri an old computer with some of his stuff on it, though, and after accidentally crying tears on the computer while wishing for a friend, Mayuri is startled to find the computer exploding, and out stepping NirBrave, the ditzy yet powerful heroine from the original series. She’s now in the real world, which poses endless problems, as she reacts to problems in a magical girl way, eats like a magical girl heroine (i.e. a ton), and is, in general, somewhat obnoxious.

How much you enjoy this very much depends on your love of loud, brash comedy. I compared it to Aho Girl earlier, and it’s pretty accurate – I had a lot of fun reading the manga, but it quickly began to pall as I realized that it seemed to be hitting a lot of the same notes. There are some amusing things here – NirBrave’s horror at reading a porn doujinshi of her series made me chuckle, and the landlady is an excellent caricature of the type of landlady you see in a lot of series like these, who has the ability to get money out of a stone. Later in the series we also get some more magical girls and magical villains, as apparently NirBrave’s arrival in the real world started a trend, and we see NirBrave facing off against her fellow magical girl NirWind. Unfortunately, its occasional attempts at depth and pathos fall pretty flat. It’s not for kids – there are a few blatant panty shots here and there, and a nude transformation sequence that seems to inflate NirBrave’s bust by a factor of three – and it’s not really for magical girl fans either. If you like broad, slap-on-the-black style humor, though, you may have fun with Unmagical Girl.

Kieli: The Dead Sleep in the Wilderness

1 Reply

By Yukako Kabei and Shunsuke Taue. Released in Japan by ASCII Mediaworks. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Alethea and Athena Nibley.

This is a digital re-release of a novel series that Yen originally published back in 2009, before the light novel boom. Which is good, as this really doesn’t feel like a light novel. Honestly, if it weren’t for the interstitial illustrations, which make Kieli look sort of cute and manga-ish, I wouldn’t even guess the author was Japanese. Instead, it feels like an odd fusion of children’s fantasy and Western, as if C.S. Lewis and Louis L’Amour had decided to collaborate. The main thrust of the story (clearly written as a one-shot, though there are eight other volumes after this) is to show the growth of its title character, a young girl living in a typical repressive pseudo-English boarding school that just happens to be in a post-apocalyptic world run by the Church. Fortunately, she’s got a perky roommate for company. Unfortunately, she also ahs a secret: she can see and interact with ghosts.

And yes, it has a new cover for the Western edition, which is meant to attract casual non-anime fan readers. If I recall correctly, Yen also did this with Spice & Wolf and Haruhi Suzumiya. At first I thought the cover image was a camera – it’s not till we get further into the book that you realize that it’s a radio, possessed by a ghost of an old soldier. The book gets started when Kieli and her roommate Becca meet a seemingly dead young man in the train station right before holidays. This is Herbie… pardon me, Harvey, who is an Undying, a former supersoldier used to end the war that was the cause of the apocalypse mentioned earlier. Like most inhuman yet sentient weapons created to fight a war, the Church has a very different view on him now. The thrust of the book involves Kieli accompanying him on a train journey, supposedly so she can get some history to write an essay for school, but in reality because these two are simply drawn to each other, and also because Kieli draws trouble to her wherever she walks.

The book is well-written and the characters are enjoyable, particularly Kieli, as she’s just the right combination of “intelligent and precocious girl” while still occasionally being a child. The first two-thirds of the book function as interlocking short stories, as we see Kieli and Harvey go to a new place and Kieli run into what she first thinks is a person but turns out to be a ghost – indeed, by the end of the book I was starting to wonder if anyone Kieli was going to run into was actually alive. Even the villain is an Undying like Harvey. It’s not clear how special her power to see ghosts is – Harvey doesn’t seem impressed, but that’s more a function of his personality, and the villain seems to want to torture her more than use her abi8lities. It’s a nice way to be able to show that the series can go on if enough people read it – and indeed, it did continue, with Vols. 2 and 3 due out later this month on Kindle, Nook, etc.

After a December filled with a more modern strand of light novel plots, I enjoyed reading the more subdued and thoughtful Kieli. Recommended for those who like teen fantasy but avoid the traditional Japanese light novel cliches.