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Manga the Week of 8/20/25

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SEAN: It’s time to play the music, it’s time to light the lights, it’s time to meet some manga.

ASH: I reflexively sang that to myself.

SEAN: Just one release from Yen Press, the 9th volume of The Girl I Saved on the Train Turned Out to Be My Childhood Friend.

No debuts from Viz, but we do see Battle Royale: Enforcers 4, Cosmos 2, Hirayasumi 6, Hunter x Hunter 3-in-1 3, Jujutsu Kaisen 27, Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc. 9, Mission: Yozakura Family 18, Rooster Fighter 8, Show-ha Shoten! 8, Snowball Earth 6, and The Way of the Househusband 14.

ASH: I really should get caught up with The Way of the Househusband.

SEAN: Tokyopop, shockingly, has a one-shot BL title debuting. The magazine is from RED as well, can you believe it? The Desert Butterfly Yearns to Be Caught (Sajou no Chou wa Torawaretai) stars the young prince of a desert country and his ex-slave/bodyguard. They like each other, but can’t be honest with each other.

ASH: That is shocking!

SEAN: We also get Confessions of a Shy Baker 5 and World’s End Blue Bird 4 (the final volume).

Titan Manga has Somali and the Forest Spirit 3.

SuBLime debuts A Man Who Defies the World of BL (Zettai BL ni Naru Sekai VS Zettai BL ni Naritakunai Otoko), which runs in Kurage Bunch. Our theoretically straight protagonist has just realized that he’s in a BL manga! And he has to comment on all the tropes he sees around him. This is a comedy, obviously, and much anticipated.

MICHELLE: Huh. I don’t usually love fourth-wall-breaking, but this could be potentially fun.

ANNA: It does sound amusing.

ASH: That it does.

SEAN: Steamship has a second volume of Adored By an Elite Officer and a third volume of Loving Moon Dog.

From Square Enix Manga we get Wandering Witch 6 and Wash It All Away 3.

Seven Seas time. Let’s begin with the danmei debut, My Husband and I Sleep in a Coffin. A “reclusive gay virgin” wakes up one day to find he’s in the body of a thousand-year-old corpse. What’s more, sleeping next to him is an immortal warrior obsessed with his dead lover… who is that same corpse.

MICHELLE: Hm.

ANNA: It might be too many corpses for me.

ASH: Granted, I think I prefer that they are both corpses…

SEAN: Also danmei: Ballad of Sword and Wine: Qiang Jin Jiu 5.

Lost in the Cloud is a manwha/webtoon about a guy who’s been snapping pictures of his crush… till he’s caught by his crush’s best friend! Blackmail ensues.

ASH: As it so often does in these cases.

SEAN: Sacrifice of My Manly Soul (Ore no Dankon ♡ Sacrifice) is a seinen title from Young Magazine Web. A boy who has to avoid debt by dressing as a girl and attending an all-girls’ school finds the entire student council are all doing the same thing.

ASH: Well, then!

SEAN: Also from Seven Seas: I Want to Escape from Princess Lessons 3, The Ideal Sponger Life 19, It Takes More Than a Pretty Face to Fall in Love 3, My Girlfriend’s Child 8, My New Boss Is Goofy 2, No Love Zone 4, Tiger and Dragon 4 (the final volume), The Too-Perfect Saint 3, and Yonoi Tsukihiko’s Happy Hell 3.

One Peace Books has The New Gate 15.

Kodansha time. My Instructor Won’t Yield (Chiba Kyoukan wa Nabikanai) is a new BL title. A kind driving instructor has all the girls after him, but he rebuffs them all. Then he has to teach the “school prince”, who is also secretly a manga artist.

MICHELLE: This looks kinda cute!

SEAN: Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-kun: IruMafia Edition (Mairimashita! Iruma-kun if – Episode of Mafia) is an AU spinoff asking what would happen if Iruma was a mafia member?

MICHELLE: Oh, dear.

SEAN: Also, out *this* week, as they updated their website after I went to press, is Mobile Suit Gundam: THE ORIGIN Deluxe 1. Which is a 900-page oversized behemoth.

ASH: Dang! The original release could do some legitimate physical damage, I can only image what this edition can do. (By the way, this series is excellent, in case anyone missed it the first time around.)

SEAN: We also see Go! Go! Loser Ranger! 14, Hozuki’s Coolheadedness 27, I See Your Face, Turned Away 4, Issak Omnibus 2, Noragami Omnibus 9 (the final volume), Rent-A-Girlfriend 32, Saving 80,000 Gold in Another World for My Retirement 12, and Shangri-La Frontier 18.

ASH: Right! I meant to read the first Issak omnibus!

SEAN: And the digital title is Matcha Made in Heaven 12.

Kana has Eden of Witches 4.

J-Novel Club has one print title, The Misfit of Demon King Academy 6.

A quiet week for JNC digitally. We get Black Summoner 21, Goodbye Overtime! 5, the 3rd manga volume of I Only Have Six Months to Live, So I’m Gonna Break the Curse with Light Magic or Die Trying, Knock Yourself Out! The Goddess Beat the Final Boss in the Tutorial, So Now I’m Free to Do Whatever 2, and A Late-Start Tamer’s Laid-Back Life 13.

Ize Press gives us A Business Proposal 10 (the final volume), Kill the Villainess 3, Murderous Lewellyn’s Candlelit Dinner 2, Solo Leveling 13, The Villainess Is a Marionette 2, and Unholy Blood 7.

Ghost Ship has Do You Like Big Girls? 7-8 and Please Go Home, Miss Akutsu! 9.

Airship gives us print books for Easygoing Territory Defense by the Optimistic Lord 5, I’m the Evil Lord of an Intergalactic Empire! 9, and Sword of the Demon Hunter 10.

The early digital debut is Breathless Time Traveler (Anata wa Koko de, Iki ga dekiru no?), a one-shot from the author of Toradora!. A college girl is killed in a traffic accident, but now finds herself time looping up to the moment of her death! Can she fix things?

ANNA: I’m curious about this!

ASH: I could be pretty easily be convinced to read it.

SEAN: Also in early digital: Drugstore in Another World 7.

Why do we always come here? To read manga. What are you buying?

Bofuri: I Don’t Want to Get Hurt, So I’ll Max Out My Defense, Vol. 16

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By Yuumikan and KOIN. Released in Japan as “Itai no wa Iya nano de Bōgyoryoku ni Kyokufuri Shitai to Omoimasu” by Kadokawa Books. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Andrew Cunningham.

Bofuri is, in the end, a series about what goes on inside a VRMMO, and most readers are here to follow the fun antics of Maple and Sally. Now, there are real players involved here, Kaede and Risa, and we have seen them on occasion. But we rarely have a chance to be in their heads for more than a couple of pages before we’re back in the gaming world seeing Maple eat a giant lump of poison. The series began with a brief mention that Risa had tried to get Kaede into some other games, but nothing clicked till New World Online. This volume, however, very definitely says the end is near. And as a result, we’re getting a little (very little) background into Kaede and Risa. Which is good! But given it’s the real world, we may actually get some real-life drama in Bofuri, the anti-consequences series. As frankly, Risa is starting to get very desperate about gaming with Kaede as much as possible before it’s too late.

Last time I said there would be an after-event recap of some sort, but nope. We’re straight into more gaming, as everyone goes around clearing dungeons, battling new monsters, and preparing for the 10th stratum. When that’s finally revealed, it’s shown to be the previous nine floors all in one – each section is one of the prior floors. The goal here is to Kill The Demon Lord, so Maple and Sally and the rest of Maple Tree start investigating to figure out how to do that. And they want to do it fast, as Maple and Sally have made things clear at last: they’re going to be third-year high school students soon, which means the days of gaming for hours a day are gone forever. It’s time to start getting serious about college.

It’s been clear from a while ago, and is made more explicit here, that Sally wants to fight Maple in a PvP battle, but holds off as she knows Maple doesn’t enjoy those. Maple is aware of this, though, and as their deadline draws near she’s starting to dwell on it more. She has no trouble fighting (and destroying) Frederica, mind you, but Sally is different. Back in the real world, not only is Risa anxious about those halcyon days with Kaede ending forever, but there’s also implications about Kaede’s past. We’d guessed that they’d been friends since they were kids, which is mentioned here without any detail. But now we hear how much Maple has changed since starting New World Online, and that she had never been so excited or enjoyed herself so much before. I want to know more about this! What was pre-Bofuri Kaede like? Was she bullied? Was she introverted? What’s going on here? And is there anything besides her latent crush and possibly different colleges that is the reason Risa is so desperate to enjoy this time with Kaede while she can?

There’s so much story I want to know about, and we get more of it here than most other volumes. But there’s still very little of it. Trust me, if you want to see Maple create poison copies of herself that explode, you’re also in the right place. Next time, probably more grinding and investigation.

Engaging with the Plot: A Former Cat’s Attempt to Save Her Now Temporary Fiancé, Vol. 1

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By Usagi Hoshimi and Qi234. Released in Japan as “Konyakusha-sama ni wa Unmei no Heroine ga Arawaremasu ga, Zantei Konyaku Life wo Mankitsushimasu! Anata no Noroi, Kiraware Akujo no Watashi ga Toicha Dame desu ka?” by Earth Star Luna. Released in North America by J-Novel Heart. Translated by Minna Lin.

It’s always dangerous when you’re making stew. When you have something that’s just “let’s throw as many common ingredients into the pot as we can, stir it up, and eat that for supper”. A lot of the time it just ends up being an ugly, overcomplicated mess. Sometimes, though, all the ingredients manage to coalesce into something really tasty. You wouldn’t dare call it original – the exact opposite – but the common muck ends up being just what you wanted. We get that here. This is a villainess story with a capital V, having all the trimmings, and yet it works because it doesn’t take itself remotely seriously (at times I wondered if it was actually trying to be a parody) and because it has a really good story to tell about love, and what happens to people who get it and people who don’t.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but we open the book with our main character being dumped publicly by her fiance, the second prince. Lucille was well-meaning and did her princess lessons well, but she knew the princess didn’t love her and was trying much too hard to change that. Now she’s engaged to the “cursed marquess”. Felix. This causes her to pass out… and when she wakes up she has memories of her past… eight lives. Yes, this is her ninth life, but her first as a human. In the previous eight, she was a beloved pet cat of some of the most influential and powerful people in history. And what’s more, she has a prophecy, which shows her pissing off Felix, getting into dark magic, and being killed by the Saint who’ll be arriving in a year. Fortunately, with her past memories and her premonitions, she can change literally everything about this plot.

A lot of this just made me laugh. It’s always nice to see an isekai’d Japanese girl who’s part of the supporting cast rather than the lead – one of Lucille’s past owners was a reincarnator who loved her “smol” kitty. The second prince is a buffoon who cannot recognize that the beautiful woman in front of him is his ex-fiancee, just not wearing heavy makeup, and it just gets sillier and sillier as he rants. But there’s also some really good stuff here. Lucille, being an ex-cat, does not remotely worry about what anyone thinks of her and is very confident. And she’s surrounded by people who are filled with self-loathing or self-doubt, ranging from the cursed Marquess to her new friend Mary Hunt… erm, Alice Rohans, who suffers from being the normal one in a generation of geniuses, to her own father, who is caring but it comes out as uncaring. If there’s a weakness, it’s that the dialogue can seem a bit TOO overly elaborate. Sometimes these people speak as if they’re reading words off a page rather than being in the moment.

This has a second volume coming, which I assume will resolve the curse as well as the cliffhanger we saw. If you liked Lady Bumpkin, and you liked Bakarina, and wondered what would happen if you smashed them together, this is that book.

Pick of the Week: More Straw Grasping

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SEAN: No debuts stand out to me, so I will go for a light novel. Should I pick The Executioner and Her Way of Life, which is genuinely yuri but likely to end with both of them dead, or Bofuri, which isn’t yuri but everyone wishes it was and they’re just gaming? I’ll tip towards the doomed yuri.

MICHELLE: Hm. This is a tough one for me, also. I like the general vibe of Long Period, so though it mightn’t be groundbreaking, I will probably enjoy it, so I’ll go with that.

ANNA: I’m just going to go with the box set of Witch Hat Atelier, it is such a great series and nice to have a good option for gift-giving.

ASH: All excellent picks! I’m going to take a chance with Rai Rai Rai, which I know almost nothing about, but which seems to have the potential for high levels of action-packed absurdity. I could really go for something like that at the moment.

Lacey Longs for Freedom: The Dawn Witch’s Low-Key Life after Defeating the Demon King, Vol. 3

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By Hyogo Amagasa and Kyouichi. Released in Japan as “Akatsuki no Majo Lacey wa Jiyū ni Ikitai” by Overlap Novels f. Released in North America by J-Novel Heart. Translated by Amanogawa Tenri.

This one snuck up on me. I was sort of gently mocking the book as I went through the first half, which is very much on the “low-key life” part of the title. Lacey invents oven mitts. Lacey invents a camera. But then it turns out that all of this, as well as the previous two books, are important as Lacey is asked to come back to the capital. And, while there’s a lot of backsliding and introverted panicking, the difference between the Lacey of the start of the first book and the one we see in this volume is night and day. She’s an incredibly powerful witch, and everyone and their brother want to use her. But while she does want to bring the kingdom happiness, she also wants the privilege of choosing how she is used. And people are taking notice. Best of all, Lacey finally cottons on to what her feelings for Wayne actually are. She’s not quite ready to do anything yet, but the feelings are recognized.

Wayne shows up at the village again, and this time he’s here for a full month, though he doesn’t say why. We see Lacey helping Cedric, who turns out to have a daughter who is getting married, and he wants to bake something special for the wedding but can’t figure out what. After the wedding, discussion of how the kids are having trouble remembering what the dress looked like makes Lacey want to create photography, which she does through a wonderful series of trial and error and the help of her phoenix. Finally, though, Wayne reveals why he’s there. The princess (you know, the one who cheated with Lacey’s fiancee in Book 1) is getting married, but has locked herself in her room right before the wedding. The king is asking Lacey to help do something about that. But why is the princess there in the first place?

After getting a fairly typical “evil noble” in the last book, the most refreshing part of this one is seeing how it handles the prior antagonists. The King is mindboggled by how much Lacey has changed from just a year away from saving the world and being the Dawn Witch. Alicia, the princess, already fully regrets her philandering, but being married off to a foreign prince (who’s fine, at least) has her lonely and homesick before she even leaves. Heck, we even get a side story showing that Raymond, whose fault all of this really is, has gotten used to life on the farm where he’s been exiled too, and is even coming through with delicious vegetables. If there’s a weak spot in the series, it continues to be Wayne, who I sort of but not really wish would be found to have a dark side, or a secret he hasn’t revealed. He’s just this bland guy.

But we’re not here for him, we’re here for Lacey, and she’s fun. She also reminds me of Monica, so Silent Witch fans should also get this. The next volume, which should wrap the series up, is not out in Japan yet.

Reincarnated As a Sword, Vol. 1

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By Yuu Tanaka and Llo. Released in Japan as “Tensei Shitara Ken deshita” by GC Novels. Released in North America by Airship. Translated by Mike Rachmat. Adapted by Jaymee Goh.

When this book first came out in 2019, I read about 25 pages of it and stopped, abandoning the book as I really didn’t like it. I mentioned this recently to some other folks, whose reaction was mostly “wait, you didn’t even get to the catgirl?”Sure enough, I guess there is a catgirl on the cover. And as I deal with a slow August, I thought that maybe I had just been in a bad mood that day, and I started the book again, determined to finish it. Well, I did finish it. And it definitely does improve when Fran shows up. But I also was not wrong back in 2019. This might be the worst start to a popular light novel series I have ever read. Our hero is annoying, he’s overly chuuni, he kills a lot of monsters without remorse (oddly, he gets the remorse later, after meeting Fran), and there’s also a ton of stat counting. And, of course, “Oh, I guess this world has slavery.” Said like you’re going to the deli.

Our sword protagonist, who doesn’t even remember his old name, is hit by… a sports car (not a truck!) and wakes up in a fantasy world as a magic sword. He spends the first eighty pages or so of this book trying out cool powers, defeating increasingly dangerous monsters, being being incredibly smug and annoying. Unfortunately, he then ends up stuck in a land that saps mana, and can no longer move around. Cue Fran, a catgirl who’s part of a group of slaves who ran into monsters. After taking care of the monsters, and the slave owner, Fran and the sword (who she names “Teacher”) team up, and head to the nearest large city. From this point the book gets far more generic and predictable, which is actually a point in its favor. The writer stops trying to make the sword entertaining and focuses instead on the sword trying to teach Fran how to get strong and also possibly not become a sociopath.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Aren’t I a huge fan of A Late-Start Tamer’s Laid-Back Life, by the same author? I am indeed. Oddly, the books seemingly start off very similar, with our main character going around, experimenting, and looking at their stats go up when they do things. The Tamer book, though, is actually a GAME, not reality, so I don’t need to apply the same morality to it. Yuta’s experimentation, due to his class, avoids fighting for the most part, while the sword’s revels in it. Yuta is generally nice to everyone and gives away things without realizing their value. The sword eventually starts to realize that killing goblins while literally imitating Stormbringer is perhaps a bit too evil, but since this is a world where all monsters are default evil, he doesn’t dwell on this too much. At least he doesn’t lech on Fran, who is only twelve years old. Her stoicness, while clearly the result of trauma, also makes her more interesting in contrast to her partner.

So yes, this gets better. I’m sure later volumes are interesting. But I’d rather stick needles in my eyes than read the start of this book again. Moving on.

Manga the Week of 8/13/25

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SEAN: Are these the dog days? Or are the dogs days later in the month?

ASH: It’s cat days more often than not with manga. (And Japanese fiction, in general, for that matter.)

SEAN: Airship has The Devil Princess (Akuma Koujo) in print. A demon who longs to have family and friends and a brighter life ends up being forcibly reborn into the body of a human princess. She’s revered as a saint, but her demonic impulses – and other demons – haunt her.

There’s also print for Reincarnated as a Dragon Hatchling 11.

For early digital we see Classroom of the Elite: Year 2 12 and Reborn as a Space Mercenary 13.

Ghost Ship has Inside the Tentacle Cave 5.

ASH: I wonder what’s going on outside the cave.

SEAN: Two debuts for J-Novel Club. The light novel is Engaging with the Plot: A Former Cat’s Attempt to Save Her Now Temporary Fiancé (Konyakusha-sama ni wa Unmei no Heroine ga Arawaremasu ga, Zantei Konyaku Life wo Mankitsushimasu!) You know how this starts. Framed for crimes she didn’t commit, broken engagement. And she’s engaged to a man who is “cursed”. Then she recalls her past life… as a cat!

ASH: See? Cat days!

SEAN: We also get Make It Stop! I’m Not Strong… It’s Just My Sword! (Yametekure, Tsuyoi no wa Ore Janakute Ken Nanda……!), an adaptation of the LN already released by J-Novel Club. It runs in Drecomics.

Also from J-Novel Club: An Archdemon’s (Friend’s) Dilemma 3, D-Genesis 6 (the manga version), and Lacey Longs for Freedom 3.

Kodansha Manga has a nice box set of Witch Hat Atelier coming out, with the first six volumes and some cards.

ANNA: Nice! Glad to see this getting the special treatment.

ASH: This does look lovely.

SEAN: Also in print: Blood Blade 5 (the final volume), Dead Rock 3, The Fable Omnibus 9, Fed Up With Being the Spoiled Queen’s Genius Butler, I Ran Away and Built the World’s Strongest Army 2, I Want to Love You Till Your Dying Day 4, Tying the Knot with an Amagami Sister 11, and Wandance 13.

And in digital we get Gang King 32 and Giant Killing 50.

MICHELLE: Insert my standard comments about how I should really catch up on Wandance and Giant Killing.

ANNA: Insert my standard comment about how I should have started reading these in the first place.

SEAN: One Peace Books has a 7th volume of Parallel World Pharmacy.

Seven Seas time. The Demon King is Way Too Overprotective! (Yo ni mo Kahogo na Maou-sama) is a Betsufure title about a girl who’s struggling to make ends meet, and now she’s dealing with a demon king who says he’s crossed universes to be with her. For fans of “possessive and irritating boyfriend is so hot that the heroine gradually falls for them”.

Fake Fact Lips BREAK is a done-in-one omnibus, and a sequel to Fake Fact Lips. As for the plot, well, sometimes fings… break, don’t they, Dino?

ASH: Whoops!

SEAN: Long Period is a BL series from the creator of The Two Lions. Our hero is angry at his best friend, who if he applied himself cold get into a great university and really go places! So why does he just want to hang out all the time?

MICHELLE: I’m in!

ASH: Yeah, I’d read it.

SEAN: Also from Seven Seas: 100 Ghost Stories That Will Lead to My Own Death 3, Backstabbed in a Backwater Dungeon 9, The Barbarian’s Bride 4, How Heavy are the Dumbbells You Lift? 18, The Last Elf 2, Let’s Buy the Land and Cultivate It in a Different World 8, Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid: Kanna’s Daily Life 13, Mushoku Tensei 21, My Cat is Such a Weirdo 7, Perfect Buddy 4, The Skull Dragon’s Precious Daughter 5,

And they’ve got a 4th volume of the KinnPorsche novel.

ASH: Haven’t read any of this series yet, but it’s still pretty cool it’s being translated.

SEAN: Square Enix debuts Exquisite Blood: The Heretic Onmyoji (Miyabichi no Onmyouji), which runs in GFantasy. Demons have stolen ten important treasures, and it’s up to the Onmyoji to get them back! For readers who don’t need the word onmyoji translated.

ASH: LOL! That might be me then.

SEAN: Also from Square Enix: Dragon and Chameleon 4, The Ice Guy and the Cool Girl 10, My Isekai Life 20, and Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You 5.

Steamship has Fire in His Fingertips: A Flirty Fireman Ravishes Me with His Smoldering Gaze 9.

Two debuts for Tokyopop. Cute but Not Cute (Kawaiikedo Kawaikunai) is a BL oneshot that ran in from RED. A CEO who has it all is feeling lonely. Luckily his assistant, who’s loved him for years, is here to help.

Reincarnated in a Mafia Dating Sim: A Yakuza Heiress Becomes the Top-Ranked Villain’s Romantic Target! (Akutou Ikka no Mana Musume, Tensei Saki mo Otome Game no Gokudou Reijou deshita. – Saijoukyuu Rank no Akuyaku-sama, Sono Dekiai wa Fuyou desu!) is a Comic Corona manga based on an as-yet unlicensed light novel. This is from the author of 7th Time Loop.

Tokyopop also has Merry Witches’ Life 2 and My Beautiful Man: Interlude.

Viz Media debuts Rai Rai Rai, a shonen manga from Ura Sunday. A girl is trying to make ends meet by killing “space vermin”. Then she’s abducted by aliens, given a weird arm, and told to kill all humans. This is a comedy, I suspect.

ASH: Potentially interesting?

Also from Viz: Akane-banashi 13, Fly Me to the Moon 29, Girl Crush 2, I Wanna Do Bad Things with You 7 (the final volume), Mao 21, Not-So-Shoujo Love Story 2, Pokémon: Sword & Shield 13 (the final volume?), Rainbows After Storms 5, Sakura, Saku 8, and Snow Angel 2.

Yen On has two debuts. Remember that “as yet unlicensed” light novel I mentioned 3 weeks ago? Yeah, I’d forgotten, here it is. Almark. A city in the north is home to powerful mercenaries, but one boy just isn’t as strong as the rest. His father sends him south to a magic academy to try to be a sorcerer instead.

Nagisa Natsunagi Still Wants to Be a High School Girl (Natsunagi Nagisa wa Mada, Joshi Kousei de Itai) is a spinoff from The Detective Is Already Dead. Nagisa can now finally be healthy enough to live a normal school life, thanks to a heart transplant. But who is the donor?

Also from Yen On: Associate Professor Akira Takatsuki’s Conjecture 6, Bofuri 16, The Executioner and Her Way of Life 9, Pitch-Black Infatuation (the 2nd Sasaki Agency volume), and Playing Death Games to Put Food on the Table 4.

No dogs at all. Sad. What are you getting?

Too Many Losing Heroines!, Vol. 5

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By Takibi Amamori and Imigimuru. Released in Japan as “Make Heroine ga Ōsugiru!” by Gagaga Bunko. Released in North America by Airship. Translated by Matthew Jackson. Adapted by Hayame.

Given that this is a series that, about half the time, frames itself as a parody of the standard light novel high school harem genre, I should not have been surprised with the outcome of this volume. And yet. I was surprised. I had certainly seen the previous four volumes, showing Nukumizu’s sister Kaju as, shall we say, dangerously obsessed with her brother, but other series have also done that (looking at you, Goodbye Overtime), and have known that it’s OK to show them as being far too close for a brother and a sister without saying straight out “there is sexual desire here, this is meant to be incestuous for real”. Losing Heroines goes there, and so this comes as a content warning for those who might be put off. That said, I think most who would be put off wouldn’t have gotten this far into the series anyway, and it’s not as if Nukumizu has the ability to understand anyone’s attraction to him, much less his sister.

It’s time for the middle school students to visit prospective high schools, and that means our protagonists have to show off what makes their school great. For some this is easy due to talent (Lemon, who may be held back a grade but boy can she run). For some it’s easy due to personality (Anna, despite her foibles, can be outgoing and personable). The literature club is in trouble, though, with its two introverts who hate dealing with others. Nukumizu, however, has other problems. It’s Valentine’s Day soon. He heard his sister recently on the phone talking about… a guy! And she’s got plans in the calendar the siblings share that imply dates! She’s 14, that’s far too young to date, surely! Everyone else tells him he’s overthinking this, but they’re not getting through to him, as he’s in full big-brother mode. Hijincks, of course, ensue.

As always this is a well-written book, with a lot of laugh out loud gags. Anna is funny whenever she opens her mouth, and her chocolate cannonball was deserving of the interstitial art it got. Nukumizu, as always, is so good at reading the hidden subtext of most of the relationships of others around him that he fails to see the actual TEXT of girls throwing themselves at him. He is told by his friend Ayano that he needs to realize how he looks to everyone around him who doesn’t have the full story, and Nukumizu… brushes him off. And let’s talk about the elephant in the room. Not only does Kaju provide a story for the literature club about a brother who has knocked up his little sister, but she’s also really desperate to help her friend Gondou with her own doomed relationship, despite the fact that Gondou knows that Kaju is really thinking about herself. She knows she can’t have sex with her brother. She knows he just sees her as family. And, as this volume makes explicit, she HATES that.

Now that we’ve unlocked the barn door and let the horses out, I assume that she’s going to get more blatant in future volumes, which does not thrill me. But she also won’t be the focus, so I’ll bear with it for now. For romcom diehards and people who don’t understand why I don’t like that sweet, sweet incest.

The Poison King: Now That I’ve Gained Ultimate Power, the Bewitching Beauties in My Harem Can’t Get Enough of Me, Vol. 1

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By LeonarD and Won. Released in Japan as “Doku no Ou: Saikyou no Chikara ni Kakuseishita Ore wa Biki-tachi wo Shitagae, Hatsujou Harem no Aruji to Naru” by HJ Bunko. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by Boris Lecourt.

This wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d hoped, alas. For the third of my “go back and try a JNC series I skipped”, I decided to try this series, which kind of repulsed me when I saw it licensed. I was supposed to be explicit, and I was expecting a lot of ridiculously bad prose. Alas, only one or two speeches really lived down to that, and for the most part it was a standard ecchi power fantasy. And so, in the spirit of not ordering a milkshake at Home Depot, I will review this for what it is rather than what it is not. What is it? It’s a series to read if you like cool guys using martial arts and poison powers to kill bad guys, and also using pheromones to seduce all the women around him and take them to bed. Where it will cut away right before the actual act. Sorry, there’s always AO3.

Years ago, the hero’s party, including a man and his wife, defeat the evil poison queen. Sadly, as she dies, she curses the wife, who is now dying herself. Their “friend” Faust (subtle this book is not) has a solution: the wife is pregnant with twins, so they can all survive if one of the twins gets the curse. What no one expects is the twin to survive. Thirteen years later, the wife is dead, and our hero, Caim, is living in a hovel outside a village, where he is abused every day for being cursed. His dad threw him out when his mother died. The only friend he has is his very very loyal maid. Then one day Faust comes by with a possible cure… and he meets the Poison Queen, who tries to possess him. When she fails, he ends up now being able to control his powers and aging five years. Time to go get some payback.

So, how to sell this series… Aside from some overwrought monologues when Caim is killing bad guys, which read more like him being a chuuni than anything else, and another girl pissing herself in fear (a trope I hate, and which the author admits in the afterword is there for fetish reasons, so bleah), this is not all that different from a typical male power fantasy book. Caim, after his plot-relevant age-up, is cool and powerful but also does not lose occasionally acting like the 13-year-old he was until recently, especially when trying to deal with love (not sex, love) or fantastic panoramic landscapes. The love interests, so far, are a) devoted maid, b) noble princess turned into enthusiastic hedonist, and c) tsundere girl who loves being spanked/insulted. They’re actually not too bad. They don’t turn meek, and he doesn’t take any advantage of him they don’t want to, except when his pheromones are doing what the plot requires. And he also punches some Nazis… erm, nobles. I always like that.

Basically, if you are looking for a book with a lot of sex, this will probably frustrate you. If you are looking for a book with a lot of boobs, suggested sex, and a cool guy living his best life, this is certainly one of them. You could do worse.

D-Genesis: Three Years after the Dungeons Appeared, Vol. 1

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By KONO Tsuranori and ttl. Released in Japan as “D Genesis: Dungeon ga Dekite 3-nen” by Enterbrain. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by JCT.

This was the second recommendation by folks when I was asking about series I hadn’t tried before, and this one was far more vocal and vociferous than The Frontier Lord Begins with Zero Subjects. People really, really pushed hard for this series. When it was licensed, I was simply absolutely sick to death of dungeons, so did not bother to read it, despite the fact that it had an obvious sell on the cover art: Noa Izumi. OK, that’s not actually Noa Izumi, but close enough, frankly. I do hope Miyoshi pilots a Labor before this ends. That said, the people selling me on this series turned out to be absolutely correct: this was very, very good. I will be reading more. The main reason it’s very good is that there is minimal dungeon crawling. It’s all about the “what if” concept of dungeons appearing all over the modern-day world, how they would be regulated, and what happens when our heroes accidentally find a game-changer but want to stay having a normal life?

3 years ago, dungeons appeared all over the world, leading to a new industry. Today, Keigo Yoshimura is currently in a horrible R&D job where he is being abused by his middle-management boss. Then one day he’s part of a bad traffic accident. He’s not injured, but it turns out a dungeon opened up in the street. He accidentally runs over a goblin (thus making him eligible for dungeon rewards), and then accidentally pushes a huge mass of rebar into the dungeon, where it drops aaallllll the way to the bottom. This clears the dungeon, and makes him the top dungeon clearer in the world. He knows he does not want to be famous for this. Fortunately, his co-worker, kohai, and bestie Azusa Miyoshi finds out about this, and about the skill he picked up by clearing it: he can essentially analyze dungeons and figure out how to get whatever he needs. The days of random drops are over! And now he *really* has to try to hide.

The worldbuilding is pretty good. I didn’t hate it. It’s perhaps a bit unrealistic that our protagonists are allowed to do this, but the author freely admits that’s part of the fiction. The best reason to read this are the two leads, who are terrific. Keigo is the sort of guy who tends to narrate cynical but also tries to help everyone he can – which in this book is mostly young attractive women, this is still a light novel. That said, he has absolutely no filter and says everything he thinks, so I do not expect romance anytime soon. Miyoshi has known him for a while, so is clearly used to him. She’s a math genius and also a food/drink gourmet, so she is very interested in helping him so that she can get rich and get the best food and wine. They’re also having fun examining stats, seeing what the unknown drops actually do, killing slimes for 300 … erm, slimes till they discover what that does, and healing grievous injuries in a very secret, don’t tell anyone way.

I assume the second book is going to have more people get involved in their lives, and no doubt will have more dungeon crawling (there’s a big wolf on the cover, for one). And I warn people that there is considerable math in this. In any case, my bad. This is a great series so far, and I will try to fit the other, erm, eight volumes to date in my schedule when I can.