Books: I Shall Survive Using Potions

By Shelley Pallis.

And then she died. Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey – a man in a toga who calls himself God shows up to tell Kaoru the Office Lady that she’s accidentally wandered into a spatial anomaly, and (sorry about this) she’d dead. Well, her body’s dead, his not-all-that-godlike powers couldn’t keep her from stepping into the space-time equivalent of a manhole, and nor could they save her body from being declared dead and “taken care of” back on Earth. But in a feckless compromise sure to please nobody, he can arrange for her to be reborn in a new body on a parallel world that’s a bit like Europe in the Middle Ages.

Kaoru, our heroine, accepts this divine balls-up with little more than a shrug. “Kaoru was a fan of light novels,” explains author Funa brightly, “so she had an idea where this was going.” But just as God is about to wave his magic wand or whatever and spirit her away to her new home on planet Verny, Kaoru stops being quite so much the doormat. In spite of the insipid Tolkien cosplay of many another light novel, she realises that a “medieval” world might not be such a picnic. Knowing that God owes her a favour, she demands Cheat Powers.

Does she want magic abilities? Does she want psychic powers? No, she only wants to be able to understand the language, which many other light novel protagonists don’t give a moment’s thought to, assuming that everybody will magically understand them. And she wants to be a bit younger, because her 22-year-old self might be regarded as past-it in terms of finding a fantasy husband.

The bar now set achingly low, Kaoru gets to say goodbye to her bereaved family in a dream, although they are so inured to the conventions of light novels, even they shrug at her predicament and act like she’s done nothing stranger than buy a slightly defective mobile phone.

Like a big-eyed version of A Matter of Life and Death, Funa’s novel approaches magic and divinity as a malfunctioning, slightly hapless bureaucracy, as Kaoru is passed from “God”, Earth’s slightly bumbling supervisor, to Celestine, the friendlier, more empathetic divine manager on Verny. Celestine is swiftly persuaded to give Kaoru more of a super-power: the ability to knock up any medicine or potion she desires. Much as the heroine of Ascendance of a Bookworm seeks to transform her new home through books, and the hero of How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom wields the magical power of accountancy, Kaoru is some sort of trouble-shooting apothecary. And she has a magic box to carry stuff in so her little arms don’t get tired.

I’m not making this up, but Funa is, sometimes seemingly as she goes. I Shall Survive Using Potions barrels along as if written as a stream of irreversible consciousness. Surprisingly, the stand-out character isn’t the gormless Mary-Sue of Kaoru, but Celestine, a slightly scatty fairy-godmother figure wracked with Imposter Syndrome and unfocussed ideas, who seems genuinely grateful to have this lost Earth girl as a sounding board and potential new BFF.

Fuming that her new teenage chest has dropped to an A-cup, Kaoru discovers that her wish-list of Cheat Powers might have over-delivered on her requests. She can’t just speak the local language, she can speak all the local languages, including those of wild animals, whose constant chatter soon starts to get on her nerves. But it’s the potions that become the focus of this story (the clue’s in the title), in what appears to be a book-length thought experiment of what it might be like to be one of the healer NPCs in many a computer game. Kaoru wanders through other people’s adventures like the chirpy nurse of Pokémon, but now such stories are told from her point of view, as she deals with a constant revolving door of injured dungeon parties. There might have been scope here for a fantasy drama about medicine in a medieval world, less The Deer King than “In Another World with First-Aid Training”, but the nature of Kaoru’s powers is another case of accidental overcompensation. With mounting anxiety, she comes to realise that she has misread the lay of the land in her new home. Verny is a world without magic, but she has been parachuted into it with the unique ability to heal all wounds and cure all disease.

She arrived hoping merely to fit in and get along. Within days, she is the prize pawn in an international game of thrones, on the run from multiple figures who want to possess her, and the centre of an increasingly hysterical cult that regards her as an ‘angel sent by Celestine.’ And while Kaoru is slow to realise the implications, her presence on Verny will soon prove to be exactly the thing that “God” promised it wouldn’t be: a highly destabilising and possibly even revolutionary catalyst.

I Shall Survive Using Potions by Funa, with illustrations by Sukima, is published by J-Novel Club and available in the UK from Anime Limited.