Isekai Shikkaku (No longer allowed in another world)

An interesting if controversial premise that like many isekai of this style fails to fully capitalize upon it. However, It happens to be a concept that personally appeals to me quite a bit and it doesn’t fall flat on its face like so many of its compatriots. It manages to at certain points tell a somewhat poignant story that it blends with dark comedy even if other times one portion overpowers the other leading to disaster. For this reason I am rating Isekai Shikkaku as a 7/10 on the anime scale.

The comedy in this anime generally comes in a few forms, someone threatens sensei, sensei carries out an unexpected action, or one of the female characters is in love with him. I think it’s somewhat impossible to classify comedy as good or bad so I will just say my opinion on this and not factor it into my rating. I found the threat bits to generally get a light chuckle from me if they were integrated into the scene well, the unexpected actions ranged from an eyeroll to an actual laugh (rare for me!). The women in love with him bits were, as I think anyone who knows me would expect, completely uninteresting to me and I found them very annoying.

Following from the comedy's use of women the show has a baffling mix of some of the best (low bar) handling of women's issues in an anime to aspects I find annoying and off putting. The first thing you would notice upon watching the show is the truly terrible female character designs. There’s no defense for this, I don’t know why they did it, it undercuts the show’s messaging a lot and is a real shame considering that I think many of the other designs are pretty okay-good. On the positive end the show frequently touches upon women's issues from ostracization, marriage inequality, and the negative impact of traditional female roles. Reading some of Dazais’ work it’s clear this is drawn from his interest in the lives of women which he writes about frequently, Schoolgirl and the setting sun touching upon similar topics as seen in the show. Regardless it’s good, anime should do this more!

To theorize a bit more on the designs it’s very possible they are derivative of the worst aspects of the show. It’s clinging to isekai tropes, the more it tries to commentate on these directly or interact with them the worse it gets for it. The show is at it’s absolute best with simple character interactions and observations of humanity in the style of Dazai’s bibliography and it’s lowest when discussing chosen ones and magic swords. This habit is probably the source of the over saccharin and strange plot points which occasionally pop up throughout the anime. One of the worst of these is the rapping character who appears about midway through and isn’t utilization besides to commentate on isekai powers.

If you’ve made it this far I can now address the elephant in the room, the pretty big controversy over Isekai Shikkaku being made in the first place. The open question is it disrespectful to the memory of Osamu Dazai who himself died of suicide to create a character that is similar to him and draws from his literary works in this way. Reading through his works as I worked my way through the show I’m not so sure that the main character of Isekai Shikkaku “sensei” is intended to be Osamu Dazai himself. Dazai would frequently include gloomy suicidal or otherwise depressed writers through his works which while similar to him were in my opinion not supposed to be him, writers write what they know. If you accept this to be the case I think a possible intention of the writer may have just been to create a character in his style in which case I think that’s basically fine. The consumption of sedatives in harmful amounts being tied to a desire to not feel fully healthy is very similar to the activity of Naoji from setting sun for example.

Edit: A friend has pointed out that date at the start of the manga aligns with Dazai's suicide. This is pretty unfortunate and I still stand by what I said here about how the character is treated within the work. Maybe I'll return and write a bit more about what I think his personal thoughts on that would've been but that seems like a very fraught topic. Much of the discussion over his feelings about himself assume short story characters are self inserts which I strongly disagree with.