Watashi no Musuko ga Isekai Tensei Shitappoi - Vol. 4 Ch. 30 - That's Wrong!

[Weoooo]

People are assigning grief to Haruji based on how they might feel in that circumstance, but I don't think Haruji is most people. He did not and does not feel grief about Taiga's death. That I can say that with this much certainty because this manga is a made-up story and the ones involved in creating this manga specifically chose that narrative. Again, it makes for a bad and restrictive story, but it is how it is. Haruji is a bad, irredeemable person because he was written that way. I mean, no one said this was War and Peace.

I don't think it's a restrictive story at all, especially because of the undercurrents in Mio's friend group. They all come from troubled homes, and stuck together because of shared traumas.

I mean, you lay out a very convincing character of Haruji here. An entitled man who sees his wife as a sign of power and influence rather than a person, who's annoyed when she does things he doesn't want her to do and is especially annoyed that she forced him to be a father. Every action she takes that he doesn't want undercuts his authority and power, and that stings him. He's used to other people bending over backwards for him, and has gotten through life being pushy and forceful enough that people will. He's never really taken responsibility for anything, not even bothering to wear a condom, and even now sees Mio's grief as a slight against him.

Which is all bad. He's a bad person. But here's the thing, the other half of him? The other bad part? That's his depth. Haruji acts like a mob boss, or a landlord, or an evil CEO, but he's not. He's a blue collar worker of some kind that clearly makes decent enough money and who has a family who has some sort of generational wealth and influence. Fine. Good enough. But less than he's sure he deserves. What flows through every action he takes and every word he speaks is resentment at the world, at his situation, at the people around him who don't give him the respect he feels he is entitled to. You peg him as a narcissist, and I don't think you're all that wrong, but he's also a person we've all met, a particular type of shitty dude who feels victimized by his lack of power.

He is not one dimensional. He is, on one hand, physically powerful, demanding, has economic and social influence of some kind, especially in the town he lives, and is used to getting what he wants. But he is not content. He is resentful and insecure, convinced people don't respect him enough and that the reason they do things he doesn't like is because they want to slight him or embarrass him. Because in the end, he's not an impressive figure. He's an uneducated manual laborer who married out of high school and beats his wife. He's deeply pathetic, and he knows it. Which is why he's so angry, because he has to cast himself as the victim of an unfair world or his whole identity will collapse.

He's the kind of character that feels like a stereotype, like you said: the guy who peaked in high school. But I've met them. We've all met them. Entire political movements rest on the backs of these types of guys.

 

[outinthegardener]

The thing about Haruji is that he is as irredeemable as they come and a lot of the character merits people assign to him are what they would expect of a normal, well-adjusted person but not applicable for him specifically. It makes for a very one dimensional character and while that is a bad thing from a literary perspective, it still doesn't make him a good, or even a relatable, person.

This chapter doesn't spring anything new about his character, but only takes it the next, and predictable if you're familiar with his psychosis, level. None of the previous panels featuring Haruji and Taiga do you see him even regarding his son with anything approaching warmth. I don't think he even looks at Taiga. And when he's gaslighting Mio, it becomes clear. Taiga is like a puppy Mio decided to bring home entirely on her volition. The speech he gave when Mio told him that she was pregnant was not a permission to have a child together. It was an abdication of his responsibility as a parent. He's telling her that she will be the one deciding the have a child and she's going to be the one solely responsible for him, for good or for bad. They probably had similar conversation all through Taiga's life, because obviously, it's difficult to entirely remove himself from Taiga's life, and every time Taiga happened to be a hinderance to how he wants to live, he would remind Mio that having him was her decision, and she should be the one responsible for him and not him. Otherwise, his line about how this is all her fault wouldn't work, as it didn't work with Doubara. So it has been a lifetime of conditioning Mio about her responsibility toward Taiga that made that line in this chapter work against her.

I can't find any evidence where he's expressing grief about Taiga's death. He's expressed annoyance at how people are treating him, expecting certain emotions that he's not capable of feeling. The admiration and respect he expects from other people, along with the lack of empathy, pretty much clinically diagnose him as a classic narcissist. The manga fills him in with some details. The encounter with his family shows that his family is one of some former renown, maybe a landholding family that has fallen on hard times, surrounded by families of former retainers who still pay them some measure of respect but are doing better than them. It's a common theme in Japanese drama that native readers would have picked up on immediately, but something not that familiar to Western readers. That decline of his family mirrors his employment situation. From his uniform, he works in some manufacturing job, which is perfectly respectable, but not to the level of an idle landowner that his previous generation was. Or not a professional occupation like a lawyer or a doctor. He's not even an owner or a manager. He could not be happy with his family or work situation, given the delusions of grandeur typical of a narcissists. He was probably satisfied when he was in school, but that has steadily declined after graduation, a pattern that should be familiar with the Western readers as well. He's like a former high school jock who still wears his varsity jacket to bars at 36 and hits on the waitress 15 years his junior.

So he can't handle the pity from people who he feels should be admiring him, and now one thing he feels he has that's (not who's, because I think he sees Mio as a possession) better than what others have, a beautiful and popular wife, has run away from him. All this he sees an an attack on his person and he can't take it.

People are assigning grief to Haruji based on how they might feel in that circumstance, but I don't think Haruji is most people. He did not and does not feel grief about Taiga's death. That I can say that with this much certainty because this manga is a made-up story and the ones involved in creating this manga specifically chose that narrative. Again, it makes for a bad and restrictive story, but it is how it is. Haruji is a bad, irredeemable person because he was written that way. I mean, no one said this was War and Peace.

I agree with almost everything here, except it's a "bad" story. After all, would a bad story give you enough character content to write that essay? Rather I think it's doing a good job of expressing things with subtlety and tension.

I'll add to the character analysis: Their son was the only thing tying Mio and Haruji together. If not for Taiga, she would have dumped his sorry ass a long time ago. Part of the tension is that with Taiga gone, Mio feels trapped being stuck with him, and he's being as insensitive and controlling as can be. It's understandable that she'd create a delusion to avoid the tragedy.

 

[shubbby]

Finally, it's here.
Many many many chapters ago I commented about this, "it's my fault Taiga died" is THE KEY to what's happening with Mio. In that moment Mio is not just confirming what Haruji said, she is also repeating something that herself believes.

Why Mio thinks Taiga's death is her fault?
Wait a bit more to discover, that's the TRUE REASON why Mio "went crazy".
I cried a bit reading that chapter.

One of the upcoming chapters deals with this, if somewhat tangentially.

 

[shubbby]

I agree with almost everything here, except it's a "bad" story. After all, would a bad story give you enough character content to write that essay? Rather I think it's doing a good job of expressing things with subtlety and tension.

I'll add to the character analysis: Their son was the only thing tying Mio and Haruji together. If not for Taiga, she would have dumped his sorry ass a long time ago. Part of the tension is that with Taiga gone, Mio feels trapped being stuck with him, and he's being as insensitive and controlling as can be. It's understandable that she'd create a delusion to avoid the tragedy.

Yeah, I take back what I said about this being a "bad" story. It's not as nuanced as I would have liked in that one aspect, but it is an almost startlingly refreshing take on the isekai trope and a profoundly incisive read on the effects of grief and abuse. I'm just a little annoyed that Haruji comes across as one dimensional, but as a relatively minor character, what he lacks in nuance and subtlety works to compel both Mio and Doubara in their progression. He is a literary catalyst.

 

[ciera]

Jesus fuck

 

[kaminomikan]

fucking useless mc, come on, kick back. Defend yourself, hit using your bag...

 

[brainman]

I can't find any evidence where he's expressing grief about Taiga's death.

Heavy drinking (half his appearances have him surrounded by piles of empty bottles), sleeping the days away (his boss confirms this is unusual, and he's mostly depicted lying on the couch), not taking care of himself or his surroundings (always seems sloppily dressed or unkempt, unlike his appearance in the flashbacks, and a visiting friend mentions what a sty their house has become), engaging in self-destructive behaviors (picking pointless fights over perceived slights, and indeed even sleeping around), lashing out (against their friends and Mio), reacting spitefully to things like pity or expressions of sympathy by those they think "don't understand" (again, against the friends who to his perception offer only empty gestures and words without any real empathy or understanding, which the friends even admit to later amongst themselves), any even just armchair psychologist would look at Haruji's behavior in the context of this story and pretty clearly attest depression. Is this not a form of grief to you? What in the story makes you believe that this is just his regular behavior?

Even this chapter doesn't really prove otherwise. Yeah, he's laissez faire about the pregnancy in the flashback, but he doesn't seem strongly opposed, even agreeing to raise the kid alongside her. And from what little we've seen of Taiga, does he seem like a neglected or abused child? Is there any reason to believe that Haruji mistreated him? It's just pure speculation.

His supposed gaslighting at this point doesn't really strike me as a calculated move. Is it a reprehensible thing to do? Sure. Does it make him a villain? Not so much, just a kind of baseline shitty man in a horrible situation, driven into a corner, helping himself the only way he knows how - again, like Mio. He needs to deal with the reality of things, in his case by absolving himself of guilt and pawning it off on someone else (remember his reaction to the random bystanders in an earlier chapter implying that Taiga's death was his own fault), in Mio's case by throwing herself into her delusion and offloading on Doubara.

He's an interesting character, and certainly more complex, and less one-note monstrous than people give him credit for. He's a shit person, and framed as a villain, which makes sense, because the story is told from Mio and Doubara's perspective, but he's really just Mio without the filter of being a tragic heroine. Which is interesting, because I could easily imagine a story told from an opposing point of view.

 

[coyote_vdb]

Thanks for the translation.

 

[Peepoo]

What an absolutely uninteresting twist, the only more boring thing the author could have done would be to go "isekai real actually" but this is a really close second. Now we're in protagonist good and antagonist bad territory. Lame

 

[foist]

Lmao at anyone who didn't clock the dad as an awful piece of shit... were there really apologists??

 

[foist]

ANYONE who gets violent and abusive because they are frustrated with their "loved one" being mentally ill is a huge POS, full stop, no discussion.

 

[foist]

at this point he just wants to hurt her
whether it's him lashing out in his own grief or not remains to be seen

Because he's a POS, its not that deep, tons of people are totally emotionally ignorant. If he thinks anything he is doing is "useful" he's truly, unquestionably a total idiot.

 

[Weoooo]

What an absolutely uninteresting twist, the only more boring thing the author could have done would be to go "isekai real actually" but this is a really close second. Now we're in protagonist good and antagonist bad territory. Lame

Yeah turns out the guy who knocked her up when she was still in high school sucks. Who could have guessed?
The point here isn't the constantly twist the story into new paths. We've known ever since we met him that he's a garbage person. The point here was the climax of the emotional arcs the characters are going through, and they all collided here and played out in a fairly satisfying conclusion.
Not intrinsically satisfying, I wanted Dobura to kill that motherfucker but that's not this kind of manga. Instead, we got a lot of characterization and emotional payoff.

 

[Kushikime]

Thanks for the chapters !! Also I got the context well but I do appreciate that you go in depth explaining on the Japanese language

 

[ComradeVee]

Jesus christ, what a fucking cavalcade of suffering. Thanks for the TL, glad to see you guys back in action! Looking forwards to the rest of the volume and the final volume of this incredible story

 

[jesuscristo]

What an absolutely uninteresting twist, the only more boring thing the author could have done would be to go "isekai real actually"

I would like to know what you think should have happened and I'd bet it would be either completely unnatural or just plan stupid. The way the story was set up so far made this chapter pretty much inevitable, and it was handled perfectly fine.

 

[yoshiii]

Damn, they both broken. Haruji even more so.

Poor Mio, I'm hoping Doubara actually grows a spine and says what he wants to to her.

 

[SleepyDemon]

NGL, I was kind of hoping that shove would've led to him cracking the back of his skull on the concrete and him literally meeting Taiga in the isekai dimension. Like...I genuinely want to see how he'd react to that.

 

[Grye]

Damn that's messed up

 

[Dzrian]

He has been an asshole from the start. The death just inconvenienced him in some ways that makes him frustrated even more. It's like he is forced to give a damn.