Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation Volumes 1-3 Light Novel Review

A 34-year-old modern Japanese NEET dies and is reincarnated as Rudeus Greyrat, a baby, in a fantasy world where magic and monsters are a daily reality. As he grows up, Rudeus masters magic, and during an unprecedented magical catastrophe, he's separated from his family. Subsequently, he must make new allies and cross multiple continents, enduring many hardships in a quest to reunite with his loved ones.

Mushoku Tensei is translated by Kevin Frane, Paul Cuneo, and Alyssa Orton-Niioka, and adaptated by JY Yang. Audiobook read by Cliff Kirk (Oliver Wyman).

A 34-year-old modern Japanese NEET dies and is reincarnated as Rudeus Greyrat, a baby, in a fantasy world where magic and monsters are a daily reality. As he grows up, Rudeus masters magic, and during an unprecedented magical catastrophe, he's separated from his family. Subsequently, he must make new allies and cross multiple continents, enduring many hardships in a quest to reunite with his loved ones.

Mushoku Tensei is translated by Kevin Frane, Paul Cuneo, and Alyssa Orton-Niioka, and adaptated by JY Yang. Audiobook read by Cliff Kirk (Oliver Wyman).

Rifujin na Magonote's popular isekai light novel series Mushoku Tensei (Jobless Reincarnation) has earned a loaded reputation, mainly due to the anime adaptation's fractured reception in the press and in wider fandom. Now halfway through its third season (the second half of this is due to air sometime in 2027), fans and detractors continue to debate heatedly in forums and comment sections whenever the series is mentioned. Honestly, the endless debates from people with entrenched opinions on both sides are exhausting.

I certainly understand where both sides are coming from. With some caveats, I thoroughly enjoyed 2021's first anime cour, which adapts the first three novels covered by this review. The second cour, broadcast six months later, was great too. The problems came during the second season, with at least one scene so disgusting that I almost dropped the franchise completely, and I completely accept that many other viewers will have left at that point and never looked back. However, perhaps against my better judgment, I persisted with the show, and have found the third season to be consistently excellent enough for me to go back and revisit the first few novels I initially read several years ago, shortly after the first season's conclusion. If I can power through the later sections I hated in the animated adaptation, I hope to eventually read the entire series. I don't believe art has to be perfect to have value, and sometimes flawed, even offensive art is worth dissection and evaluation, especially if the art's positive aspects overwhelm the negative.

Mushoku Tensei's controversies lie with the personality and actions of its protagonist, the reincarnated boy Rudeus Greyrat. Magonote's writing takes a “warts and all” approach to Rudeus, with the majority of the novel series written from his first-person perspective, his floridly perverted desires and creepy observations towards the opposite sex fully unexpurgated on the page. We're not necessarily expected to sympathize with Rudeus – he acknowledges that his own personality is problematic, and accepts, with regret, how he wasted his first life as a porn-obsessed shut-in who exasperated his family so much they disowned him. Pre-reincarnation Rudeus was a pathetic, selfish individual who externalized blame for his pitiful circumstances, and lived like an emotionally abusive parasite. In a word, he was gross.

Yet Magonote decides that this is the character he wants to spend twenty-six whole light novel volumes rehabilitating, and it's certainly not a straightforward journey. Rudeus takes with him many of the psychological hang-ups that caused him to ruin his first life, though to be fair, he tries very hard to make a better stab at a successful second life. It helps that he's reborn into privilege with a loving family in a lower noble class, and he discovers a natural ability for magic that makes him strikingly overpowered, even as an infant. Yes, this is in some ways very much a power fantasy, though it's not merely as simple as that. No matter how much of a prodigy young Rudeus is, events often spiral far outside of his control, and he's left to deal with exceptionally difficult, even traumatic circumstances. This isn't more lazy isekai power fantasy slop where characters pull up videogame-esque stat screens out of thin air and solve all of their problems by leveling up. This world is far deeper and more complex than that.

The issues with Rudeus' character run deep, and arise early. As a baby, he leers at his mother's breasts. As a child, he acts inappropriately with another kid, plus idolizes his young female magic teacher so much he steals (and treasures) her worn underpants. This kind of stuff really creeps me out. As much as he might like to try, Rudeus completely fails to hide his perverted nature. Though no one else knows this child has the mind of a 34-year-old man, they comment on his unsettling behavior and weird facial expressions. He knows he's not normal, and so does everyone else.

Rudeus isn't the only character with overly sexual motivations, however. The series treats sex and sexuality as an integral part of the human experience. Rudeus describes, in almost excruciating detail, the kind of noises his parents make when they're alone in their bedroom, and there's an uncomfortable scene where his teacher, Roxy, is shown to be something of a voyeur. His father, Paul Greyrat, is a womanizer, and this behavior comes with long-lasting narrative consequences.

In fact, one of Mushoku Tensei's main themes is that of consequences. Often, small, seemingly innocuous decisions come back to bite Rudeus with major ramifications, even many volumes down the line. Maganote lays down a great many story threads in these first three volumes that go on to weave a tight narrative tapestry much later. Even in this introductory stage, we hear about pivotal characters like Orsted and Perugius, and places like Ranoa Magic Academy. Rudeus also meets the three women who will play major roles in his adult life: Roxy, Sylphie, and Eris.

Name-dropping isn't the only world-building technique that Maganote employs. The “Six-sided world” is a living, breathing place with a history dating back thousands of years, of wars and societal development. There are multiple continents, all with many different countries and cultures that are only beginning to be examined here. The backstories we learn as Rudeus reads textbooks or hears stories are honestly fascinating, and almost all of the foreshadowing introduced here is paid off handsomely later.

Each novel covers a well-proportioned chunk of story, usually all set within a certain area. Mushoku Tensei is a grand adventure narrative, eventually becoming globe-spanning in its scope, though it begins intimately, with the entire first volume set within Rudeus' family home, where he spends the first eight years of his life, being trained by Roxy and befriending Sylphie. The second volume covers the period where he is sent to live with extended family, to act as a tutor to the wild Eris (my favorite character by far). Things really ramp up in the third volume when catastrophe strikes, and the grand adventure starts for real.

Although I mostly can't stand Rudeus as a character, the richness of the world and the rest of the colorful and sympathetic cast make up for being stuck inside his puerile thoughts for most of the narrative. It's such a compelling read, and for my recent revisit of these first few volumes, I decided to try the audiobooks, read by Cliff Kirk. His mature male gravitas wasn't quite what I expected, but he does an excellent job. I'm not quite sure how he manages to raise his voice by what sounds like several octaves for the younger female characters, but fair play to him.

For anyone who has already made up their mind that they will hate the series because of their visceral dislike of the main character: I get it. Move on, go read something else. For those willing to endure some moral discomfort in service of an excellent story, this series comes highly recommended. You don't have to agree with the protagonist's thoughts and decisions to enjoy a story, and in fact it's sometimes quite satisfying when comeuppances occur under such circumstances!