Japanese Reading Report: 28 December 2025

• ファタモルガーナの館
• ８月３１日のロングサマー （第１−９巻）
• メガロザリア （第１巻）
• チェンソーマン （第２２巻）

ファタモルガーナの館

Another slow because of how much I was moving around. I did manage to get a 3-hour session in on Saturday, which constituted the majority of my progress.

I finally finished the arc of this final door, and in true VN fashion the story decided it wasn't yet time to end. After concluding the third key bearer's flashback we convince him to help us free Morgana. Michel, Mel, the Asian Man, and Jacopo ascend the spiral staircase and enter Morgana's cell.

Despite managing to arrive before the day Morgana was fated to die, she is beyond help and dies in Michel's arms, calling out to him as an angel and asking if she made her Father proud. Michel goes along with her dying delusion and helps her die in peace. Afterwards, he convinces the three key bearer's to share their regrets and feelings with Morgana with the slim hope that her spirit might still be here to receive them. After everyone has spilled their feelings, the guys decide to take Morgana's body out into the light and hope that it changes the future, but when they step outside the sky goes dark and the horrors of Morgana's original curse repeat themselves before Michel's eyes. Only then Michel realises that he was never in the past, he was always in an illusory world in the present-day house. In his despair he blacks out.

Michel wakes up in a white world before the White Haired Girl (WHG). She explains that while she is not Morgana, she is an aspect of Morgana. The WHG during the first three doors was born from Morgana to continue her own suffering, because even as she cursed the three men she was also cursing herself to suffering. The WHG, born at the moment of Michel's death, respected him so much that she took on his appearance. As a pure aspect of Morgana, she's unable to end her own life but she also knows that her existence is part of the chains tying Morgana to the house, so the WHG convinces Michel to kill her (he's very reluctant about it, but it seems he has no choice in this matter).

Finally this week, Michel wakes up in the present with Morgana. Though he didn't change the past, Morgana was made to witness the key bearer's true motivations and identities. Michel convinces her that the cycle of pain must end for her own sake, and she agrees to free the souls of the men she has trapped. We go down to the house and have one last (maybe!?) conversation with the key bearer's in their standard order. Morgana apologises to Mel about putting him in such a horrible situation with the WHG and I liked that he sort of rejects her apology by saying that he needed to grow anyway, and it's possible he would have been in his own cycle of pain with or without her torment. The other key bearer's also have some things to say, but overall there's a hopeful feeling to it. After freeing all three men I was given the option to stay and help one more person or to just go to the exit. I decided to stick around because, thankfully, I had the same guy in mind that the game did. We head to the cursed painting and decide to help him as well. As it turns out, the painting was Michel's older brother Georges. He apologises to Michel for painting him as a beautiful woman (though I found his apology a bit weak since he sort of puts all the blame on their mother) and they all decide to head out. I found the levity added by Georges sort of detracted from the overall atmosphere of the final moment at the door, so maybe the other choice would have suited me better. Either way, we finally open the house's front door ready to step out into a new future, except...

Is that Didier... Michel's oldest brother, the man who betrayed and killed Michel!? How long has he been waiting out there?

８月３１日のロングサマー

Perhaps the biggest surprise this week, and maybe part of the reason I didn't find as much time as I could have to play Fata Morgana. This manga has a simple premise: two highschoolers are trapped in a time loop on the 31st of August, the last day of Summer before school starts again. The story begins with them both acknowledging that the time loop had been going for a while, though it's not totally clear how long it's been. The male looper, Suzuki Takaya, decides that the reason they're looping is because of his failure with girls. It's not clear if the female looper, Takagi Kana, has any reason to be looping from the start. Where the real magic of this series emerges is in the writing. Without ever leaving the loop of the single day, the series has had countless amazing story arcs, extremely tight and varied comedy writing, and has slowly developed a beautiful romance between the two main characters. Takagi and Suzuki are both written so well that I found myself constantly rooting for their success.

The 9 volumes I read in the week went by so quickly it felt like almost no effort at all. Suzuki's mental cutaways are so funny I think it might be the funniest manga I've read, so I'll definitely be suggesting it for people interested in comedy or romance.

メガロザリア

Following in the tradition from last week, this was another one of my "on my e-reader so why not?" volumes. The plot is basically about a girl who has a terrible life, rejected by her mother and abused by another girl in her orphanage, right when she's on the brink of giving up she meets a witch with the power to turn back time. Rosalia works with the witch to right all of the wrongs of her life. The rules of time travel are established right away, and they basically form the structure around the drama for Rosalia going forward. Basically the rules are as follows:

• To time travel, the witch must witness the murder of a human
• Both the witch and the murderer retain their memories
• The victim will die instantly where they were at the point of return
• Once time travel has been performed, no future time travel can return to an earlier time

チェンソーマン

This was not on my e-reader, but I wanted to read it and I have the CMOA app on my phone so I just read it that way. It was a fairly fun, largely combat-focussed volume. The death devil commands the famine devil and false Chainsaw Man to "spread fear", and Chainsaw Man and Yoru try their best to fight them off. In a surprise windfall for Yoru, the flames of war are kindled by a nuclear attack. She thanks America for its great support and seems to be supercharged for the next volume.