If you’re looking for an isekai that stands out above all others, though, what would you pick? Sword Art Online has its toes in the genre, but lacks confidence in its storytelling and is quick to abandon its premises with repeated variations of “and then the hero suddenly saves them all.” That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime is a wonderful send-up of isekai tropes, but slides back into them in later seasons with heavy-handed fan service and … other problems.
Our own candidate for best isekai story to date is one that starts from the isekai playbook and gleefully breaks it in favor of a family-friendly, lavishly detailed, wholesome story with, uh, only a little bit of murder, mostly, with some exceptions. It’s the isekai series that turned my own stubborn teen daughter into an avid reader. It’s also going to be a bit of a deviation from our usual fare, and you’ll see why when we get to it.
Ascendance of a Bookworm: I’ll Stop at Nothing to Become a Librarian
Book-hoarding Urano Motosu dies our isekai-required humiliating violent death when she is crushed to death by books in her own room during a not-particularly-severe earthquake. She regains consciousness as a 5-year-old girl in another world. There’s a catch, though. Now a girl named Myne, she has no world-saving powers to speak of. She’s now in the body of a frail, sick 5-year-old girl who only rarely has the stamina to leave her own home. A girl who … just died, even as Urano’s new consciousness takes hold? That’s a bit unsettling.
Also unsettling: The world the book-obsessed Urano has been reborn into is a feudalist state so primitive that her “bathroom” consists of a family-use bucket in the corner—a bucket that is simply dumped out the window of the family’s upper-level apartment and onto the street below. This isn’t a society that’s even invented hand washing yet, much less widespread literacy. Myne is thrown into immediate despair when she learns that her new older sister doesn’t even know a word for “book.”
That’s where we begin our story. A weak, prone-to-collapsing girl with the mind of a book-loving adult but not a penny to her name vows to go to any lengths necessary to create books to surround herself with. Oh, and paper doesn’t exist either. And even though Urano-Myne remembers a great deal about the printing revolution that first brought books into the hands of the common classes in her old world, that doesn’t mean a thing if the technology doesn’t exist to even build the necessary parts.
This is not a heroine who gets thrust into the world with a holy sword and a new ability to backflip-reverse-stab whatever monster gets in her way. Myne’s first goals amount to being able to walk down the stairs on her own, or go to the market, or go to the woods with the town’s other commoner children when they go out to forage for food and firewood as part of their daily chores. Attempting to jumpstart an information revolution is impossibly out of reach.
Myne does begin to change the world, though. Her superpowers consist of whatever knowledge she managed to pick up from her book obsession, coupled with her Japanese mother’s equal obsession with picking up (and soon dropping) new home hobbies. Urano knows how to make homemade shampoo, and how to weave baskets, and how to crochet.
What makes Bookworm effective is that Myne’s ability to change the world around her comes from no cheat more substantive than having a knowledge-hoarding adult mind stuffed into her child’s body. As time goes on she learns, via hints like screaming vegetables and magic seeds that sprout into monstrous, writhing sproutlings, that her new world has a lot more going on than she had first assumed—but as things escalate, and they do escalate, that rule remains true. Forget Myne’s “ascendence”; even surviving childhood will be dependent on Urano’s distinctly non-childish focus and resolve.
Bookworm‘s real upturning of the isekai genre, though, is that almost nothing works out as Myne herself intends it to. Does she send world-shaking ripples throughout her new society? And how! But it’s her shampoo-making knowledge and her vaguely competent crochet skills that soon send her second childhood spiraling out of control, not her ability to recall most of the details of the world’s first printing press. No matter how out-of-control things become, however, Myne’s single-minded determination to bring printed books into the world nearly always ends up (ahem) making it all worse.
Now then, here’s where things are going to get a bit unusual for us. I’m going to recommend you watch the first two seasons of Ascendance of a Bookworm, and if you like it, stop there and read the books. Ascendance of a Bookworm exists as a series of young adult-oriented light novels translated into English by J-Novel Club and available both in print and as e-books at online bookstores of your choice. And if you’re a fan of fantasy-styled fiction, the light novels are good!
Not even the Harry Potter books were enough to entice my own daughter into becoming a willing reader, but Bookworm did it and then some. Author Miya Kazuki is adept at stuffing in details that pass by innocently enough, only to become significant many books down the line. Forget the usual series trope of “introduce magic spell in chapter two, magic spell saves the day in last chapter and is never mentioned again”; in Bookworm, Chekhov’s gun might sit on a shelf for multiple in-book years before being fired. Myne is believably stubborn; her new friends and allies are believably exasperated. Now this is a series that deserves more fame than it’s getting.
The books also might deserve a better anime adaptation than they’re getting. Mind you, anime Bookworm is very pretty, and the character designs adopted from illustrator You Shina really make the show. It’s also the case that, as with any adaptation of good writing, there’s a great deal of intrigue and detail being skipped over. There are a handful of awkward points where it’s clear the animation could have sorely used a budget boost; this isn’t like Mob 100 or Jujutsu Kaisen, series that revel in lavish action scenes.
It’s still solid family-friendly fun, though. It’s just that, as Myne herself might insist, the books are even better.
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