Holiday Review #11: BUTAREBA: THE STORY OF A MAN TURNED INTO A PIG

 It's true that a lot of isekai protagonists could be described as pigs, but usually it's not THIS literal.

BUTAREBA: THE STORY OF A MAN TURNED INTO A PIG (Buta no Reba wa Kanetsu Shiro), based on the light novels by Takuma Shikai and illustrations by Asagi Tohsaka, with art by Minami.  First published in 2020 and first published in North America in 2024.

PLOT:

Once he was a man who happened to eat some raw pig liver.  One moment he passed out at the rail station, the next he was reborn as an ordinary hog in a world far removed from modern-day Japan.  It's there that he meets Jess, a slave girl who is able to hear his thoughts and thus realize he is not just some pig.  Before they can work on changing him back, he'll need to help Jess with a scheme to obtain a magic crystal, a scheme that threatens to become deadly for one of them.

STORY:

The bar for my expectations for isekai manga is on the ground, and amazingly Butareba managed to exceed them.  Mind you, it didn't so much vault over that bar as it did trot over them but I've definitely read far worse than this.

It helps that our nameless protagonist is literally just a pig.  He may still possess the mind of a modern-day otaku, but otherwise his abilities are limited to whatever a real-world pig can do.  This means that he has actual challenges to overcome, challenges that require him to get clever and take advantages of his newly porcine abilities (such as an enhanced sense of smell).  This does mean that this is a pretty talkative manga because there's a lot of internal monologuing, but Zihan Gao's translation does its best to make it more conversational instead of just transplanting lines from the light novels straight into the book.

Since our protagonist is a pig, a lot of the narrative heavy lifting has to be done by his companion Jess.  This is unfortunate because Jess is so meek and mild.  Some of this is explained away by her being a slave to a nobleman and part of an oppressed race, but it's hard for the story to muster much energy when one of its protagonists is a mute animal and the other an exploited young woman.  It really doesn't help that our protagonist adds to the exploitation by obsessing over her panties and using his tiny stature to look up her skirt, which she endures without the slightest fuss.  Just because she doesn't make a fuss doesn't make it OK!

The plot itself is curiously low-key, but it does keep moving forward at a steady pace and doesn't involve any of the usual cliches involving foretold quests, demon lords, or cheat skills.  It has a lot more humor than you typically see in isekai stories.  It keeps its focus pretty tightly on Jess and the pig and their growing bond, so you could even argue that it has a bit of heart.  It's still a very gimmicky premise with some occasionally sketchy elements, but already it has the potential to outgrow them and develop into something halfway decent.

ART:

My expectations for the art were equally low, and Minami didn't do much to challenge them.  The best thing going for it visually was something they couldn't take credit for: the pig design.  It's very simple and squishy, with stubby little legs and beady little eyes that makes him look almost like a plushie.  That simplicity makes it less jarring and more amusing when it does un-piglike actions.  The rest of the character design is much more conventional and I can't say I particularly care for it.  Jess's character design is as limp as her personality, and most of the effort went into drawing all the fussy, frilly details of her upskirt shots and panty peeks than into making her emote.

The only other visual I took away from this was a single visual gag, one that could only work in a manga.  Early on, our protagonist tries to distinguish the thoughts he wants to communicate to Jess from the pervier, more genre-aware inner monologue he does not want to communicate to her.  He tries to distinguish this by pointing out the different shapes of the panels/bubbles used for those different thoughts.  It's not the most uproarious joke, but it's more inspired than I typically see in these kinds of books.

RATING:

Butareba was slightly above its other, equally gimmicky peers, but that doesn't make it good.  It's clearly trying to make an effort with its premise and the relationship between the protagonist and Jess, but it backslides every time it gets pervy with her.  It has the potential to get better in future volumes, but I frankly doubt it's going to get there.

This manga is published digitally by J-Novel Club.  This series is ongoing in Japan with 6 volumes available.  3 volumes have been released and are currently available through most digital manga vendors.

There are two weeks left in our Holiday Review Giveaway! To find out more and potentially win a $25 Bookshop.org gift certificate, click the link above.