[DeepL Translation - needs review] Volume 1 Introduction: Rakan lives alone in a house with a mysterious garden overgrown with plants like a jungle. One day, a man with a gun made of wood falls into the garden! The long-awaited first volume of Shiho Sugiura's otherworldly fantasy! A charismatic legend is born!
(Translator: DeepL)
An early isekai
Silver Diamond follows 羅貫 (らかん) a young man living alone. His days are peaceful: despite the semi-recent deaths of his mother and grandfather, he carries on, tending to his massive garden and attending high school. One day, he comes home to find a stranger collapsed in his yard, one carrying a plant-like gun who claims he came from another world. His world is slowly dying, the land desertifying at an alarming rate. The man, 千艸 (ちぐさ), says that 羅貫 is a 沙芽(サノメ), a person capable of growing plants at will, and wants him to come with him to his world in order to kill the person 千艸 believes is responsible for the land's slow death, a prince who looks exactly like 羅貫.
This is one of the original series that got me into learning Japanese, and it holds a near and dear place in my heart. The cast is quite large, and the history and worldbuilding behind 千艸's world are fascinating. The main cast in general have unique and interesting backstories, and the side characters get a decent amount of screen time. The author knows her craft well at this point, and her humor consistently shines through as well.
I feel like this is a bit on the harder side of her works, mostly due to her writing style. There's nothing especially difficult about it, but it does have a certain combination of casualness and kanji usage (when you might expect kana) that tends to make me pause and slow down.