Literature / The Executioner and Her Way of Life

Due to the nature of the story, it is recommended that you view at least the first episode/chapter of The Executioner and Her Way Of Life before continuing to read on. Unmarked spoilers are ahead.

The Executioner and her Target go on a journey together. ^note Menou and Akari Tokitou.

"My name is Menou. I'm a pure, just, and strong priestess."

— Menou

There is a world much like our own in which many humans have great magical potential. However, there also exists those that have a far greater potential than the average person, known as "Lost Ones" or "Otherworlders." They are people who come from a world known as "Japan" that have been summoned into this world through a ritual. They are known for possessing such great magical potential that they have been seen as causes of great calamities. As a result, the Church has deemed it Necessarily Evil to execute them before they can become a threat.

Menou is one of these executioners. After executing one Otherworld, she learns of the existence of another "Lost One" named Akari who was summoned at the same time. When she attempts to fulfill her duties, she learns firsthand that Akari's abilities make it impossible for Menou to kill her without help. After tricking Akari into believing she is her ally, they go off on a journey while Menou attempts to eliminate Akari permanently. However, will her feelings regarding this "duty" remain the same, or will they begin to waver over time?

The Executioner and Her Way of Life (Shokei Shōjo no Virgin Road in Japanese, literally The Executioner Girl's Virgin Road) is an ongoing Isekai yuri Light Novel series written by Mato Sato and illustrated by Nilitsu, which began publication under the GA Bunko imprint in 2019. As of March 2023, eight volumes have been released in Japan. It is licensed by Yen Press, who began releasing the series in the West in March 2021. It has an ongoing manga adaptation that began monthly serialization in Young Gangan in June 2020, which was also licensed by Yen Press. It was announced during January 2021 that it would receive an anime adaptation that began airing on April 1st, 2022 and finished its run on June 17th, 2022 with a total of twelve episodes. A dub released on HiDive on May 20, 2022.

---

This series contains examples of:

• Action Girl: Executioners, such as Menou and Momo are this by default.
• Alliterative List: In the English release of the Light Novel, Menou's Catchphrase is translated as "I'm a priestess - pure, proper and powerful".
• Apocalypse Maiden: The native residents of Menou's world are capable of utilizing a power called Guiding Force, which allows them to wield unique abilities. The compatibility of Guiding Force with Lost Ones is far too strong and presents the threat of them losing control over their powers and destroying the world. This is why the church and government of Menou's world assassinates any and every Lost One that crosses into their world so as to prevent a situation like that from ever happening.
• Authority in Name Only: It's mentioned in the light novels that while the Noblesse are considered a major force on paper, being that they include kings in their number and are responsible for national matters, in practice, the Faust have so much control that they can't do anything significant without asking the Faust to give them the go-ahead. For instance, they can't maintain armies, mint currency, or organize trials, and many methods they might use to make moves against rivals are under heavy restriction. When the king of a large nation commits a crime, he's immediately put on trial for it, suggesting that his high title provides no real protection from the Faust's wrath. This provides their motivation for their summoning rituals.
• Bookends: At the end of episide 12, Pandemonium digs up and uses the body of the guy killed in episode 1 to resurrect Manon. You know its him, because you see his clothes briefly.
• Chekhov's Gun: At the train station before boarding the train to Garm, Menou entertains a child by conjuring bubbles from a coin. She later uses the same conjuring to distract Orwell during their fight.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: Akari and Momo are this to Menou.
• Corrupt Church: Faust shows signs of this when Orwell turns out to be experimenting with young girls and Lost Ones herself to gain immortality. It is sent even further in Volume 4, with their attempt to accelerate Akari's Pure Concept to make a new natural force to control.
• Deconstructed Trope:
  • The series deconstructs the usual "ordinary Japanese person is Trapped in Another World and becomes overpowered" concept common to many Light Novels, as it's not only Menou's job to kill these sorts of people before things get out of hand, but also focuses heavily on the downsides of what happens when random Japanese people end up with magical powers that result in a Loss of Identity that almost always turn out malevolent. It also uses the Decoy Protagonist in the first chapter/episode to reveal that the real protagonist isn't Mitsuki or Akari, but instead Menou, the native-born person whose life was ruined by these Otherworlders.
  • The Time Master and Save Scumming tropes are also demolished. Unlike other isekai characters such as Subaru, Akari doesn't keep her memories whenever her powers rewind her, and using them at all could accelerate her Lost One status. Meanwhile everything happening with the true Akari personality hidden within, her time looping powers, and manipulation of the timeline to avoid Menou's deaths, the kind of thing that entire other isekai series are focused and themed around, are not observed thanks to Menou's viewpoint being unaware beyond her theorizing.
• Decoy Protagonist: The boy introduced in the first chapter seems like he could potentially be important to the story, but he was used as a Sacrificial Lamb to showcase how dangerous Menou and executioners are. He's also a literal decoy for Akari's existence, with the kingdom throwing him out to the wolves for someone like Menou to kill so they can keep Akari under secret watch.
• Dies Wide Open: Mitsuki dies with his eyes slightly open and Menou, despite being the one who killed him, shuts them out of respect, showing the conflict between her dedication to her duty and her kind nature.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: A recurring gag is Menou's borrowing and channelling of Akari's power being treated as a sexual metaphor. When it first happens on the train, Akari is very blushy and describes it as "Menou is inside of me", while Menou merely grumpily tells her to stop making it weird. Later on, Sahara describes Menou doing it so regularly as a sign of her being a ladykiller.
• Exact Words: Mitsuki overhears the Noblesse who summoned him saying his "power was null" before kicking him out of the castle, leading him to believe he was rejected because he didn't have special powers. With Menou's prompting, he discovers that his power is Null— rather, that he possesses the Pure Concept of "Null."
• Fake-Out Twist: Everyman Mutou Mitsuki is summoned to another world but is cast out by the king when his ability comes up as null. However, it turns out this is actually an incredibly powerful ability. Moments later, he is stabbed in the head and murdered by the real protagonist for being too dangerous to her world.
• First-Episode Twist: Menou abruptly kills Mitsuki, because her job is killing "Otherworlders" — people from Japan who are transported to another world and granted dangerous, reality-breaking powers.
• Foreshadowing: Momo shows concern regarding Menou handling a long term assignment, and she states she doesn't believe Menou is suited for such a task.
  • During the train ride to Garm, Akari initially says something along the lines of not being alone anymore, something that makes no sense in the present since she's seemingly had nothing but walking around with Menou for a bit. And during the terrorist hijacking, Momo and Ashuna feel something "disturbing" before Akari approaches Menou at the front of the train against all reason, just in time to help save the train. The anime makes it much more blatant that Akari's using her Time Master powers, even if unwittingly, to create a better outcome than the train blowing up and killing everyone on it, and that the world can feel the echoes of her using this ability, which becomes relevant much later on.
• Giving Radio to the Romans: When Mitsuki is summoned to the new world, he starts wondering about various cliches of the Isekai genre he can take advantage of, such as getting rich quick off modern inventions. But as it turns out, Mitsuki is far from the first Japanese person to get summoned, and all of them had the same idea: Grisarika is already in the middle of industrializing, and Japanese culture and language has already cross-pollinated as well.
• Healing Factor: Akari was told that her power is healing, but Menou discovers that it involves time resetting her injuries to before they happen which makes it impossible for Menou to kill her.
• Hot Springs Episode: Akari and Menou share one in Volume 02.
• Hitman with a Heart: It is established early on that Menou is not a heartless killer, and she feels regrets over the sins of her past killings.
• In Love with the Mark: The premise of the story involves Menou developing feelings for Akari over the course of their journey.
• Insult Backfire: Momo refers to Ashuna as "little princess" in a way that should be affectionate but is clearly condescending, but Ashuna enjoys it because she's never had someone give her a nickname and asks Momo to keep calling her that, to her disgust.
• Jumped at the Call: When Menou offers to take Akari away on a journey, Akari immediately takes her up on the offer because she believes meeting Menou was fate.
• Loss of Identity: The ultimate fate of the Otherworlders. The more they use their Pure Concepts, the more their personality is overridden and their memories lost. By the end of it, nothing of who they were when they arrived in this world is left.
• Naïve Newcomer: Due to only arriving in this world, Akari is this by default, thus serving as a reason for much of the world building explanations. The reality of the matter, however, is that she's a highly-complex manipulator that knows the whole story, and thanks to sealing her memories away into her true personality within, doesn't even realize it.
• Necessarily Evil: Menou sees herself as this to protect her world against potential calamities. She doesn't like killing the Lost One, and she knows what she did to her previous victims was wrong, but she does it because she believes she has to.
• New Life in Another World Bonus: This series provides a deconstruction of the concept. What happens when people from a world without magic are suddenly given overpowered skills? They lose control of those and cause a lot of damage. How do the inhabitants of the world deal with them when those guys are much stronger thanks to the bonuses? By killing them before they can use their powers.
• Sequel Hook: In the season finale, Pandaemonium is defeated, but she was just the first of the Four Human Errors, and even Ashuna doubts this is the end. Momo vows to kill Akari herself if Menou can't do the job. And come The Stinger, Flare decides that it's time to kill her apprentice for the zillionth time.
• Shout-Out: In Libelle, Akari mentions wanting to "that one thing" on a ship:
  Akari: Y'know, where I stand on the prow and spread my arms out wide!
  Menou: What?
  Akari: Riiight. I guess you wouldn't know about movies here...
• Spoiler Opening: In the opening for the anime, Akari is depicted as breathing life into Menou’s skeleton and bringing her back to life. This is an indication that Akari keeps resurrecting Menou.
• Superpower Lottery: From the point of view of the average inhabitant of this world, all Otherworlders have this thanks to their Pure Concepts. The Four Major Human Errors however, won an even bigger prize, having such strong powers each of them is a threat to the entire world, and they are all nigh-impossible to kill. In fact, the main reason executioners exist is to stop any new Otherworlder from reaching this level of power.
• Time Skip: Volume 7 picks up six months after the end of Volume 6.
• Tokyo Is the Center of the Universe: Every single Lost One has been documented as having come to this world from Japan.
• Tragic Villain: The crux of most Lost Ones. The story and Menou's dreams of the ones she's killed imply that basically every Otherworlder that's come over is usually around high school age before they discover their latent powers in this world and get overwritten by their powers. It usually isn't presented as any of these people being inherently evil, but the concepts that overtake them being the problem, so they have to die to prevent calamities. The world seems apathetic or downright spiteful towards such individuals when they aren't used as pawns for political gain and power, leaving someone like Menou, their literal executioner, as one of the few people sympathetic to their plights and haunted by their deaths at her hands.
• Translator Microbes: Averted. The reason why Lost Ones are able to understand the language of the other worlds' inhabitants is because too many Lost Ones that arrived in the past offered up parts of their worlds' culture; including the spoken language which had been integrated.
• Wham Episode:
  • The last chapter of Volume 1 (specifically, the part that is adapted as Chapter 14 of the manga and Episode 6 of the anime) reveals that the plot is much more complicated than anyone realises: Akari has a second personality who is using her Pure Concept to nudge the timeline in the direction she wants, after returning from a future where Menou is killed by Flare, and it's clear she's done this several times already.
  • Volume 4, or to be more specific, the last chapter of Volume 4, and the subsequent epilogue. Good Lord, where to even begin?
    • It's revealed the Four Major Human Errors are the origin of all forms of conjuring used by people nowadays, as when a Pure Concept fully overwhelms the soul of an Otherworlder, it's detached from the soul and becomes a natural element of the world, thus making it possible for anyone to use weaker forms of it.
    • The Faust aren't actually trying to kill Akari. They want her to become a Human Error so humanity will have access to another form of conjuring. And according with Flare, she is nearing that transformation, which also means she won't be able to turn back time anymore.
    • There is a way for Otherworlders to come back, but the ritual would kill over a third of the world's population and devastate the planet. Even worse: the Four Major Human Errors were still sane when they first attempted it, only losing control after the battle where people tried to stop them. And the requirements for the ritual still exist, meaning it's possible for someone to try again.
    • Menou is told about Akari's time travels and deduces the real reason she betrayed the Faust in the previous timeline: not to save Akari, but to kill her before she can be turned into a Human Error.
    • Akari is taken away by Flare, and the volumes closes with Menou preparing to rescue her, setting the stage for battle between the two that Akari and Momo wanted to avoid at all cost.
• Written by the Victors: Everything involving Ivory sealing away the Major Human Errors as the secret fifth was covered up by Faust and the kingdoms as part of the many mysteries involving the purpose of summoning Otherworlders. Faust only "won" by humanity even standing in the aftermath.

---