#terrible but not technically inaccurate synopsis

[gorewound]

A boy meets an alien robot with no concept of human cultural norms, this is the first time it hasn't been a friend-making roadblock for the boy that he is named Hogarth.

[murasaki-murasame]

The Empty Box and Zeroth Maria Reread: Volume 1

I’ve been waiting so damn long for this to get an official English release and it’s finally here. I’m not entirely sure yet if I’m gonna bother writing about each and every volume as they come out in English, but I figured it’d be interesting to revisit this series, since it’s been like four years since I read it. Hopefully it’s as good as I remember it being.

Technically I never read the final volume, and I honestly don’t remember much from the volumes I DID read, so a lot of this is probably going to feel fresh enough that it might be a bit inaccurate to call it a reread. But I’m just gonna call it a reread so people know that I’m not going into this blind, and that I might end up spoiling stuff from the later volumes.

Anyway, let’s get into this.

This was one of the first light novels I ever read, so I can’t help but feel weirdly nostalgic about this series. It’s going to be really fun to slowly re-experience it as it comes out in English, even if I might not bother writing about each volume. I’m still kinda amazed that this series even got an English release, especially since it’s already been over for several years, and has always been a bit of a cult classic series. But I’m still really happy to finally own an official English release of it.

To start things off, this is a really weird series. It’s kinda hard to even tell if it’s necessarily ‘good’ on an objective level, especially since I have a lot of nostalgia towards it. The actual story is really good, but the writing can be kinda . . . bland and repetitive. I don’t think this is a fault of the translators. In fact, as a translation it seems better than I expected. I think that the writing issues were just there from the start. It’s not terrible, but just kinda boring. It sort of clashes with the intense, psychological story going on. Anyone reading this has already read the book so I’m not gonna writing out a synopsis of it or anything, though.

Separate to all of that, there’s also the topic of the characters. This is where I really wish I had a better memory of the later volumes beyond just the broad strokes of their stories. It’s kinda hard to remember exactly where the character arcs and stuff go, but reading this first volume again made me remember that I’ve always quite liked the characters in this series. It’s kinda hard to explain why, though. The rest of the series delves really deep into at least some of them, but even this early on you can tell that a lot of these characters are kinda abnormal.

Even though Kazuki kinda beats the reader over the head with how normal he is, even this early on the overall story is making it clear that his obsession with normalcy is really abnormal, and that he’s willing to go to great lengths to preserve that normalcy. It starts off fairly benign here, but I remember that it becomes more and more of a big deal as the story goes on. I’m not entirely sure if I’d say that I like him as a character, but I don’t dislike him. At least in this volume he mostly exists just to be the person who the story happens to.

There’s not a whole lot to say about Haruaki, Kirino, and Daiya as characters in this volume, but they still work well as supporting characters. I’ve always had a soft spot for how casually vicious they can be toward each other. It’s a fun dynamic. I don’t remember if much of anything happens with Haruaki and Kirino as the series goes on, but I’m pretty sure that Daiya gets majorly important later on.

Maria as a character is definitely one of the best and most memorable parts of the series. She’s really great. I love how much her role and your perception of her shifts throughout this volume, even though her motives and personality stay largely the same.

The whole premise of this volume, and the main scene that sets it up, has been stuck in my mind ever since I first read it. It’s not super complicated or anything as an idea, but the image of the mysterious transfer student announcing to the protagonist that she plans on breaking him, and the psychological horror time loop that follows, has always been very memorable to me.

I kinda forgot just how much stuff happens in this volume. It’s not even very long as a book, but it still feels like a lot happens. Probably because there’s so many twists and turns and complete shifts in the dynamic of the story.

It’s hard to judge the mystery of this volume since I already knew the identity of the owner in advance, but I still think it’s handled really well as a mystery. The weakest part of it is probably just that if you exclude Kazuki and Maria, there’s only like four major characters who could be the owner, so there’s not really too many options. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people just kinda meta-logic’d their way into guessing it correctly.

The story does a good job of throwing you off the trail and making you suspect Kirino, though. Even as someone who already knew the general answer to the mystery, I got genuinely confused at parts and thought that they really were talking about her instead of Mogi, even if Kirino still wasn’t the owner of the box. Obviously there’s a few big sections which are narrated by an undefined female character, and the way that they’re about Mogi when she used to be sociable and friendly makes you assume it’s Kirino, but there’s also stuff like the scene where Mogi stabs Kirino, and when Kazuki arrives at the scene the narration describes him as seeing ‘Kirino and someone that used to be Mogi’. The immediate assumption is that it’s talking about Mogi that way because she’s dead, but as you find out soon after, it was phrased that way because she stopped being Mogi once she succumbed to the endless repetition of her box and became a murderer.

Which is also an idea that’s presented in a really cool and disturbing way. It’s hard not to be really sympathetic toward her by the end, as you learn about what her wish was, and how she became stuck in this loop of loving someone in a way that could never truly be requited, but being unable to escape the loop without dying. Which slowly drives her insane, leading to the emotionless person we see in the main story.

Even though for most of the story you assume that the owner of the box is completely composed and in control of things, and that them being aware of the loop gives them the advantage, but I really like how that idea gets turned on it’s head as you see how Mogi being stuck in this loop and being aware of it the whole time was exactly what wore her down. The part where it shows her going to Haruaki for advice in each loop about how to deal with people she doesn’t want to see anymore, and him always jokingly suggest she just murder them, was a really good way to illustrate the concept of how even one of the random people in the loop can unwittingly torment the owner of the box.

In general, I really like the psychological horror vibe of this volume. Especially as you get further into the book and plot points like more and more people in the class slowly being ‘rejected’ come up.

Mogi’s whole part in this story is really depressing and messed up in it’s own way, but I also can’t help but feel bad for Maria during all of this. She’s just stuck trying to complete her mission and take control of the box, but she has no real idea how to do it and she winds up basically spending decades trying to find the owner. There’s also the fact that she has to actively make it so that she remembers each loop, and that if she slipped up and succumbed to despair, she’d just become another person looping forever and ever without knowing what’s happening. The whole plot point of how people in the loop manually make it so they keep their memories is kinda . . . vague and hard to wrap my head around, though. The most I can grasp is that it’s tied up in witnessing the car crash at the end of the loop, but I at least feel like Kazuki should have been involved in that more times than what we saw.

Although there’s also the whole part where we find out near the end that Mogi has the power to erase people’s memories once they find out about her identity as the owner, which I kinda forgot until just now for some reason. It helps clear up a lot of things, since it at least helps explain why it took Maria so long to successfully stop her. The fact that she did, but she just failed to stop her each time and wound up forgetting about her, goes a long way to explain it. Especially combined with Maria’s pacifistic nature.

Even though I like the weight it brings to the story, I definitely still feel that the number of loops in the story is slightly absurd. It’s hard to imagine the events of the story being spread out over such a long period of time. I mean, 27,756 days translates to about 76 years. It sorta strains my disbelief a bit. It’s not a huge deal. Mostly, it just makes it kinda weird to consider how spaced out the murders of everyone in the class must have been. Even though Mogi murdered the first person on the 10,000th loop, that still leaves like 50 years of time for her to kill the rest of her victims. Which makes them seem weirdly spread out.

Anyway, back onto the topic of Maria, she was really in an awful position, especially since she could only ever be a transfer student. She had to continually be reset back to when nobody in the class knew who she was [more or less], and so forming lasting bonds was impossible. Which is why I really like the scene at the end where you see how the first loop went, with her explaining to the class that for the sake of her own sanity she’s going to have to close herself off from everyone else, and even take on a fake name in order to truly embrace her role as an illusion. It makes me glad that, now that she’s broken out of the loop, she can actually be herself and make friends.

I also like how they bring up the whole ‘why not wish for infinite wishes’ concept by having that basically be what Maria’s entire existence is. That she’s effectively a box that can infinitely grant wishes. It’s a really neat idea. Especially combined with the whole point about how, since she can’t stop herself from still thinking that wishes can’t be granted so easily, her whole power basically doesn’t work right. I can’t remember if it’s that she ends up causing the person whose wish she grants to die, or if their wish just gets corrupted, but still.

In general I like the whole theme of wishes and their consequences, which is a pretty huge element of this series. I mean, this volume’s whole story is built upon Mogi’s wish to live without regrets, and how that ends up creating this unending time-loop because her wish can’t truly be fulfilled, at least as far as she knew, since she thought that the accident was going to kill her, and so anything that happened in her box would just be a meaningless, artificial afterlife of sorts.

I also quite like the idea of the Boxes as a concept. Mostly because it’s surprisingly unique to imagine a box as a wish-granting item. But it works really well, with how it sets up this whole idea of the box making up this artificial space based upon the person’s wish.

I don’t really have much to say about O as a character, mostly since I can’t really remember what we find out about them in later volumes, and they’re very mysterious and unexplained in this one.

There’s a lot that I haven’t really gone over deeply, like the whole theme of people acting the same way across the loops and how that can be both good and bad [in particular I still like the scene where Haruaki talks about how if he’s going to act the same in every loop, then it means that he’ll always believe in Kazuki and stand by him], but this is going on long enough and this whole post is messy and unorganized enough as it is, so I should probably stop here.

Again, I’m not entirely sure if I’ll bother making posts about the later volumes, but I still plan on buying and reading them as they come out. I still really do love this series, even if it’s kinda hard to articulate why.

Sadly I think I remember the second volume basically being the low point of the series, so that’ll be a bit disappointing, but we’ll see how I feel about it upon a reread.

[gorewound]

Butch lesbian himbo child soldier discovers the awesome power of friendship a big fucking sword.

[gorewound]

A soaking wet man and a really angry Geodude take revenge on the ableist medical establishment.

[gorewound]

A single mom takes care of her kids while another single mom takes care of hers. Eight dead, multiple injuries, likely hundreds of thousands of dollars in property damage all ensue.

[gorewound]

Autistic horse is sent to town to take notes on social interaction, by an even more autistic horse who lives in a tower.