The Spring 2022 Manga Guide

Fushi no Kami: Rebuilding Civilization Starts With a Village

What's It About? 

When the civilizations of yesteryear fade from memory and become fanciful fantasy, the only evidence of their existence...are books. Ash, a young boy living in a remote farming village, holds a secret—he possesses memories of a distant and more bountiful past life. Days of toiling in the fields have given rise to a burning desire: to bring more enjoyment to the everyday doldrum of his dreary present day! And while books may be the answer, Ash...can't actually read! But where there is a will, there is a way. Join Ash as he battles illiteracy and sets his sights on a better life!

Fushi no Kami: Rebuilding Civilization Starts with a Village is based on the light novel series by Mizūmi Amakawa and Mai Ōkuma. The manga is drawn by Yoruno Kuroki, with English translation by David Evelyn, and J-Novel Club will release its first volume digitally on June 16.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Jean-Karlo Lemus

Rating:

Fushi no Kami is a very low-stakes story, but not a boring one—quite the opposite, in fact. The story of a young boy learning to read with the help of an irascible priest, Fushi no Kami is able to get by with a lot of charm. The joy of learning to read is infectious, and seeing how much it brightens Ash's life when he lives in such a dreary remote village accounts for a lot. It's also nice, however, to see how astute it makes him; there's a nice scene where Ash is able to use his cunning to keep a merchant from taking advantage of his father. There is a bit of a twist to Ash: it seems he's reincarnated and he has some memories of his past lives, hence why he was able to master reading in a month. But his memories aren't from another world, just from previous lives where he was better-off. This gives him ample motivation to read, if not also to help the priest decode the ancient language and possibly rediscover ancient comforts.

There is no real villain; at least, not that we know. There are stakes, what with Ash ending the volume alone in the woods and having to use a botany guidebook to survive, but so far the story is taking its time in setting up a wider view and that works fine for now. Fushi no Kami is nevertheless extremely engaging, and you won't have to be a bibliophile to enjoy it.

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Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

I remember reading the first light novel of Fushi no Kami and being really, really bored. Now that I've read the manga, I have to think that was due to the fact that elements of the story simply come across more clearly in a format where text and image are more closely aligned. Ash and Father Folke's discussion of how the ancient version of their written language combines pictograms and ideograms came across as frustratingly dense in the novel, but here the interrelation of art and language makes it come across clearly and easily. That's not all that happens in this volume, but it is a good reason why maybe the manga version is the one that you ought to pick up.

The story is otherwise relatively boilerplate isekai. Ash has memories of his past life that makes him smarter than the average eight-year-old, and with those memories comes a determination to elevate the lifestyle of Noscula Village into something more easily enjoyed. First on his list is learning to read and write; once he's got that out of the way he begins looking for books that will teach him things that will improve everyday life, like medicinal recipes and other similar things. We get a glimpse of how this makes him an outsider with the other kids his age, although that may be more due to the fact that Maika, the chief's cute daughter, has a crush on him. Ash is, as per usual, patently oblivious to the whole thing, though Father Folke does his best to be Maika's wingman. The most interesting aspect of the whole isekai thing is that Ash may not have been reborn from our world, but rather from the ancient version of his.

To make a long story short, Fushi no Kami is just a nice, basic fantasy with an isekai element. I do like the fact that the language Ash is learning to read seems to have followed a similar trajectory as English's Old English to Middle English to more modern English (yes, I know I'm skipping a few steps there), but mostly this is best summed up as “harmless.” It's nice. It doesn't necessarily need to be anything more than that.

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MrAJCosplay

Rating:

This title is a little bit misleading as we aren't exactly seeing the birth of a civilization starting from ground zero. In fact, you could argue that the majority of the book doesn't have a strong sense of direction or even much of an overarching plot. However, what it might lack in those elements it makes up for with a surprising amount of charm and a very enjoyable lead. Ash is a young boy that is obsessed with the idea of books, seeing as how he lives in a world where scarcity increases their value while skills such as reading and writing are considered a luxury. However, that drive and passion for knowledge not only allows him to develop those skills, it also acts as a driving force that influences those around him. He can be a little bit sneaky and deceptive in his own way to the point where it's a little hard to believe at times that he's eight years old, but it's very difficult to not feel like you're getting drawn into his pace. There are some lingering threads about the overall lore of the story left unexplored, but this volume seems more concerned with setting up our recurring characters before it's pulling the trigger on any grand adventure. This first volume is more of a prologue, but if this is just the set up then I'm very curious to know what that starting act will end up looking like.