Well, it's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it. Menou is an Executioner and her work involves keeping her world clean of troublesome strangers who show up from other, more Japanese, worlds. With nobility trying to use these Otherworlders to tip the balance of power, Menou already has her hands full before a seemingly invincible visitor shows up - the bubbly and slightly dim Akari. It all sounds like fun and games, except Menou has a job to do and she's not prepared to let anything stand in her way...
This book sure leads off with a bit of a bang, but then also a clunk and a bit of a thud and then a general crashing sound of pottery being destroyed. I like the stark and unflinching beginning to this series which immediately casts Menou in a pretty awful light (although the book does make it clear that the situation is teetering on the edge of going out of control) and doesn't seem to let up.
Then the book starts diving into its lore and I'm gonna be a bit of a crank and say that elaborate magic systems that are info dumped on you in the opening of a narrative are absolutely unpalatable and pretty annoying. Towards the end it becomes easier to follow but I was still feeling my brain trying to run out of my ears at times. There's a balance to be struck between hand-waving everything away and being slavish to detail that isn't really necessary and this book's screamingly angled towards the latter.
Menou's interesting in that she's a fairly blank slate, by narrative design instead of as a negative point, which has resulted in her throwing herself into her job with willful abandon. It's kind of surprising how little the needle has budged on her by the ending - you might think this sounds like a yuri, I sure did, but this book's concept of romance is pretty puerile.
In fact, there's way too much that's entirely too puerile. Menou's assistant Momo, who turns out to be unhinged and whose vocal stylings are annoying as hell, has some real issues going on and it's a 50-50 on whether she'll end up trying to kill Akari herself. A little of her goes a long way.
Everybody is dressed incredibly stupidly - the last main character we meet has a costume that's so unbelievably dumb and reads like something a man would want a woman like that to wear, not a proper fashion choice. And make no mistake, I am aware that manga and anime have made some crazy costuming work over the years, but this one is so bad I had to comment on it, which is my comment on my comment.
There's an early "reveal" of Menou's shocking nickname and I think it's supposed to be impressive, given how people react, but it's actually so dumb I laughed at it.
You might think that I have nothing good to say about this book, but that's also not the case. Parts of it are quite acceptable, even if literally every single plot beat is so, so obvious even from the very first second (I cannot believe this won a grand prize in a contest, I thought my jaw was going to fall off).
The idea of these people showing up from Japan and the amount of damage they've done is really intriguing and some of the ways it's happened are quite unique - there's a sword that turns things to salt and that's a new one to me (if they find the one that turns things to pepper they can corner the combat seasonings market).
The character relationships are kind of awful - again, if this was a yuri written by somebody who knew how to write yuri rather than some guy who thinks 'two girls, hurr hurr' it would probably be a lot more affectionate (probably more than Menou herself would allow). The book has its point to make about slavish devotion to something without thinking about it, but it's not like much changes in that respect.
When the manipulation of time gets involved later on it definitely does change things up and it's blessedly not hard to follow and also creates some interesting discussion about paradoxes - the author handles the fact that changing the past would alter whatever travelled back to affect those changes, which is neat. That turned out to be some of my favourite stuff in the book, although even then it brings out a mean streak in a character that was almost shocking.
2.5 stars, but we'll go down to 2 because there's a whole ton of chaff to get to the wheat hidden inside. I'm literally still baffled at that whole award thing or even the fact that this is getting an anime (actually, seeing the character designs in the artwork, I think I can guess exactly why this is getting an anime). It ends with me interested enough to give it a second volume, but this is one weird story that I don't find half as successful as I feel I should and I don’t know if I would go, ‘oh yeah, you just have to read this’.