By Hanami Nishine and . Released in Japan as “Yatoware Heroine wa Akuyaku Reijou ni Zamaa Saretai” on the Shousetsuka ni Narou website. Released in North America by Cross Infinite World. Translated by Jordan Taylor.
I was somewhat baffled at this single-volume series after reading it. On researching the title further, I am slightly less baffled. It came out in 2019, which is not in the first wave of Villainess titles, but right after, which is why it tries to play with the form a little. It’s also one of the CIW titles that they licensed directly from the author, and only seems to have appeared on the Narou website. A lot of webnovels are written on the fly. They’re week to week. They’re messy. And when they get picked up by a publisher, they tend to get heavily rewritten. This is still in the “messy” stage. It starts off almost as a broad comedy, and gradually starts to get a bit tragic as we begin to understand our hired heroine, who just wants to live happily with her mom but sometimes life doesn’t let you get what you want. Her messiness makes this interesting.
Nina Scaglione has been reincarnated in this world form Japan, but her memories are vague (she *thinks* she may have lived in the country as the daughter of a rice farmer) and she’s not remotely noble. She lives as a commoner with her mother, who is dying and in pain. Her father is also dead. Then suddenly a talking cat shows up, and tries to make a deal with her. She can’t cure her mom, but she can get medicine that will ease her mom’s pain for as long as she has. In return, she has to play out this other girl’s “otome game villainess” fantasies and be the “heroine”, who is there to be a commoner, seduce the prince, and then get publicly shunned at graduation like all the best villainess books. There are a few problems here. The first is that the prince is uninterested in her, and she in him. The second is that this villainess is really, really dim.
At first I was certain this book was a comedy. This villainess, Clarissa, is a master class at “did not think this through”, and can’t even pour a bucket of water over the heroine without screwing it up. Nina’s attempts at being the heroine are helped along by this world’s “heroine powers”, which means everyone who has not co-signed a contract with God thinks that everything she does is wonderful and perfect, and this can also get very amusing. That said, as the book goes on, Nina’s life starts to get worse and worse. Things are not helped by Nina herself, who is very much in the “I am so plain and no one would be attracted to me” school of light novel protagonists. There are some real tear-jerking scenes later on, even as the book gradually manages to barrel along its narrative. That said, the book does end happily ever after, kinda sorta if everyone works art it. Even for the villainess, who is rather flummoxed by all this.
So yes, I don’t regret reading this, and enjoyed Nina’s struggles. But it’s a mess.
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