Justin: After becoming a full-fledged witch, Elaina can now do what she’s aspired to do: travel. With her broom and witch’s brooch placed on her black robe, she travels around the world. Along the way her adventures range from the mundane (runs into a novice witch that has a peculiar back story) to strange (a part of a country where beauty and ugliness falls into the eye of the beholder scenario) to bizarre (where a destroyed town, a monster, and a queen wearing a tattered dress is somehow the least unusual thing about it).
No seriously, that’s really the narrative.
Wandering Witch: The Journey of Elaina doesn’t lie about its title. We get 14 chapters of varying length where Elaina wanders the world and shares the different cultures she experiences and people she meets with us. In theory, it doesn’t make it bad to have no real goal. There are definitely works like this out there, so ultimately it will come down to the stories and the main character’s personality in how these tales are told. This is where your mileage will vary, since the stories themselves and Elaina herself are a mixed bag.
In these 14 chapters we get to see how certain stories handle discrimination, incompetent politicians, ownership, the works. There were a few that did stand out for me. At least for hilarity it involves a man Elaina meets that is very proud of his muscles. He has a journey to find his sister, but due to him having a one-track mind — he keeps thinking he has to challenge stronger things in order to save his sister — he forgets he’s supposed to do that. He appears a few times in this light novel, and the way this situation is solved involves two other dudes who ran a magic scam service, two dudes who basically mimic the Legendary Tortoise and Hare race, and one girl that’s rude and slightly sneaky.
One chapter that is slightly hilarious but can also be a commentary on social structures is when Elaina ventures into a country where it’s divided by a town with bread and a town with rice. Despite rules and regulations on storefronts and inns saying anyone who likes either/or can’t buy or reside in those towns, everyone ignores it. Heck, one even calls the signs decorations. Why is that? Well once Elaina ends up meeting the King and Queen, she immediately discovers the problem…and promptly (and in this case, probably for the best) doesn’t solve it.
We’ll get back to Elaina’s problem-solving in this light novel shortly. Meanwhile, the one other stand-alone chapter I’ll mention I liked involved Elaina discovering a country with severe inflation taking place. This mostly was my favorite because it put Elaina’s witch-skills to the test, where she, taking advantage of a place that’s been ripping travelers off, becomes a fake fortune-teller and even transforms herself at one point in order to find out the real reason the country has been like this. Though this last part only happened because the King himself suspected something was up, so he asked for help.
And that’s one common theme for most of this volume — Elaina’s requisite problem or not problem-solving attempts.
She’s essentially doing her best not to butt into anyone’s business. This is a fair position to take, but in some cases it comes across as her not actually caring about what happens to anyone. You might get that sense in one chapter where a trip to a fairly rote village ends with her discovering that the village chief purchased a slave; meanwhile, his son has no idea that’s the case, and the slave, who’s their maid, is totally uncomfortable by it all. She ultimately feels for her, but ends up leaving, understanding that maid’s fate is probably not good. So all in all, for most of this volume her personality feels distant as she tells us everything that’s happening to her.
The only time she seems resolute is when this volume goes over her past. As in, her being so much better at her craft at a young age that she said aloud she thought the witches in the practical skills test were weak. That was her personality — and that was enough to make sure no witch except one would ever take her. That would be Fran, the Stardust Witch, who ends up impacting Elaina’s life in one way. It’s how those two interact — from Elaina showing her true strength to how unusual Fran acts — that’s fun to read.
All in all, there are some odd tales mixed in with some normal ones that will likely mean a couple of them will stand out. The thing is, the stories and Elaina will have to be better as this series continues. I suspect there will be arcs as the light novel continues rather than mostly one-off stories or narratives that are interspersed within the volume — maybe that’s when we can really see this light novel shine.
Justin’s rating: 3 out of 5
Helen: Elaina is a witch, which isn’t unusual in her world where women have more magical ability than men, but it is unusual that she became one at such a young age. Not that she’s particularly concerned about her reputation anymore — Elaina is more concerned with traveling the world (like the main character from her favorite books as a child) and her world is an, interesting one. When reviewing the manga adaptation of this light novel series I wondered if the order of events had been changed up but no, this series still makes the puzzling choice to start with Elaina’s journey in a magic-heavy country first even though that’s not the norm for the rest of her travels going forward.
Honestly, there isn’t exactly a “norm” to start with for her travels as Elaina lives in a very strange world. There are a number of very short chapters that were cut from the manga adaptation (like Elaina’s continued run-ins with a random muscle-head in the woods) and overall it felt like she lived in the world of Aesop’s Fables rather than a more standard high or low fantasy world. The very disconnected chapters (that you could possibly read out of order without losing any context) felt likes a series of morality tales that have been intentionally twisted so there’s no real meaning to them anymore, like the chapter featuring a queen with no memory and a rampaging beast outside her castle.
I’m fine with episodic stories as long as there’s some sort of larger theme tying them together, like Natsume’s quest to return the names his grandmother stole in Natsume Yuujinchou, and there’s really no unifying element like that present in Wandering Witch. I do also enjoy other traveling stories, like Spice and Wolf, but the stories in Spice and Wolf are all incidents when the main characters have gotten wrapped up in a larger situation and usually become emotionally involved too; Elaina usually tries to keep herself distant from whatever she’s stumbled into, with a few exceptions, and for a character who narrates in the first person she’s still a bit hard to connect with (and not just because she’s a bit full of herself). From the descriptions I’ve read, Kino’s Journey might be the most similar work to Wandering Witch out there, in terms of pacing and goal, but I’m not overly familiar with that story so I can’t say for sure.
I suspect that the upcoming anime adaptation will make many of the same choices the manga adaptation did in terms of which stories they’ll adapt and which they’ll cut. I was surprised to find that I preferred the manga’s art over Azure’s illustrations here. The manga’s art is a bit more detailed, and overall I was left feeling a bit underwhelmed by this first volume. I’ll reiterate what I said in the manga review and say that when the story is animated (with sounds, colors, and specific pacing) that the story might end up working better for me. As it currently stands, Wandering Witch has a few individual stories that I enjoyed (all of which were the more “serious” stories where Elaina formed more of a bond with the other characters) but its execution lacks polish.
Helen’s rating: 2.5 out of 5