I love the Isekai, one of the most popular genres in manga, Japanese comics.
You get transported to a whole new world, where you get to be a hero, more or less. If nothing, you get to reinvent yourself in a world where nobody knows you. It gives what some crave for, a new start, or perfect escape from the drudgery of everyday life. So what is not to love about it?
Many people sure seem to think so, for the genre’s success is phenomenal.
Isekai’s literal translation is – different world. It could be the male/female protagonist summoned to another world, or they die, more often via accidents and are reincarnated into different world. While the reasons for going to a different world, be it an entirely new world like the Lord of the Rings or ancient Rome or Japan, differs, the trope hardly varies.
One of the oldest Japanese folklore, Urashima Taro, told since Japan’s Meiji era is said to be first ever story to come out of Japan with the Isekai theme. It follows the story of Urashima Taro, a fisherman, who saves a turtle. As a reward, the turtle takes him on its back to the deepest part of the ocean inaccessible to humans – the Dragon Place, where the Princess resides. He stays for three days and is entertained by the Princess Otohime. When he wants to go back to take care of this elderly mother, the Princess reluctantly lets him go with a box as a gift, and warns him never to open it. When he goes back to earth, he realises the place is not the same anymore. He also learns that three hundred years have gone by since his visit to the Dragon Palace and he opens the box only to be hit by old age. The story goes that box actually contains his age and once he opens, he becomes an old man instead of the youngster he was when he came to the shore.
The modern day Isekai stories start with the 1976 novel Warrior from Another World written by Haruka Takachiho, and followed by other series like Super Mario Bros (1986), and manga like Fushigi Yugi in 1992.
However it wasn’t until the 2000s that the genre took off, in part thanks to the popularity of the anime adoption of Sword Art Online (SAO), a light novel released in 2002. Set in 2022, SAO follows the story of Kazuto Kirigaya, one of the 1000 Beta testers for the virtual reality device NerveGear to play the VR game set in the world of Aincrad. This is probably what you would call a metaverse in current day’s parlance.
Though we are a long way off from creating such an immersive world, the writer Reiki Kawahara sure has gotten one thing right – sheer possibility of having such a world. But I digress.
So in the game world of Aincrad, once you enter you cannot get out of the game at will. Someone in the game needs to get to finish it for everyone to get back to the real world. In fact they realise that it is a real world for all means and purpose, for if they die in the game, they die in the real world. Of course the hero Kirigaya finishes the game, saves everyone, including damsel in distress.
But I loved the idea and the way the story takes off, even though I did not follow the subsequent seasons. The concept wasn’t new either but what it did was make Isekai mainstream. Subsequent years saw massive adoption of Isekai giving rise to a whole new set of works across manga, anime, and also Webtoons.
I have lost count of the number of Isekai manga I have read and anime I have watched since SAO. There are a couple of works that I absolutely loved. One was, Izakaya Nobu. The story follows Nobuyuki Yazawa, who owns an Izakaya, an informal Japanese bar, in Kyoto. But the best kept secret of this restaurant is that it opens to the ancient European city capital.
Of late though, most of what I have seen have not been up to the market. One story overlaps with the other and it has been much harder to set one work apart from the other. It appeared to me that Isekai as a genre has reached it saturation point.
However, it would seem that the Isekai boom is here to stay, though not in Japan. According to media reports, Isekai anime have higher growth potential in other countries like the US thanks to the rise in the adoption of English translation of Isekai light novels and Amazon’s algorithm. Yes you read that right.
In recent times, more light novels get translated to English and is gaining a significant audience, according to the report by animenewsnetwork.com. These are especially popular on Amazon thanks to underlying recommendation algorithm.
Contrary to what a lot of people think, I like Amazon’s recommendation engine. It gives me a chance to explore other authors in the genre I like and I have found plenty of books through them. Apparently, it works for Isekai as well. According to the report, many authors have are publishing as many translations of these light novels as possible so that the algorithm can consistently recommend them.
However there is a flipside. The report points out that there are times when Amazon delists the book without informing the author, especially if they are books with sexual undertones.
But as of now, there continues to be demand for Japanese light novel series books, which is now slowly expanding to Chinese as well and are seeing quite a success. It would be interesting to see where it goes from here!
A journalist's diary 