Sorawo should have never gone through that mysterious doorway she came across one day but here she’s in, in another reality and she’s not alone. Toriko, another Tokyo college student, has also come to the Otherside but she’s come with the mission of finding her old friend and Otherside mentor who has gone missing. Even working together as a pair, the Otherside is dangerous and the two of them are not coming out of it unscathed.
There aren’t very many horror light novels published in English (Another by Yukito Ayatsuji is the only one that immediately comes to my mind) but Otherside Picnic is very much a horror story first and a supernatural one second. The “Otherside” that the characters interact with is filled with supernatural beings and phenomenon certainly but, instead of being familiar yokai, by and large these are creatures and situations populated by urban legends that make up modern day folklore. There’s a sinister feeling to all of them, giving the story more of a horror vibe than a supernatural one, and, as Sorawo and the others debate, there seems to be some level of intelligence associated with each creature but it’s so alien it’s hard to tell how “intelligent” any of them actually are.
Otherside Picnic was apparently heavily influenced by a Russian sci-fi novel called Roadside Picnic (which I haven’t read) but this volume reminded me quite a lot of the 2018 movie adaptation Annihilation which also featured an all-female cast of characters who were exploring what amounted to an alternate reality next door to our own with many recognizable yet twisted creatures and situations. I believe this is a coincidence since Otherside Picnic was first published in 2017 (I’ve heard that the Annihilation movie and novel differed significantly so I don’t know if the novel could have been an influence instead) but it made me think that this is one of the few titles I’ve come across where I would be interested in seeing a big-budget, Western movie adaptation of the series. The creatures that Sorawo and Toriko run into are so unsettling and strange that seeing screenshots of the currently-airing anime adaptation has honestly been a let down, the visual presentation feels quite different! shirakaba’s illustrations which accompany the light novels feel like an excellent match however, as the more detailed, realistic style captures the horrors and dangers of the Otherside very well.
I have heard that the anime director already has a few other yuri titles under his belt which is probably why he was chosen to adapt this yuri title in the first place. If this story is a horror first and supernatural second, it’s also yuri but for me that was a distant third category it fell into. Knowing in advance that it was yuri did influence my reading and had I not known that I would have been more questioning in how to approach Sorawo’s feelings towards Toriko; as this first volume goes on you become aware that Sorawo isn’t an honest narrator in many unintentional ways, from having the Otherside mess with her mind to simply not being very honest with her feelings and characterizing her intense, somewhat obsessive feelings about Toriko as “love” is certainly the easiest explanation.
I do feel that their initial team-up is the weakest part of the story, a necessary but ungraceful evil to get the story going, but as the story went along it was easier for me to accept that Sorawo would keep jumping into these crazy dangerous situations if it was along with Toriko. I agree with Erica Friedman’s take that the amount of actual yuri content in this first volume was low and it was messy — but that’s fine because frankly everything is tonally messy in this book and I’m quite sure it’s on purpose!
Horror typically isn’t my thing but I was completely drawn into this first volume and curious to read more. I would like this to be a series with a solid beginning, middle, and end but clearly there’s so much Iori Miyazawa could mine for story ideas in the Otherside that I worry this series may go on for a while (especially since Sorawo studies urban legends, a.k.a the series has a built in way to explain anything it concocts which certainly gives it even more freedom to go wild). It’s a refreshingly different light novel compared to what typically gets brought over to the US and I could see it appealing to a wider range of American sci-fi readers in much the same way that VIZ’s Haikasoru imprint managed to cross that divide in some circles.
I hope that J-Novel Club continues to bring over a variety of light novels so that we can keep getting unexpected gems like Otherside Picnic.