Hit the “Random” button and see what comes up! In this feature, we take a look at whatever manga the Random Number God decides to throw at us and find out if it’s worth your time.

This time: Ibara no Majutsushi, by Fujitsuka Yuki

We have another oneshot manga this week, mostly because A) I’m super lazy and B) the other main candidate for this week’s feature had some of the worst scanlations I’d ever seen. Seriously; look up Puri Puri if you want to know what I mean. It’s kind of a pity, since otherwise that one would have been a great candidate for a crappy RMT, but it was borderline unreadable. But, without further ado, let’s actually talk about this week’s random manga, hm?

This oneshot follows Ena, a young man who – after traveling the world for several years – has returned to his quiet hometown to work as a gardener for the local lord. Not that he was traveling by choice, though. When Ena was a chlid, he and his friend Asagi learned the art medicine from Ena’s grandfather, wanting to save lives. The twist being, their hometown considers medicine to be black magic, practiced by evil sorcerers. Seven years ago, the two of them tried to smuggle in rare medicine to cure Asagi’s younger sister, but were discovered and Ena was banished. Just by showing his face again, he’s risking execution, but he feels it is his responsibility to save his hometown from itself. Unfortunately, since this is a oneshot, that’s about as far as I can elaborate without flat-out spoiling what happens, but by the same token it is a oneshot so you can probably predict exactly how it goes.

A quick glance at the internet’s manga library shows that Fujitsuka Yuki is mostly a shoujo mangaka, and it definitely shows in the art here. All the boys are super pretty and have those weird perpetually open-smiling faces that only exist in shoujo manga (you know, the ones that make it look like they’re about to make out at any given moment), and while it creates a decent sense of dissonance at times, I can only imagine that was unintentional; most of the time it just seems out of place, or even off-putting.

Also, while this manga presumably takes place in some sort of fantasy world, they have milk crates labelled Milwaukee for some reason. Maybe Wisconsin is a portal to another world?

Verdict: More Thorns Than Rose
There just isn’t much to recommend here. While the premise is decent and the execution inoffensive, it also weighs a little heavily on the suspension of disbelief. Doctors couldn’t save one man, so now the entire village thinks of them as practitioners of black magic? Really? Spend your time elsewhere, dear readers.