By Shen Shui. Originally published November 25, 2021. Selected contribution to the Rags Drum 2021 Eve Festival. Chinese original.
Abstract: “Isekai reincarnation” is a narrative pattern in which a protagonist dies in their original world, is reincarnated in another, and begins a new life. As web-fiction platforms built around user submissions, such as Japan’s Shōsetsuka ni Narō, have grown popular, this narrative pattern has become an increasingly favored subject for Japanese light novels. Many works of this kind have become enormously popular and widely discussed in both Japan and China. Yet discussions of isekai reincarnation still tend to settle for a simple model that defines light novels as cultural consumer goods catering to otaku fantasies. They struggle to produce worthwhile criticism through engagement with the popular isekai texts themselves, which have swept through otaku cultures across East Asia and even Europe and North America. Returning to a range of isekai texts, this article identifies why isekai became a popular narrative pattern in otaku cultural consumption during the 2010s, and explores a certain kind of “transcendence” behind that consumption.
I. “Isekai” and “Fantasy”
What prompted me to examine the isekai narrative pattern as a problem was the “Chinese web fiction versus Japanese light novels” debate, with its strong nationalist coloring and a certain “progress-based view of literary and cultural history.” Let me first introduce this hot topic on the Chinese internet. Some people subscribe to two mutually contradictory claims, both wholly subordinated to the production mechanisms of the culture industry: “Those who wrote it first are better than those who wrote it later,” and “Those who have written longer and produced more are better than newcomers.” They argue that Chinese web fiction, as the predecessor that wrote stories about crossing into another world and switching on cheats “earlier,” is plainly ahead of Japanese light novels, which only invented the isekai pattern in recent years. To refute this, others claim that the pattern was already popular in Japanese light novels long before it appeared in Chinese web fiction.
I will return to this debate, and to a comparison of the isekai pattern in Japanese light novels with the pattern of crossing into another time or world in Chinese web fiction. During the debate, however, a distinction began to emerge between “good isekai with original worldbuilding” and “bad isekai that borrow their settings from games.” This was accompanied by numerous claims that earlier isekai novels had been excellent, whereas Japanese light novels were now declining in quality. Encountering this view brought a crucial question into focus: what is the key difference between the isekai that has become popular in recent years and the fantasy that has been popular in Japan since the 1990s? Why have “high-quality” fantasy novels developed into “low-quality” isekai novels? What does this “deterioration” mean?
If we begin with the cultural-studies framework of production–circulation–consumption, the answer seems easy enough: the shift from fantasy to isekai is fundamentally a change in who the producers are. Take, for example, the afterword to the first volume of Ao Jyumonji’s Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash, which can also be classified as an isekai story:
Dragon Quest, Wizardry, Final Fantasy, Megami Tensei, Metal Max, Romancing SaGa, Breath of Fire, LIVE A LIVE, Chrono Trigger, Arc the Lad, Tactics Ogre, Suikoden, the Tales series, Wild Arms, Final Fantasy Tactics, Star Ocean, Atelier Marie, SaGa Frontier, Xenogears… These console role-playing games, or games with substantial role-playing elements, have always been my salvation in life.
[Passage omitted in the source article.]
People sometimes ask why I started writing novels. I think it was mainly the influence of games. If I had never encountered role-playing games, I certainly would never have started writing novels. In particular, if I had not become so absorbed in online RPGs, my debut work, Bara no Maria [Maria of the Rose], would never have come into being—and neither would this book. And if I had not read novels based on role-playing games, such as Ryo Mizuno’s Record of Lodoss War and Benny Matsuyama’s Tonariawase no Hai to Seishun [Ash and Youth, Side by Side], then even if I had become a novelist, I might not have written the novels I write today.
—Ao Jyumonji, Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash, vol. 1, Chinese edition, Ching Win Publishing.
The influence of RPGs inspires a desire to write novels like RPGs. The “game-like” character for which the isekai pattern is criticized clearly comes from this personal experience particular to a new generation of writers. With the development of social networking services and websites where individuals can submit fiction, readers passionate about RPGs and fantasy novels have gradually begun writing fiction themselves. The work of these amateur producers naturally often falls somewhat short in “professionalism.”
But does that settle the question so easily? It does not. From its inception, the concept of the light novel has included this crossing of media boundaries—this media mix. In How to Write Character Novels, Eiji Ōtsuka divides light novels into three kinds: “young adult literature,” which existed before the 1970s; “girls’ novels,” which appeared from the 1980s onward; and “game-like novels,” which began to be written from the 1980s onward with the introduction of creative methods drawn from tabletop role-playing games, or TRPGs. The example Hiroki Azuma analyzes as representative of the third kind, the “game-like novel,” is precisely Record of Lodoss War, one of the fantasy novels so many people now try to separate from isekai fiction. Azuma introduces it as follows:
Record of Lodoss War began as a serialized report in a specialist magazine, recounting sessions of a well-known tabletop role-playing game. A creative collective called Group SNE wrote these records. The originator of the Record of Lodoss War project was the head of the group, and Mizuno, the author, was one of its members. Although the serial was very well received, the game on which the sessions were based was not Group SNE’s own work. Group SNE therefore turned the reports into a novel and published it, while also adapting the underlying game to develop its own tabletop role-playing game emphasizing the world of Record of Lodoss War. The former was Record of Lodoss War; the latter was Record of Lodoss War Companion, published the following year, in 1989.
—Hiroki Azuma, The Birth of Game-like Realism: Animalizing Postmodernity 2, Chinese edition, Tonsan Publications.
If we see the passage from fantasy to isekai merely as a deterioration brought about by consumers becoming creators, and by the influence of elements from other media—or even blame it entirely on the creators’ lack of professional competence—we cannot reach the heart of the problem at all. How exactly did isekai break away from fantasy? Where is the dividing line between them?
II. “Reincarnation” and “Transfer”
The question of “death” offers precisely such a way into the isekai problem. After citing Ōtsuka’s internal distinctions among light novels, Azuma likewise moves naturally into a discussion of Ōtsuka’s treatment of character death. The death of a character is an important component of “game-like” isekai fiction.
But my concern here differs from the problem Azuma summarizes in formulating his concept of game-like realism: “the game itself as a metanarrative system capable of generating multiple stories, and its influence on the making of stories.” I am not discussing the game-like realist stories Azuma invokes, such as All You Need Is Kill or Ever17, with their loops of repeated death and return. I am discussing a death that occurs once and only once: the death that takes the protagonist from the original world into another. In other words, the distinction between “reincarnation” and “transfer.”
The website Shōsetsuka ni Narō, mentioned earlier and something of a stronghold for isekai fiction, has itself developed this twofold division of isekai works into “reincarnation” and “transfer.” Put simply, reincarnation begins with the protagonist’s death. Life in the original world comes to a sudden end, and some intervening factor brings the protagonist into another world to begin a new life. Transfer, by contrast, means that some factor transports the protagonist directly into another world, still in their original state. Once we make this distinction and examine particular works, it is not difficult to see that reincarnation and transfer are not merely different patterns within isekai stories. They also constitute the difference proposed above between fantasy and isekai.
Fantasy works from the 1990s onward can be divided into two kinds, depending on whether they include characters who cross between worlds. Those that do are all stories about protagonists being transported to another world: in the 1990s, The Twelve Kingdoms and Magic Knight Rayearth; in the 2000s, The Familiar of Zero and Kyo Kara Maoh!. There are almost no stories in which the protagonist dies and begins again as a new being.
We can therefore describe this fantasy–isekai trajectory as a shift from imagining oneself as the protagonist of an adventure in a fantasy world—indeed, this is the essence of Record of Lodoss War, based as it is on records of TRPG sessions—to imagining oneself beginning an entirely new life in a fantasy world. The Japanese subtitle of Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation, the most influential isekai reincarnation work, can sum this up: “Once I’m in another world, I’ll get serious”—rendered in the article’s Chinese gloss as “Once I’m in another world, I’ll show what I can really do.” Our analysis of the passage from fantasy to isekai stories can thus be summarized as follows:
Fantasy stories based on mythology, history, and folktales
↓
Participatory media culture based on fantasy stories
(TRPGs, electronic RPGs)
↓
Stories modeled on TRPGs, in which ordinary people from the real world play characters in a fantasy world
(Transfer-type isekai works since the 1990s)
↓
Stories likewise modeled on TRPGs, in which ordinary people from the real world die and begin entirely new lives in another world
(Mushoku Tensei)
“Death” functions here as the dividing line between a previous life and the present one. In transfer stories, the protagonist remains their original self. However mysterious the cause of their arrival in another world, “return” remains one of their goals. These works often emphasize the tension between the protagonist’s desire to return to their former everyday life and their adventures in the fantasy world, as in The Familiar of Zero. In fact, stories depicting the protagonist’s entanglement between everyday life and life outside the everyday are even more common beyond isekai. A similar pattern frequently appears in the manga and light novels with supernatural elements that have been popular since the 2000s. The male protagonist becomes embroiled in a strange supernatural incident and dies or nearly dies. A girl belonging to the supernatural world saves him by using her powers, or activating supernatural powers he already possesses, to heal or revive him. The price is his separation from his former everyday life and entry into a fantasy world governed by supernatural forces. He wants to return to his quiet everyday life, yet cannot let go of the heroine and other attachments, and wants to shoulder his responsibilities. The story typically ends with the protagonist, accompanied by a group of peers, completing his fantasy adventure, defeating the villain, growing as a person, and returning to his everyday life together with his newfound companions. There are so many such works that I will not give examples here. If we also include them within the isekai pattern, it becomes easy to understand why some critics regard the Sword Art Online series, which takes a video-game world as its setting, as a kind of isekai work.
Whether in isekai transfer stories whose protagonists seek to return, or can even return frequently—Kyo Kara Maoh! builds its dramatic conflicts around its protagonist’s relatively frequent journeys between worlds—or in supernatural school stories where the two sides are spatially very close, with protagonists and supernatural companions often simply becoming classmates or living together, this sense of proximity is something isekai reincarnation stories resist intensely. To eliminate altogether the sense that the former world remains almost within reach, the authors of isekai reincarnation stories choose to make their protagonists die. Through death, they draw an absolute dividing line between the protagonist’s previous life and the present one. Mushoku Tensei, a representative work of the reincarnation pattern, even devotes an entire chapter to the circumstances preceding its protagonist’s death. An unemployed, thirty-four-year-old male otaku, driven out of his home, “died like a crushed tomato, squeezed between a truck and a concrete wall.”
III. The Protagonist Who Has to Die, and a RE-TAKE of Life
The author confronts the dead protagonist with this reality: apart from the memories he retains, he and his former self are no longer the same person. In other words, to write a story in which the protagonist begins an entirely new life in another world, the author has to make him die. But why must the protagonist go to another world to begin a new life? Can he not change in his original world? A boy grows through adventure; a young adult finds an opportunity and keeps striving—these are common developments in novels and manga. Works such as Mushoku Tensei answer this question in the negative.
From the Japanese: Yeah. Not bad. I’m getting excited, at my age. I’ve been reincarnated in a world like this with my memories intact. Anyone who wouldn’t be excited by this would never become a NEET. All right, I’ve decided. I’m going to take life seriously in this world. So I never have regrets again. I’ll give it everything I’ve got.
From the article’s Chinese translation: Yeah, I’m still getting excited even at this age. Anyone who wouldn’t be excited about being reincarnated in a world like this with their memories intact couldn’t be a NEET. I’ve decided: I’m going to take life seriously in this world. I’ll give it everything I’ve got, so I never have regrets again.
—Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation, web version, episode 1.1
“Someone who would not be excited by reincarnation in a world like this could never become a NEET.” Put the other way round: “One becomes a NEET precisely because one hopes to be reincarnated in such a world.” NEET stands for “not in employment, education, or training.” In Mushoku Tensei, school bullying is what precipitates the protagonist’s becoming a NEET. Faced with bullying, he ultimately chooses to become an unemployed NEET, shutting himself in his room and fleeing into the worlds of anime and games.2 From the moment he refuses contact with the outside world and becomes a NEET, he is in fact already dead within modern society. When his parents’ deaths lead to his being driven out of the house, he is forced out of this state of death. It is not that he is poorly adapted to this world. On the contrary, he is very well adapted to it:
From the Japanese: I don’t know how to look for a job. No, I have a vague idea that I should go to Hello Work. But I haven’t spent more than ten years as a shut-in for nothing. How would I know where Hello Work is? Besides, I’ve heard that all they do there is refer you to jobs. You have to take a résumé to the place they refer you to and have an interview. An interview in these clothes, with the sleeves all crusty from naughty fluids and bloodstains here and there? No way would I get hired. I would never hire someone in a crazy getup like this. I might sympathize, but I would never hire him. I don’t even know what kind of shop sells blank résumé forms. A stationery shop? A convenience store? I might find a convenience store if I kept walking, but I haven’t got any money. Say I somehow got past all that. Say I got lucky and managed to borrow money from a financial institution or somewhere, bought new clothes, résumé forms, and something to write with. I’ve heard you can’t fill out a résumé without an address. Checkmate. It was then that I realized my life had reached a complete dead end.
From the article’s Chinese translation: I don’t know how to look for a job. No, actually, I know perfectly well: all I need to do to look for work is go to the employment office. But more than ten years as a shut-in is no joke. I have no idea where the employment office is. Besides, I’ve heard that even if you go there, they only refer you to job openings. You still have to take a résumé to the place they refer you to for an interview. Go to an interview in these clothes, with the sleeves smeared shiny with whitish fluid, and now sticky with blood all over? How could I? I would never hire someone who looked like a lunatic to work for me. When it comes down to it, I don’t even know where they sell blank résumé forms, and I have no money. Even if all those problems were solved—even if I somehow got lucky and borrowed money somewhere, changed into new clothes, and bought résumé forms and stationery—I couldn’t fill out a résumé without an address. Checkmate. Only now did I discover that my life had nowhere left to go.
—Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation, web version, prologue.3
He knows that to survive he has to work; that he can go to an employment office to find job opportunities; that he can try to borrow money for clothes, résumé forms, and stationery; and that with an address he can complete the résumé. But he may not be able to borrow money, and he has nowhere to live, so he cannot find a job and cannot begin a new life. If the protagonist chose at this point to struggle for survival, to carry on through hardship and eventually get his life on track, the result might be an inspirational story about a dejected young person getting back on his feet, of the kind often found in the work of writers such as Hiro Arikawa. But it is precisely because he knows only too well the position and status of a homeless, unemployed, thirty-four-year-old NEET in the real world, because he knows the rules of that world only too well, that he is “constantly filled with regret.” To avoid further regret and gain some sense of satisfaction, he chooses to save others, and ultimately dies. After death, he arrives in a fantasy world of swords and magic, like an RPG. Why does arriving in such a world mean that, to have no further regrets, he needs to “show what he can really do”? This is not simply a matter of “starting life over.” More importantly, this world operates according to the logic of the anime and game worlds he identifies with, rather than the logic of his original world. Because this logic is familiar to him, and because he has already had experience of the aspects that resemble the way his original world works, he has no reason left to avoid facing life: he has to take it seriously. And it is precisely to eliminate these reasons for avoidance that the protagonist has to die in his original world.
In other words, isekai reincarnation works have crowded out so much of the older fantasy–isekai transfer fiction because a social sentiment keeps finding expression: an unwillingness to endorse contemporary society’s model of life built around striving and success, coupled with the realization that refusing to accept this model leaves one excluded and marginalized. If the detailed characterization of the protagonist in Mushoku Tensei leaves us caught up in the particulars of the work and unable to agree with this conclusion, consider Azusa, the protagonist of I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level. Azusa Aizawa is an ordinary worker who, exhausted by frequent overtime, ultimately dies at work. Favored by a deity, she is reincarnated in another world as an ageless, immortal witch. Although she has effectively enabled cheats, she does not choose a life of luxury. Instead, she lives as an ordinary worker, hunting a set number of slimes every day and leading an ordinary everyday life.
Azusa Aizawa likewise faces the fate of “having to die.” I do not mean death in the physiological sense. The point is that the protagonist must either choose the working life of a corporate slave, which she inwardly resists, or leave it. Once she chooses to leave, she is already dead—as far as her life as a corporate slave is concerned. It is like the saying repeated so often in Hanzawa Naoki: “Being transferred out to another company means the end of your career as a banker.” The more difficult question is: what can she do after leaving? When the entire real world, the whole social environment, is filled with the same homogenized model of life, and the protagonist only begins to reflect on her own foolishness after dying and being reincarnated, she has no option to leave that way of life behind. She can only avoid facing it for a while.
At a time when the many stories with a theme of moving away from cities—stories about “returning to the provinces” and “escaping the city”—are gradually dying out, younger creators without extensive experience of life in society have ultimately chosen another world. They choose a world modeled on the game worlds they know so well, a world where effort pays off, to reset their everyday life, to reset their life itself.
IV. How Chinese and Japanese Isekai Reincarnation Differ
Any discussion of “resetting life” must address Remake Our Life!, a work that has recently become a talking point, and the “restart” meme that has been popular on the Chinese internet for several years. These two can serve as a starting point for a brief examination of how Chinese and Japanese isekai reincarnation differ, and for some additions to the preceding discussion.
First, consider Remake Our Life!. This is a novel about returning to an earlier point in one’s life. Its twenty-eight-year-old protagonist dreams of making games and joins a game company despite having studied an unrelated subject, but never gets a chance to show what he can do. When the company goes bankrupt, he loses heart and returns to his hometown, only to wake up one day back at the moment when he was choosing a university. He therefore decides to seize the opportunity, enter an arts university, and fulfill his dream. The spin-off Remake Our Life! ver. β, in which the protagonist does not return to the past, and the previously mentioned stories about young working adults striving and succeeding may still convey the simple values of “remaining true to your original aspirations” and “persevering.” Return-to-the-past stories, however, are actually even more delusional and harmful than works such as Mushoku Tensei. Unlike inspirational stories, they do not coexist with the logics and values they reject; nor do they open up new terrain, as isekai reincarnation stories do. Instead, they choose to return to the past and, knowing the outcome, make themselves winners by the standards of those same values. Remake Our Life! is not the most pronounced example of this. The most pronounced examples are Chinese web novels about crossing into another time or world. In fact, most works of Chinese web fiction can be classified as “restart” fiction: the author designs a world whose operating logic and values are, in the author’s eyes, fundamentally no different from those of the real world, then gives the protagonist every advantage through various factors, allowing them to rise above the rest. From Chinese-style fantasy to Western-style fantasy, from historical to urban fiction, this holds without exception. The protagonist does not resist the logic by which the real world operates. What he resists is being a loser under that logic and those values. So, given the opportunity, he is determined to succeed.
The popularity of memes about “restarting” and “being reborn” arises from this social sentiment. It is precisely because people endorse the logic of this unequal society, want to become powerful within it, and want to enjoy a superior standard of living that they are so obsessed with restarting. Even more than we need to beware of the culture industry selling pastoral fantasies, we need to beware of our thinking being thoroughly reshaped around the absurd belief that only “the strong” can have an everyday life of their own.
Conclusion: Death and New Life
/remake is the command in League of Legends for restarting a match when a teammate disconnects, and it is also one expression of the currently popular restart meme. Using gaming terms to express their emotions and the problems they face is one way young people today exercise their imagination. But can we extend the bounds of that imagination further through cultural consumption? Can we break out of the established logic of the real world, in which we are alive yet seem so eager to start over, and imagine a world we would feel motivated to face by showing what we can really do—a world where we could neither run away nor give up and let things slide? Perhaps this is the transcendence embodied in the protagonist’s necessary death in Japanese isekai reincarnation fiction. As the metaphor of cheating, hacks, and cheat software itself suggests: once we are invincible in the worlds we imagine, what kind of new life do we want to live?