Mitsuha has not been having a good couple of years. When she was in high school, her parents and older brother died in a car accident. While they left her enough to get by, she worries about paying for college and how to live her life without them. It certainly doesn’t help that she looks years younger than her actual age of eighteen; being orphaned is hard enough without people assuming she’s twelve. Making tough decisions has taken up much of her time, and it’s while she’s doing that everything changes. While contemplating a scenic overlook, she accidentally falls over the edge. When she wakes up, not only is she not dead, but she’s in a strange otherworld that looks vaguely like the Europe of centuries past. It turns out that as she was falling, she collided with an invisible otherworldly being, and some of their power rubbed off on her. Mitsuha is having her very own isekai experience with the benefit of being able to travel back and forth between her new world and her old one. Suddenly, looking for what she wants to do is a whole lot easier.
This is my third experience with this particular story, following the source light novels and the anime version, and I feel equally ambivalent about all of them. (As a point of interest, the light novels, originally published by the now-defunct Sol Press, are being re-released digitally by Kodansha.) Mitsuha’s version of the ubiquitous isekai experience involves her falling from a cliff, accidentally smacking into an incorporeal being, and then using its offer of power to set herself up as a merchant in another world to avoid pesky things like “college” and “job hunting.” It’s almost the same premise as two other series we’ve seen this year; just substitute the incorporeal being for a magic door and you have Peddler in Another World or I Got a Cheat Skill in Another World. Well, that and Mitsuha appear ready to set herself up as an arms dealer as opposed to trading in matches. Whatever, right? Although it’s worth mentioning that Mitsuha is roughly four hundred times more determined (and possibly ruthless) than either of the male protagonists of those other two works. She may have had a hard time figuring out what to do with her newly lonely life, but once she makes a decision, she goes for it.
This first volume hustles through the source material at a decent clip. Mitsuha shifts over to the pseudo-medieval fantasy world and in short order figures out how her teleportation works. She promptly leaves the little village she started in, talks her way into the house of the local lord, and by the end of the volume, ends up in the royal capital, angling to buy a shop and execute her plan. She’s at least a somewhat interesting heroine in terms of how she goes about all of this: Mitsuha has zero qualms about using her petite stature to fool people into thinking she’s a helpless little girl, and she does that in both worlds. When she can’t, she allows her money to do the talking. She’s fairly unscrupulous and seems to indulge in a sense of superiority over others at times. That’s not tons of fun to read about, but she comes by it honestly, mainly by repressing her emotions about the relatively recent deaths of her parents and older brother; it’s clear that she’s repressing them. Mitsuha’s brother specifically takes up an outsized residence in her brain, and thinking about what he might do in her situation seems to give her a sense of comfort. Part of the reason she’s ambivalent about staying in her family home is the loneliness of being there without her family. She’s a tough cookie, but at least part of that is deliberate.
Mitsuha’s brother may be dead, but he’s still, in many ways, the more interesting character, largely because he was a character. A survival games enthusiast, he unwittingly prepped Mitsuha for her adventure, and he’s now become the voice in her head. Part of me can’t help but think (again) that the story would have been more fun with him alive to experience it. But it’s still an interesting angle to include, and it helps to set Mitsuha’s story apart from other sister FUNA characters. (At least the creator knows what they like: little girls in other worlds.) Plenty of people (mostly of the masculine persuasion) fall for Mitsuha’s little-girl act. Again, this feels like something her brother would have encouraged to increase her chances for success. It can cause a disconnect within the narrative at times, but knowing where Mitsuha is coming from and whose advice she’s leaning on is one of the stronger elements of the story. And she can (and does) turn on the more adult charm when necessary, as we see when she sets out to learn how to use weapons from a mercenary group back on Earth.
With this being the third version of the tale to make it into English translation, there’s a good chance that you already know where you’ll fall on the enjoyment scale. The art more than gets the point across, and if you enjoyed this in either or both of its other two iterations, there’s no reason you won’t enjoy this one as well – though, of course, the inverse applies as well.
