Let Sirens Sing Your Name
Seanan McGuire
Fun little intro to isekai
“Let Sirens Sing Your Name” is Seanan McGuire’s June, 2026 Patreon reward. She introduces it as follows,
(Image: Two cats, a large caliby Maine Coon and a smaller sealpoint Ragdoll, on an orange background. The Maine Coon has her paw around the Ragdoll’s neck and is grooming him. He looks pleased.)
This month, we’re taking a brief detour into stand-alone isekai--not portal fantasy--with the story of what it means to seek forever. Please enjoy.
What is isekai? The name is Japanese 異世界—meaning different world or other world. Here’s the Wikipedia page. There was a little discussion of this matter in the comments on McGuire’s Patreon page. Here’s what the story’s narrator has to say,
You can’t grow up in America in the twentieth century and not know portal fantasy. It’s everywhere, from Alice and her rabbit hole to half the characters in network cartoons. But it always has a portal. There’s a door, or a tornado, or something. It doesn’t just happen.
No, the word for the kind of journey I’d had was harder to find, and when I found it, it wasn’t written in English. Isekai. Those stories didn’t have portals. They had objects or summonings, like the sextant, or they had deaths. The results were the same. Passage to another place. It’s a Japanese word. It literally means “other world,”
McGuire writes in a comment on her Patreon page,
…part of why I wanted to write this was to explore that difference a little bit. Portal fantasies have portals—doorways, passages, physical barriers—and isekai generally don't.
Thus, according to her, the distinction between portal fantasy and 異世界 is the essentially trivial matter of whether there is an actual door between worlds, or the passage occurs in some other manner. According to Wikipedia 異世界 derives from the folktale Urashima Tarō (浦島 太郎), who is a kind of Japanese Rip Van Winkle or Oisín.
Whatever, it’s a charming little story of travel between our world and a fantasy world. I enjoyed it, even though I’m not fully buying McGuire’s explanation of 異世界.