Goyavoyage's den

Dating when Otherside Picnic takes place

(No, not that dating. The other kind of dating. Determining a date.)

It's been a hot minute since I last wrote about Otherside Picnic, a horror yuri series of light novels by Iori Miyazawa - adapted into a good manga and a lesser anime - I have been enamored with for a few years. I adored the series prior to that, but recently its eighth volume has had a particularly deep impact on me. I have written several posts exploring extensively that same volume, and I still want to write one highlighting some of the recently English-released volume 9's strengths at some point.

There is however, since the end of April, a reason to my silence about the series: I have found through a reread some horrible pro-Israel elements in an early chapter - a short and one-time but decidedly atrocious thing that I had overlooked before. It is particularly unbearable to read in the context of the ongoing Palestinian genocide, and I am finally gathering the strength to write with a heavy heart a dense and angry blog post on that topic. I should finish and post it here sometime soon, maybe next week (edit: well, ok, it's clearly going to take more time than that - but I'm working on it).

Still, I am drawn to writing a sillier thing before all that to let out some steam. Otherside Picnic has been close to my heart for too long, and doing a kind of overanalysis tribute thing to its better parts will help me switch gears before addressing more hearbreaking and anger-inducing topics. Also I just felt happy about my bit of investigative work for this post and wanted to put it out here.
And also, as you'll see, these days of June 2025 are meaningful in that silly context.

This post is mostly aimed at people who know the series already, as some kind of fun easter egg. Not that it mentions elements I consider particularly spoilery; I'm just not sure it's accessible or interesting to people not invested in the series in the first place, as I'm mostly just throwing around chapter numbers and small quotes regarding dates and places from the books (up to volume 9 included, though without detailed mention).
And if you haven't read Otherside Picnic... well, you may honestly want to wait for that upcoming post before deciding whether you still want to give it a try.

Anyway. If you'll indulge me, before the storm of hurt and conflicted feelings, I want to ask a light question that has been on my mind for years when reading the series, and that is actually not that easy to answer: when does Otherside Picnic take place?

Calendar hell, here we go

The above is not a particularly far-fetched question, as a few dates are mentioned across the Files, the various "big chapters" that each represent an adventure - and most often an encounter between the two protagonists, Sorawo and Toriko, and some kind of Japanese creepypasta monster. This is for instance the case of May 14th, a particularly symbolic date in the fiction, as it is when the series starts and the two protagonists meet for the first time (though the exact date isn't mentioned before volume 7, File 21). Sorawo's and Toriko's birthdays are known too, and respectively May 5th and June 6th (from File 21 too - it's funny, I realize only now that they're 05/05 and 06/06).

Still, the years (plural, as some New Year happens between vol. 4 and vol. 5) when the events of the series happen are not stated outright. I've always been curious about that. Amidst occasional File rereads, I have spent a long time taking notes of which File happened when notably for potential fanfic writing, but also more generally so that I could one day cross two extremely useful pieces of information when determining a year: which day of the week is which day of a given month.

The thing is, I've been stuck for a veeery long time on a specific element from File 4, stating this in its first chapter:

It was roughly three weeks after we'd returned from Kisaragi Station, on the 24th of May, that Toriko had vanished.

For a long while, this ambiguously-phrased sentence had necessarily meant to me that the return from Kisaragi Station, that is File 3, had happened on a 24th of May. It couldn't have referred to the date of Toriko's temporary disappearance from File 4 - with the leads' encounter on May 14th, three weeks just couldn't have passed since then, and I couldn't believe Miyazawa would have been careless about that.

(Of course, File 3 set on the 24th of May caused some problems too, because there was definitely more than 10 days elapsing between the beginning of File 1 and File 3: File 1 has a "one week later" in its third chapter; and File 2 has two mentions of three days elapsing in its chapters 1 and 4. But I was still readier to believe that miscount than a full, explicit mention of three weeks elapsing between May 14th and May 24th.)

And so, still believing for a long while that File 3 was happening on some May 24th, coupled with the fact that File 3 itself is said to happen "on a Friday evening" (File 3, ch. 1, and mentioned several times again in the same File), I once started trying to deduce the date Otherside Picnic was happening in from this. On which years did May 24th fall a Friday? With a quick algorithm, this gave us as believable candidates the years 2013, 2019 and 2024 to set the start of Otherside Picnic.

The thing is, I was recently able to ascertain something I had suspected for a long time due to this weird mistake of a too big amount of time elapsing between Files: this May 24th thing is a translation mistake from the English edition.
Getting my hands on the Japanese edition of the first volume recently, and knowing a smattering of Japanese, I was delighted to read that the above quoted sentence was actually about June 24th in the original. Which meant it probably referred to the date on which File 4 was taking place. Which meant it was of no use in terms of determination of the date, but now it's much more satisfying to know that all this wasn't a big miscalculation on Miyazawa's part.

Luckily, there is another reference we can use to determine the date of the series, a much more reliable one: File 15's mention of Christmas.

A more reliable attempt at this

From its fourth chapter onwards, File 15 happens on Christmas Eve - and this is an explicit plot point. Kozakura, the tritagonist, looks dubiously at the two leads preparing their expedition to the titular Otherside, and says: "What? You're going today? Of all days, today?". Sorawo, oblivious as she is, misinterprets this remark. Kozakura's words are only given sense in retrospect, with a cute gift-giving scene at the end of the File one day later - Toriko explaining that they left on December 24th and it is now December 25th.
The thing is, File 15 also mentions explicitly "a somewhat misty Tuesday" at the beginning of its ch. 4. This means December 24th is a Tuesday on the year Otherside Picnic takes place.

This time, there's no doubt about it. Or, well, the only doubt would be a fatal mistranslation on the day of the week, but I just checked the manga raws not to see my theory crumble before my eyes, and this is a Tuesday.

This yields... the exact same candidate years as before, coincidentally: 2013, 2019 and 2024. I exclude from this any year after 2030 and before 2010 because... it just doesn't feel believable at all, with the protagonists having smartphones and the overall present vibe.
So we didn't actually make any substantial progress here since the guess based on incorrect information earlier, but now we know these candidates hold true.

2013, 2019 or 2024?

Let's get the 2013 hypothesis out of the way.
The light novel series started in 2017 and the manga in 2018; and 2013 always felt too old a setting for the story. Still, I needed a compelling argument against it... and it unexpectedly came to me very recently, as I just started reading the manga version of the series in print form. Indeed, some extra narrative tidbits accompany the end of each volume. I have only read the first of them so far, but it has been delightful - and particularly useful here. It talks extensively about Kozakura's VTuber carreer, and in it Kozakura herself mentions PUBG, a 2017 video game that heavily contributed to popularizing the battle royale genre (and kinda feels like a historical testimony of Otherside Picnic starting publication in 2017-2018, in my opinion).
So, no 2013.

This leaves us with either 2019 or 2024 as the narrative's starting year.
It was tough to break the tie between those two options: 2019 and 2024 have the exact same day of the week/date assignation after March 1st, and the narrative starts in May. 2020 and 2025 are also the same until February 29th in 2020, which breaks the similarity. All this meant that any useful clue in the story to decide would be located in vol. 5 onward, when the action happens in March and beyond of the year after when the story starts.

To be honest, though I was hoping for the 2024-2025 option, I genuinely believed for a long time that the answer would be 2019-2020 (or, well, a Covid-less version of 2020. You know.). With a series starting in 2017, it made the most logical sense to use 2019-2020 as reference years - notably since vol. 4, in which File 15 is and which makes the rest of this datation exercise stand, was released in 2019 in Japan.

Struggling to decide between 2019-2020 and 2024-2025

Actually, until the day prior to posting this, I was still only grasping at straws. Here are the main elements I considered and that couldn't help me decide one way or the other:

My one vaguely compelling piece of evidence was some rather detailed information on Sorawo and Toriko's summer holidays given very recently in volume 9, File 29.
Indeed, Sorawo's holidays that year are from August 9th to 19th, explicitly said to be "including Saturdays and Sundays". If August 9th is a Sunday of 2020, this is a strange thing to say, while it makes perfect sense if it is a Saturday of 2025. From this, when reading volume 9, I started definitely believing this was all happening in 2024-2025. And this was what I had originally planned on telling in this post today.

Still, doubt kept creeping up as I was writing all this. Even with this line of reasoning, I kept the fear that I may have been wrong and the books were happening in 2019-2020. Sorawo has a supplementary lecture (as she says so herself in File 29, ch. 3) on August 8th, the day before her holidays start, and it might have been a Saturday of 2020 - classes on a Saturday are highly improbable in Japan universities, but not entirely unheard of...

And so, yesterday evening, as I wanted to post all this and be sure of what I had written, I did something I should have done before: I checked the school schedules of our protagonists.

Where the deeper dive starts

This is not very difficult: without naming the universities they attend, the novels are still pretty explicit about which universities these are. I'm not the first person obsessed enough with the series to look up real-life locations, as you can find here a spoilery analysis of where Toriko resides by kinseijoshi, and here a complete Otherside Picnic locations pilgrimage list by hurpdurpburps.
Anyway: vol. 5, File 17 is pretty clear about these universities. File 17 opens with "The university Toriko attended was right by Yotsuya Station on the Chuo Line", which if you look it up on a map is definitely Sophia University.
For her own studies, Sorawo mentions pretty often Saitama and the station Minami-Yono, and File 17 also says "[my university] was a thirty-minute walk from the station", which fits the expected candidate of Saitama University to a T.

Looking up the 2020 and 2025 academic calendars of Saitama university (and double-checking in Japanese to be sure) didn't exactly reassure me, as the 2020 schedule does include a special make-up class day on Saturday, August 8th that felt like the perfect explanation.
Still, both candidate years are a good fit to Sorawo's holidays from August 9th to August 19th, if you look at the days indicated in red that mark when the university is closed. 2025's version also includes an explicit summer break mention from August 12th to 19th, but it seems believable for Sorawo's department to give her a few more days before that, after her exam week.

What definitely broke the tie was focusing on Toriko's summer vacations.
I didn't exactly expect much when first reading her dates, August 1st to September 26th, in vol. 9. They puzzled me, as they seemed to fit oddly with weekends no matter whether they referred to 2020 or 2025. But yesterday evening at last, as I checked Sophia University's academic calendar for 2025 and saw, at the bottom of the page, the line "Summer Vacation August 1 (Fri) ～ September 26 (Fri)", I think I let out a small noise of pure joy. The fit was perfect. The fit is perfect.
It also doesn't work with the 2020 dates of August 9th to September 27th.

All this means one thing: Otherside Picnic happens in 2024-2025.

I can barely communicate my joy in being able to pinpoint that with such accuracy. I didn't know I'd be able to find such level of definitive evidence.

The last desperate struggle

Err, well.
As confident as I am with that with all this reasoning, I must admit that there is still a flaw in this, that I realize as I am writing: Otherside Picnic volume 9 was released in May 2024 in Japanese. The previously mentioned academic calendar for 2025 was issued in December 2024 (see top right corner), and was probably not around before that.
This means, in all likelihood, that Miyazawa couldn't know the 2025 academic schedule when writing volume 9, and used the university's academic calendar for 2024 for reference, which coincidentally has the exact same Summer Vacation dates (it's not the case the other years, if you want to check). And quite possibly... he just got lucky about all this. If he didn't, this would have definitely shown the other viable hypothesis I never really wanted to consider: that Otherside Picnic may not be consistent in its days of the week/date assignation, and not correspond to any real year.

This may as well be true, but that'd be so sad, honestly. As you can see, I am the kind of person that this would really bother.
It would make sense, though: Christmas 2019 may have been used as the template for the reference in File 15, published in 2019; and Sophia University's 2024 summer break schedule for File 29, and it just happened to line up into a year assignation without any contradiction.

With all this frenetic note-taking about dates in the fiction, I must end this already quite unhinged post with mentioning an extra instance that doesn't entirely add up, and this in any case.

File 28, vol. 9 happens in July, as expressed in Sorawo's thoughts early on. In the same File, Sorawo and Toriko visit Kozakura; and Sorawo mentions being without Toriko at Kozakura's "last week", which feels like it definitely references the Sorawo-Kozakura conversation of File 25, vol. 8. Problem is: that conversation happens in the week that follows Toriko's birthday (a very clear datation anchor that opens vol. 8), meaning in the first half of June. If we believe the 2025 setting, these two instances of Sorawo at Kozakura's are at best on June 11th and July 5th. Even if we don't particularly use 2025 as a template, the dates are always too far apart - no matter how you cut it, it's one hell of a "last week".

Maybe Sorawo went to Kozakura's alone again in the latter half of June and we heard nothing of it - but I don't buy it at all. Maybe the only option is that Sorawo exaggerates when she says it's July, and she means it's nearly July.

Nah, the main real option is probably that Miyazawa is not a calendar nerd, and I'm just reading too much into all this at this point.

(This, or there is a translation mistake in the English version of vol. 9. The chances are slim, honestly, but a few happen here or there. Somehow they've been relatively recurrent among numerals - like the one I pointed out earlier about June 24th, but also a "50 meters" in File 1 ch. 2 that has been mistranslated into "5 meters", or a building's floor number in volume 7, File 22. At the time of writing, I am unable to ascertain this theory. I may come back to this later.)

The conclusion to all this is that the calendar consistency of Otherside Picnic was very probably preserved thanks to Sophia University's academic schedule having the same Summer Break dates between its 2024 and 2025 editions. Which is a fun and strange and extremely specific thought.

Conclusion

It is quite possible that there was no actual careful planning of a calendar consistency between the days of the week and the numbers of the months in Otherside Picnic. However, as we are now, exactly one option remains as a possible setting for the story: the years 2024-2025.

I'm ready to see this single consistent dating theory getting crushed by a future volume. Until then, it may come as a joy to you just as it is to me to think that Otherside Picnic is currently unfolding, with real life soon catching up to the fiction's 10th volume set in the late summer 2025.
... Also you may take psychic damage in realizing that Sorawo and Toriko were born in 2004.

To close this long post, I must add one last easter egg: there is something to me posting this on some Thursday, June 12th, 2025. Because Toriko's birthday was on the 6th. And we're during the week after it. Meaning we're currently in the middle of volume 8's very precise time frame. In the middle?
No. We're precisely a Thursday, the first Thursday after Toriko's birthday. And Sorawo mentions a Thursday - in File 26.

This is not just volume 8; this is File 26. Today is the day when the single best File of Otherside Picnic to date happens.

It wasn't even my goal when I started planning out this post - I originally thought about posting it either for May 14th, or for June 6th. But it ended up going this way, and it feels strangely funny and delightful.
And, uh... it implies... some amount of things, regarding some room 404 in an appartment building near Nippori Station. I'll leave you with that thought.

... Maybe this whole post was, in some strange way, about the other kind of dating after all.

#essay #otherside picnic