Books: In Another World with My Smartphone

By Shelley Pallis.

And then he was struck by lightning, and it was a mistake, but it was too late, and he was dead.

Well, that’s not a customer complaint that the Guardian is going to be able to deal with in a couple of phone calls. Fifteen-year-old Touya Mochizuki has indeed just been killed in a godly blunder, by one of those light-novel deities that has the power of life and death over mortals, but is still tied up in so much red tape that they can’t undo the damage they have done. Instead, all Touya is offered is a new life in a different world, and like many another victim of divine injustice, he agrees on the grounds that he is granted one wish.

I’ll give you three guesses. No, I won’t because like many another light novel, the high concept is included in the very title, so if you’ve made it two paragraphs in without working out what Touya takes to his medieval new life, then there’s no helping you. But there is plenty of helping Touya, as he discovers in something that so much of us already take for granted: the immense singularity of competences and information that the humble smartphone brings into our lives.

Touya is a stranger in a strange land who knows exactly where he is. He knows where the nearest water source is, and what the weather is like over the hill. He can literally press a button and talk to God.

It’s this sense of wonder, not at an alien world, but how alien our world might look to a time-traveller from the days before the mobile phone became a personal, portable computer, that has made Patora Fuyuhara’s In Another World with My Smartphone series such a huge success, with 100 million downloads of 25 volumes to date implying that they has a Japanese readership base in the seven figures. Touya has nothing but his smartphone and the clothes he is standing up in, but fortunately a Japanese school uniform is so outlandish that he can immediately sell it to a passing businessman to acquire his first local currency. Before long, he is blundering through the gamified challenges of a world that (surprise, surprise) owes a lot to role-playing games, but all the while able to lean on his magical device that can tell him what time it is, and, er… function as a makeshift torch, and wakes him up in the mornings.

Inevitably, Touya is dragged further into the politics of his new home, particularly when a prophecy sort-of promises nine nubile concubines, many of whom he has to rescue, woo and otherwise keep calm. Thank God he’s got a phone that lets him Google “pissed-off sister-wives.” But he also has a burgeoning ability in magic, which seems to me to be a bit of a cop-out. I’d much rather have seen him quelling orc armies with a well-chosen ringtone, or using his apps to predict an eclipse or something, but instead there’s an awful amount of rules-lawyering as he tries out new spells and tries to remember how many copper coins are in a gold piece.

An afterword from the author reveals that the book was originally written on a smartphone as well. Another trick Touya didn’t try! At least not as far as I’ve read…

In Another World with My Smartphone is published by J-Novel Club and available in the UK from Anime Limited.