Days with My Stepsister Volume 1 Review

Light novel author Ghost Mikawa has been lucky enough to have the debut of not one, but two new series in the Western market in the form of Looks Are All You Need and the title I’m here to review today: Days with My Stepsister. This one also has an anime scheduled for the Summer 2024 season, so what better to time a look at it? Let’s find out what it’s all about!

The story follows high-school student Yuuta Asamura, who passes his days peacefully attending school and working part-time in a bookstore. One day his peaceful life is abruptly turned on its head when his father announces that he intends to remarry and in the process, Yuuta will gain a stepsister. 

As an only child, Yuuta finds himself almost excited about the idea – especially as he’s led to believe his new sister Saki is in elementary school. However, when he meets his new stepmother and stepsister for the first time, he’s startled to find Saki is a high-schooler just like him and not only that, she’s the most popular girl in his grade! Still, both Yuuta and Saki have seen their parents go through difficult divorces and have no intention of doing anything to ruin their newfound happiness, so they agree to keep a respectful distance from one another. 

Being used to living on their own by and large since their parents were away at work, Saki and Yuuta are both fairly independent and not used to leaning on others for support. Despite saying he would keep a distance, Yuuta inevitably gets involved with Saki and learns that she’s not so tough underneath her brave persona. Like him, she carries scars from being betrayed by one of her parental figures and wants to find a well-paying job so she doesn’t have to rely on her mother and new family for anything. 

And that’s all there is to this first volume of Days with My Stepsister. The book is split into chapters which take place over a week, Sunday through to the following Saturday and that means the story doesn’t move very fast once we get over the initial moving-in phase. The two siblings go through their daily lives, slowly getting to know one another and developing a bond of sorts. 

This slow process works somewhat better for Saki’s character than it does Yuuta. She begins to open up to him surprisingly quickly and there’s clearly some depth to her character. She puts on an act at school to keep people away from her (aside from one close friend) and she’s very willing to do whatever she can to become fully independent. In many ways, it’s reassuring that she now has Yuuta in her life as he can help keep her on the straight and narrow while becoming the support she desperately needs (and she in turn becomes a support he didn’t know he needed). But as Yuuta is the main character and everything in Volume 1 is told from his perspective, it can sometimes feel as if time is passing too slowly and little of consequence happening unless Saki is present. 

However, I do have to give author Ghost Mikawa credit for the fact this hasn’t immediately become a stepsibling romance like many series of its kind. I’d be surprised if it doesn’t become one in the long run, but it feels like that will be earned rather than Yuuta falling for Saki simply because it’s forbidden romance or they were suddenly pushed into this situation. And if we’re going to have a romance like this, I would much rather the author spend time fleshing it out and justifying it to me like My Stepmom’s Daughter is My Ex or Domestic Girlfriend (although in those cases the characters knew each other before becoming family). So, this one is certainly ticking those boxes for me presently. 

There’s a fairly solid foundation here, depending on what you’re looking for out of it, but I have to say I wasn’t impressed with the translation for this one. The problem is that Yuuta is extremely one-note in English, with very little variety in how he talks except for his inner monologues. This wouldn’t usually be a deal breaker for me, but there’s a scene where Saki asks him to stop speaking so formally with her and he agrees, only to continue talking the exact same way he was before which just doesn’t make any sense. Having checked out some of the Japanese I gather that there was a change in honorific usage and Yuuta using more formal ways of speaking grammatically before agreeing not to, something that’s difficult to convey in English 1:1 but certainly could have been depicted better than it was. I was surprised Yen Press didn’t keep the honorifics here, as they do sometimes for series set in Japan like this. It’s not consistent by any means, but I think keeping them would have at least alleviated some of the problems since they add a bit more depth to the relationships. 

Yuuta’s dialogue often reads like a textbook and not at all like a high-schooler, even a mature high-schooler, and this is not helped by the fact he’s well-read and often recites information he reads in a book. And while those scenes are trying to capture the textbook vibe, the rest of his thoughts shouldn’t be! This is a shame as Saki does have much more variety in her speech patterns in comparison. Given that the premise of the novel is about watching two characters grow closer, not having that reflected in the dialogue feels like a major issue to me. It’s missing the nuance of the Japanese text, which is probably why the audience in Japan is quite taken with it but I was left somewhat ambivalent. Still, hopefully, this will improve as the series goes on and simply be a first-volume problem. 

Days with My Stepsister Volume 1 comes to the West thanks to Yen Press and has been translated by Eriko Sugita. Beyond the issues I’ve talked about above, the book reads well with no typos or issues to speak of. This release includes colour pages from illustrator Hiten, which depict the cast in a variety of daily life situations. At the back, there’s also a QR code and an advertisement for a YouTube channel, where there’s a variety of shorts (with English subtitles in most cases) featuring the cast. This light novel series is based on these videos which follow the daily life of Yuuta, Saki and some other characters I presume we’ll meet in the future. 

In Japan, the series is ongoing with eight volumes released as well as a manga adaptation (which Yen Press have scheduled for later this month), and the anime coming in the Summer season. Volume 2 of the light novel series came out in English just last month with #3 following in June. There’s nothing scheduled beyond that, but I imagine Yen will be keen to get more out quickly given the anime. 

Overall, Days with My Stepsister Volume 1 is an okay read let down by its localisation which makes the main character duller than he should be. Still, some interesting storylines are cooking for the main characters as they get closer and given the author didn’t rush straight to a romance I’m willing to continue with the hopes the issues I experienced here clear up. Everyone else may want to wait for the anime adaptation to get a better taste of whether or not this is for them.

Our review copy from Yen Press was supplied by Diamond Book Distributors UK.