The Girl from the Other Side 4

 
The Girl from the Other Side 4
Siuil, a Run

by Nagabe

Seven Seas

2018

 

 

The fourth volume of The Girl from the Other Side opens with the Outsider 'Teacher,' cute little girl Shiva, and Shiva's aunt who has turned into an Outsider all returned to Teacher's cabin.

 
There's very little 'action' in this volume. The aunt and Teacher talk, and we learn that the aunt isn't a blood relative to Shiva, she found her as a baby, Outside among the dead of a village whose human inhabitants had all been killed by the military because they were believed to be Cursed, and she took the baby home and raised her.

 
Teacher worries that now that Shiva has her aunt back, that they won't want or need him anymore.
 

Then Shiva's aunt tries to get Shiva to run away from Teacher with her. The aunt believes that Teacher passed the Curse to Shiva, and that's why the aunt transformed and the military burned down their most recent village. Shiva manages to convince her aunt that the Curse was passed on by a different Outsider, and that she wants the three of them to live together, and the aunt agrees to bring Shiva back to the cabin.
 

There's a sweet period where the three of them live together as family. Then things turn sad again, because Shiva's aunt loses her memory of her life before, including losing her memory of Shiva. Teacher observes that this happens to everyone who transforms into an Outsider. (And I think we've previously seen that he has no memory of his own prior life.) With no memory and thus no attachments, the aunt wanders off.
 

Throughout this volume, the Outsiders from the forest have shown up to pester Teacher to 'return the Pure Soul to Mother,' meaning take Shiva to the giant Outsider who lives in the lake. At the very end, one shows up again to demand it, and shows them the severed, broken, Outsider head of Shiva's aunt.
 

The pace of this volume felt kind of slow. We learned a little but mostly reaffirmed things we'd already learned. The plot of the aunt trying to separate Shiva and Teacher kind of detracted from the emotional impact of their (very brief) new life together dissolving when the aunt lost her memory. The slice-of-life homemaking scenes served an important character-development function in the first volume, but here they both take too long (pausing the development of any other part of the story) and pass too quickly (without enough time to actually establish a new status quo.) The plot of the other Outsiders wanting Shiva spent the whole time idling in neutral, but I think it will start moving again in volume 5.