By: Juan Espinoza
OwlFeed Lifestyle Journalist
Jobless Reincarnation or Mushoku no Tensei is a great book to read as a first experience for those who are trying to get into manga with an easy main character to get along with.
The story follows a 34-year old, unemployed neet( an unemployed adult who still lives with their parents and has no social life) who was killed while saving people from a collision with a truck. You’d think it’s the end right? Nope, he gets reincarnated in a new world of magic and swords. In this world, he will go all out.
The main protagonist is Rudeus Greatyard (the 34-year-old neet) the son of Paul Greatyard and Zenith Greatyard. All he wants is to go all out in the new world and not to have a lonely, shameful and overall unfilling life. But in this world strength is one thing he needs to work on along with his social skills and how he handles people in a “normal” manner.
Rudeus’ first obstacle is learning how to do magic since he is still a child and can’t do anything against adults when it comes to physical fighting. So he starts to train on his own so that he can be stronger when he’s older but it doesn’t go as planned when he almost destroys one of the rooms in his home and is found out by his parents. Instead of becoming angry with Rudeus his parents decided to get him a tutor, allowing him to further his training.
Rudeus’ obstacles continue on as he learns to cope with his emotional problems. In Rudeus’ past life, he was bullied to the point where he stopped going to school and ended up cutting ties with his own family. However, his tutor Roxey, a short green-haired demon girl, fixed his problem by teaching him about the outside world and helping him not be afraid of people anymore.
As more problems occur we start to feel a connection to Rudeus to where he connects to other characters in the story. My friend and fellow otaku Devin Gardner said it like this, “He overcomes his problems like a normal main character.”
Mushoku no Tensei is well balanced when it comes to character interactions and when the main character is thinking to himself. As AreKyoya (famous community leader of AnimeSeekers) said, “The writing in this series is really good because it has a good balance of exposition and character interactions that makes it easy to read.”
The enjoyment of Mushoku no Tensei is a refreshing one, as it is something new and interesting in comparison to the same old stories. It really is a great book to start on if it’s your first time trying manga. AreKyoya also said, “I would say there is truly no dull moment,”’ and as a fellow manga reader, I completely agree.
In all, Jobless Reincarnation/Mushoku no Tensei is an enjoyable read which is currently ONGOING and has an ANIME adaptation set to release some time during 2020, which I am really looking forward to.