When Did Isekai Begin? From Return Narratives to Permanent Escape

In 1900, in an American novel, a little girl is swept up by a cyclone and dropped into a dazzling land of magic. The people there welcome her as a hero. Yet she has no interest in staying. All she wants is to find a way back to a gray farmhouse in Kansas. Roughly a century later, in a Japanese online novel, a 34-year-old man is hit by a truck, dies, and is born again in a world of swords and sorcery. This man has nowhere to go back to.

Both are stories about another world, yet they end in opposite directions. What happened in between? This article traces the origins of stories in which someone crosses the threshold of reality into another world, the narratives now commonly called “isekai” (Japanese for “another world”), starting from the old folktales. Then it asks why, at some point, the protagonist stopped coming home.

Where Do We Draw the Line?

In Rhetorics of Fantasy (2008), the literary scholar Farah Mendlesohn sorted fantasy into four types according to the protagonist’s relationship to the fantasy world. In her scheme, “portal-quest fantasy” is the story of a protagonist who passes through a door from our world into another, while “immersive fantasy” is set entirely inside the fantasy world from the start.^[1] This article is concerned with stories close to the first type. It also leaves out tales of the afterlife, such as heaven or paradise. What remains is the story of someone from our world who crosses a threshold and arrives in another world alive, or newly born into it.

There is a reason for drawing the line here. What defines portal fantasy is that a protagonist standing at the reader’s own eye level meets a strange world for the first time. Whatever the hero doesn’t know, the reader learns alongside them, so the moment of crossing over and the moment of coming back become the backbone of the story. Follow how the door opens and closes, and you can see what each era asked of its stories.

Old Tales Beyond the Threshold, and the Price of Return

The structure is older than you might expect. Japan’s Urashima Tarō already appears in texts compiled in the eighth century. A young fisherman follows a turtle (or a woman who is the turtle in another form) across the sea to a distant realm, lives there for a time, and returns, only to find that several hundred years have passed at home. When he opens the box the woman gave him, he ages in an instant.^[2] The point is that time flows very differently in the other world, and the traveler who returns pays for it. However happy he was there, he ends up alone in a homeland where no one knows him. The old tale sets “the pleasures of the other world” and “the return to one’s own world” side by side, and puts a heavy price on the latter.

Such stories turn up all over the world. In the Scottish ballad, Thomas the Rhymer follows the Queen of Elfland and serves her in the fairy realm for seven years before returning.^[3] In “The Peach Blossom Spring,” written in the early fifth century by the Eastern Jin poet Tao Yuanming, a fisherman stumbles upon a peaceful village beyond a grove of peach blossoms. Even though he marks the route on his way out, he never finds the place again.^[4] “Jack and the Beanstalk,” attested in print in eighteenth-century England, follows a boy who climbs into a giant’s land in the sky and carries off treasure.^[5] All of them share one shape: cross the threshold, go through something, and come back.

People of the past also told stories about dreaming of another life. In the Tang dynasty tale Zhenzhong ji (“The World Inside a Pillow”), a poor scholar named Lu Sheng lies down on a pillow at an inn in Handan and lives out a lifetime of wealth and honor in his sleep. He wakes to find that the millet the innkeeper was cooking has not even finished steaming. In Nanke taishou zhuan (“The Governor of Nanke”), the hero serves as governor of a kingdom inside an anthill, then wakes from the dream.^[6][7] These tales survive as the Chinese idioms “the Handan dream” and “the Nanke dream.” The other life is only a dream, and the lesson is that waking up teaches you how fleeting life is. What is worth noticing is that the old stories knew the pull of another life perfectly well. They simply refused to indulge it to the end, and always sent the traveler back where he started.

The Door Opens in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Portal fantasy deliberately constructed by an author emerged in earnest in nineteenth-century Britain. In George MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858), the bedroom of a young man named Anodos turns into a fairy forest, and he wanders through a world of fantasy written for adult readers.^[8] In 1865 came Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. A girl falls down a rabbit hole and, when her adventure ends, wakes in her sister’s lap.^[9]

The borderline cases deserve a mention. A story like Alice, which ends with “it was all a dream,” makes it unclear whether the threshold was really crossed. Places such as fairyland or the Dragon Palace of Japanese folklore are close to isekai in that they are worlds outside the human one rather than realms of the dead, but this article treats them only lightly.

Knowledge and the Body Become Weapons: Two American Inventions

In 1889, Mark Twain published A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Hank Morgan, a nineteenth-century American engineer, is knocked on the head and wakes up in sixth-century England, where he shakes the court with modern knowledge and technology.^[10] Strictly speaking this is a borderline case, since it involves travel through time rather than space. But it shows the core prototype of later isekai: a person with modern knowledge who thrives in another world. Alice and Anodos were visitors who marveled and wandered; Hank Morgan is someone who intervenes in the strange world with what he knows. Here begins the story in which the outsider becomes the person with power.

In 1912, Edgar Rice Burroughs serialized A Princess of Mars in the magazine The All-Story under the title “Under the Moons of Mars,” and it appeared as a book in 1917. John Carter, a Civil War veteran, falls into an inexplicable paralysis in an Arizona cave. He then steps out of his own body and looks down at it lying on the floor, and soon wakes on Mars. Thanks to the planet’s low gravity, he gains superhuman strength and agility.^[11] An ordinary man goes through something like death on Earth, wakes in a new body in another world, and becomes a superman. That structure could fairly be called a direct ancestor of later reincarnation stories and their “cheat abilities.”

The Door That Swings Back: Oz and Narnia

Until the mid-twentieth century, however, the basic rule of portal fantasy was the return. Chapter 1 of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) opens on Dorothy’s home in Kansas: nothing but “the great gray prairie on every side,” with land that “the sun had baked… into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it.” Aunt Em had been a young, pretty wife, but the sun and wind “had taken the sparkle from her eyes,” and now she “never smiled.” Uncle Henry “worked hard from morning till night and did not know what joy was. He was gray also, from his long beard to his rough boots, and he looked stern and solemn, and rarely spoke.”^[12]

This is the home Dorothy wants to go back to. Oz is glittering, and its people welcome her. Even so, in Chapter 4 she tells the Scarecrow: “No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home.” In the final chapter she clicks the heels of her silver shoes together and lands back at that shabby farmhouse. Aunt Em, who never smiled, sees her running toward her and cries, “My darling child!”, folding her in her arms and covering her face with kisses. Dorothy’s last line: “I’m so glad to be at home again!”^[12] In C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), the children become kings and queens of Narnia, then tumble back out of the wardrobe to find themselves children again.^[13] In classic portal fantasy, coming back was not merely an ending. It was the moral of the story.

In Japan: Summoned Boys and Game-Like Worlds

In Japan, this structure changed significantly in the 1980s. In Aura Battler Dunbine, an anime that aired in 1983, a boy named Shō Zama is summoned from Earth to a world called Byston Well, where he fights as an Aura Battler. The world is set up as lying on the boundary between life and death, but the boy fights there alive, so it falls within the scope of this article. It is often cited as the progenitor of stories set in medieval-European-style worlds.^[14] Note, though, that “progenitor” is a label added later by fans and critics.

Next came Mashin Hero Wataru in 1988, Madō King Granzort in 1989, and NG Knight Lamune & 40 in 1990. In Granzort, a boy who wins a trip to the moon gets lost on the lunar surface and enters a world inside the moon called Labiluna.^[15] In Lamune, a princess emerges from the TV in front of a boy who has just cleared a video game and carries him off to a “game-like world,” a story often cited as a link between game grammar and isekai.^[16] In the 1990s came works in which students cross into other worlds, such as Fushigi Yûgi, Magic Knight Rayearth, and The Twelve Kingdoms. The sense of levels and stats that games like Dragon Quest (1986) had made familiar also began to seep into storytelling around this time.

What stands out is that most protagonists in these works were boys and girls, and in many of the stories the end of the adventure was tied to going back to the original world, or to finding a way to do so. The setting had become Japanese, but the skeleton still rested on the tradition of Oz and Narnia. The difference was that the worlds were increasingly read as “game-like.” Web novels would later merge these two strands: the door into another world and the rules of the game.

Web Novels Close the Door: The Reincarnation Formula

The decisive turn happened online. Shōsetsuka ni Narō (“Let’s Become Novelists”), a fiction-posting site launched in 2004, became a stage where anyone could publish a story.^[17] Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation, which began serialization there in November 2012, reached the number-one spot on the site about a year later, and after that “reincarnation” effectively became the default route into another world. Some analysts say that the regret over one’s previous life, and the depiction of a fantasy world as a stage for a fresh start, also took hold thanks to this work.^[18][19] Its protagonist is a 34-year-old unemployed recluse who is hit by a truck, dies, and is reborn as a baby in a world of swords and sorcery.^[19]

A few terms are worth separating here. “Reincarnation” (転生) means dying and being born again. “Transportation” or “transfer” (転移) means moving there in one’s own body. “Summoning” means being called there by someone. Classic portal fantasy was mostly transfer, and Dunbine was summoning. Once reincarnation became the standard, the protagonist was already dead in the original world. The body to return to and the place to return to both vanish from the story. Where authors of classic portal fantasy had to work out how to send the hero home, that problem no longer needed to exist.

Similar Currents in Other Countries at the Same Time

Nor was this trend confined to Japan. In the Chinese-speaking world, there are chuanyue (穿越, “time/world-crossing”) novels in which modern people cross into the past and thrive. In Xun Qin Ji (1994, by the Hong Kong author Huang Yi, adapted as the 2001 TVB drama A Step into the Past), a modern special-forces soldier travels to the Warring States period and helps the First Emperor of Qin rise to power. Works like this are credited with laying the groundwork for what became a major branch of internet literature.^[20] In Korean web novels, from the early 2010s, “regression, possession, and reincarnation,” in which a dead or failed protagonist goes back in time, enters another person’s body, or is reborn, became the most powerful grammar of the genre.^[21] In the English-speaking world there is LitRPG, set in worlds where game rules literally apply. The name was coined in Russian publishing in 2013 and then established itself as a genre in the English-language self-publishing market.^[22] The names differ from country to country, and the settings split into the past, another world, and a game world. Yet the shared structure, giving a dead or failed protagonist “one more chance,” is strikingly similar. That similar stories became popular in different language communities at nearly the same time suggests this cannot be explained as one country’s fad.

Why Did They Stop Coming Back?

The biggest difference between classic portal fantasy and today’s reincarnation stories lies not in the ending but in the starting point. Dorothy went back to a shabby house and taciturn family. The Handan dream and the Nanke dream also send their heroes back to their original lives and make them accept those lives. By contrast, the protagonist of Mushoku Tensei, in his previous life, cut himself off from his family and shut himself away, and in the other world he gains a loving new one. One could read this as a story of family love. But set it beside Dorothy and another picture appears. It looks more like abandoning the original family and swapping in a new one. Anyone can love people who are easy to love. Family love also means staying on good terms with relatives you dislike or resent, growing fond of them over years of living side by side as blood kin, and making the effort to get along. Dorothy’s return was the latter, while the replacement in reincarnation stories is closer to the former. This change is not the readers’ fault. Might the better question be what it means that the structure of the stories has changed this way?

One background worth speculating about is the sense of a “starting line.” In eras when class limits were literally insurmountable walls, stories about accepting one’s place came naturally, and when everyone felt they were in about the same boat, differences at the starting line may not have been a big issue. Today there are far more ladders for climbing out of one’s class, but that may be exactly why a life that failed to climb them stings more. In Japan, oya gacha (“parent gacha,” 親ガチャ), which likens one’s parents to a gacha lottery, was nominated for the 2021 buzzword awards and made the top ten.^[23][24] In Korea, around 2015, the “spoon class theory” spread, dividing people into gold-spoon and dirt-spoon by their parents’ wealth,^[25] and in China in 2021, tang ping (躺平, “lying flat”) resonated with young people.^[26] A reincarnation story is, quite literally, a story of “rerolling the parent gacha.” Just as a player resets an unsatisfactory character and starts over, might the wish to restart one’s present life be reflected in these stories?

Still, the phenomenon seems to have two faces. One is the wish to escape a hard reality: escapism. The other is a value system that admires people who determine their own lives: agency. Societies of the past counted quietly enduring hardship as a virtue, which is why Dorothy, going back to a shabby place and shouldering her life there, was the ideal protagonist. Drawing on the World Values Survey, the political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel argued that as economies and societies become stable and shift from industry toward services, people’s values tend to move from “survival values,” which prioritize material and physical security, to “self-expression values,” which prize individual freedom and self-expression.^[27] There is no evidence that this trend is directly tied to the popularity of reincarnation stories. But in an age that praises those who change the board over those who endure the one they were dealt, it may be only natural that narrative has shifted from “going home to endure” to “starting over on a new board.”

There are also secondary factors. For a generation raised on games, the sense of resetting after failure and starting over with one’s memories and abilities intact is not unfamiliar. The readership has changed as well. The norm of children’s literature, that a child must eventually come home, no longer applies to adult web-novel readers. There are craft reasons too. If you kill the protagonist in the original world, you no longer have to explain why they must go back, and the story moves much lighter and faster. Of course, all of this is one interpretation, and it is worth remembering that isekai stories in which the hero returns are still plentiful.

Conclusion: The Place of the Gray Farmhouse

Dorothy clicked the heels of her silver shoes three times and went home. However dazzling Oz was, the place to return to was gray Kansas. Today’s protagonist ends his life in front of a truck and opens his eyes in a new world. A little over a hundred years lie between the two stories, and in that time the direction of the door has changed. The door in old stories made travelers leave, return, and look at their original lives again. The door in recent stories opens toward leaving the original life behind.

For many English-speaking readers, the Dorothy who goes home is a film before she is a book. MGM’s 1939 The Wizard of Oz swapped Baum’s silver shoes for ruby slippers and made “There’s no place like home” the story’s signature line, so a child in Ohio or Manchester is likely to hear it in Judy Garland’s voice long before reaching Chapter 4.^[28] The word at the center of this article has made a journey of its own: “isekai” entered English as a Japanese loanword, and in March 2024 the Oxford English Dictionary added it, defining it as a genre of fiction in which a protagonist is transported to or reincarnated in a different world.^[29] There is a small irony in that. The genre’s English name arrived from Japan, yet the oldest promise of the form, a child who steps through a door and comes back, is one that English-language readers had grown up with through Carroll, Baum and Lewis.

How to view this change will differ from reader to reader. But stories have always reflected what an era finds hard to bear and what it longs for. If the choice of a girl who turned her back on the golden city of Oz and walked toward a gray farmhouse feels strange to today’s readers, that strangeness itself may be a clue to how we have come to think about a “place to return to.”