Tag: J-Novel Club

June 13, 2022 · 0 comments

By Shelley Pallis. Sorawo Kamikoshi is a loner, a twenty-year-old nerd studying cultural anthropology at a Saitama university, whose hobby is exploring spooky places. Nor are these randomly and doubtfully “haunted houses” – she has found numerous portals to an alternate world, the titular “Otherside” where all sorts of rumours, urban legends, horror stories and […]

May 14, 2022 · 0 comments

By Shelley Pallis. Yuri Kitayama’s Seirei Gensouki: Spirit Chronicles has several different beginnings, and to be frank, I am not sure that it has stopped beginning yet, even as I get to the end of the first novel. Sometimes it’s a sprawling political saga about feuding nations, and sometimes it’s a path to power of […]

May 8, 2022 · 0 comments

By Shelley Pallis. Belying his humdrum title, Hitsuji Gamei’s novel The Magic in This Other World is Too Far Behind kicks off with an original and exciting double-bluff. Using the language of fairy tales, he chronicles the rise to power of Felmenia Stingray, a nobleman’s daughter who masters many magical arts at a young age, […]

April 23, 2022 · 0 comments

By Shelley Pallis. And then he died. In his sleep, because of a particularly powerful sneeze. Ryoma Takebayashi wakes up at tea party in heaven with several gods, and accepts his fate with customary light-novel equanimity. A downtrodden salaryman in a dead-end job, he had seen many of his co-workers die from overwork and a […]

April 20, 2022 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. It’s hard indeed to compete with the sort of granular detail and insight of Shirobako, but Animeta does a fine job from the very first pages, in which cynical staff at an anime company bicker over the poor quality of new hirelings. Facing a bunch of talentless drudges, the go-getting director Kujo […]