Sometimes, a creator works on a series that is so good that it risks shadowing all of their other works. For Nio Nakatani, that series is Bloom Into You, and fans of that one might find themselves a little dismayed that God Bless the Mistaken isn't a similar gentle yuri tale. Don't let that steer you away from this because God Bless the Mistaken's first volume shows that Nakatani is equally skilled in any genre she cares to turn her mind to. It opens a quiet piece of magic realism in a world where the extraordinary has become the everyday.

The series' protagonist is Kon, a middle school boy living in a shared house with four others. Kon is the only child; Kosei could be in high school or early college age, and Iyoda appears to be in university or perhaps grad school. The last two denizens are both working women, Maruko and Kasane, and it is Kasane who Kon interacts with the most. That's because she's a researcher focused on something casually known as "bugs," as in "bugs/glitches in the fabric of reality." More formally known as periodic exceptional phenomena, these strange bends in normalcy result in any number of things – when the book opens, all plants have experienced extraordinary growth. Flour is sprouting, vegetables and fruit are ripening out of season, and vegetation is overtaking roads and buildings. But we also see the day that it became possible to climb the air like stairs, a day that reverses everything (so that left is right and so on), and cryptids manifesting according to people's beliefs. No one knows what the day will bring…except Kasane, the only person our characters know who doesn't, in the book's parlance, "bug out." To her, the world is as we experience it regularly, although bugs that affect the physical world around her don't count; she can see and touch the vegetation, for example, but can't climb into the sky on invisible stairs.

This serves as the link between Kasane and the others at the shared house, most specifically Kon. Because she can't always experience what's happening in the world around her, she can distance herself from it as a scientist, but she also needs to observe and work with those who do bug out. Kon is her chosen helper, something he seems largely ambivalent about. There's a sense that he doesn't quite know what to do with her, that she's in some ways a very foreign being to him, more so than even the cryptids that appear in the final chapter. Anomalies, in reality, make sense. People who are separate from that don't.

We see this most clearly in the chapter about how a bug causes an extra step to appear on every staircase. This storyline takes place entirely at school, where Kon and two of his friends overhear some girls in class recounting the usual sort of school ghost story: a girl committed suicide from the roof, and if a thirteenth step appears on the roof staircase, you'll see her ghost, and she'll try to take you with her. It is very basic but appropriately creepy for the age group, and when one of Kon's friends leaves her pencil case on the roof and they sneak up to get it, she takes advantage of the situation to trick the other girls in class that the ghost story is real. What's important is that no one knows about the extra step bug when she does so, and Kon and his friends realize that between them and the bug, they've more or less made the school ghost story real. Even though Kasane isn't in the story, it shows how those who don't experience the bugs (with the three who are unaware of this one standing in for that) can still alter the perception of the world around them for others and how even with the periodic exceptional phenomena, people are still going to be susceptible to other unknowns. This fits with the almost psychological approach Kasane takes in her research at times, making for an interesting thematic element of the series.

Nakatani seems to deliberately not develop Kasane in the same way as Kon throughout the volume. We learn bits and pieces about her, and we know that her teasing of Kon and others can sometimes be a little mean. But she's primarily an enigma, skipping merrily through life in a way that she only can because she's not tied to the bugs like everyone else. It's a neat conceit, and if she can be a little annoying at times, it's in service of establishing her as a wild card – or rather, as the solid foundation of a world that periodically goes mad.

Landing somewhere between Shima Shinya's Glitch and Yuki Urushibara's When a Cat Faces West, God Bless the Mistaken is a gentle slice of magic realism life. Nakatani's story may not have the emotional heft of Bloom Into You (or at least, not yet; who knows what'll happen down the line), but with solid art and a fascinating world, this is a lovely read. She may be best known for one series, but it's clear that Nio Nakatani's no one-trick pony.