Why You Can’t Find Volume 4 of The Girl from the Other Side — And Why That’s Actually the Point
I still remember the first time someone slid into my DMs with panicked urgency: “DID YOU SEE VOL. 4?! IS IT OUT YET??” It was a Tuesday. I was eating cold ramen and rewatching episode 3 of Girls’ Last Tour, blissfully unaware that, across Discord servers and Reddit threads, an entire subculture of gentle horror fans had quietly convinced themselves that Volume 4 existed — or worse, that it had been suppressed.
It wasn’t malicious. It was just… confusion. A perfect storm of rebranding, translation quirks, and the kind of quiet, devastating finality that makes people need more.
So let’s settle this once and for all: There is no official English Volume 4 of The Girl from the Other Side: Siúil, a Rún. Not in 2015. Not in 2019. Not in the shiny new 2024 Dark Horse reissue with Nagabe’s handwritten afterword (more on that later). There never has been — and there never will be. The series concluded at Volume 3. In Japanese. In French. In German. In Korean. In every official edition ever released. Period.
But here’s the thing: the myth isn’t baseless. It’s rooted in real publishing decisions — ones that made perfect sense to editors, but zero sense to readers who’d just spent three volumes falling in love with Shiva and Teacher’s impossible, tender, heart-shredding orbit around each other.
Where Did “Volume 4” Come From? (Spoiler: It Wasn’t a Volume)
The most common culprit is the 2019 The Girl from the Other Side: Deluxe Edition — a beautiful, oversized hardcover released by Seven Seas. It collects *all* the original manga material: Vols. 1–3, plus the bonus short “The Boy Who Drew the Moon,” the original one-shot, and Nagabe’s color illustrations. Visually, it feels like a culmination. It’s thick. It has gold foil. It smells like closure — and also, somehow, like “this must be Volume 4.”
Except it’s not labeled as such. Flip to the copyright page: it explicitly says “Collects Volumes 1–3.” But try telling that to someone clutching it in a bookstore, seeing “Deluxe Edition” embossed on the spine, and mentally filing it under “the big finale book.” Context is everything — and context failed us here.
Then came the 2022 French Glénat omnibus — Tome 4. Yes, really. Glénat grouped the original three volumes into two fat paperbacks (Tomes 1 & 2), then released a third physical volume containing the extras — and called it Tome 4. Not “Annexes.” Not “Supplément.” Tome 4. French publishing logic is its own beautiful, baffling language — and in this case, it whispered directly into the ears of bilingual fans: “Ah. So *that’s* where it is.”
I saw a tweet last year that broke my heart: “Just pre-ordered Tome 4 from France. Shipping’s expensive, but I need to know what happens *after* the ending. Please don’t spoil me.” They weren’t wrong to hope. They were just hoping for something that doesn’t exist — because the story doesn’t have an “after.” It has an end. And Nagabe chose to end it exactly where it needed to end.
Why Volume 3 Is the Only Ending That Works
Let’s talk about that ending. Chapter 28. The final page. Shiva’s hand slipping from Teacher’s. The snow falling. The silence.
I remember watching the anime adaptation — which, bless its heart, added an extra scene where Shiva wakes up in a sunlit field, smiling. I loved it. I also knew, instantly, that it wasn’t *right*. Not for the manga. Because Nagabe’s ending isn’t about survival. It’s about devotion so absolute it becomes indistinguishable from surrender. It’s about love that refuses to bargain with fate — that chooses presence over preservation, tenderness over tenure.
Volume 3 isn’t incomplete. It’s complete. Every panel in those 200+ pages builds toward that final image: two figures dissolving into the same white. Not tragedy. Not victory. Unity. Trying to extend it — to add epilogues, flash-forwards, or “what if?” scenarios — would be like adding a fourth movement to Satie’s Gymnopédies. It wouldn’t deepen the piece. It would dilute it.
That’s why the 2024 Dark Horse reissue — while gorgeous, while thoughtful, while including Nagabe’s new afterword reflecting on the series’ legacy — still stops at Volume 3. No appendix. No “director’s cut.” Just the original work, preserved, unaltered, with space left deliberately blank where readers used to imagine more.
What *Is* Out There — And Why It Matters
So if there’s no Volume 4, what *should* you read instead? Not as replacement, but as resonance.
- The 2017 Artbook (Siúil, a Rún: Illustration Collection, ISBN 978-4-04-893112-7): This isn’t fluff. It contains Nagabe’s early character sketches — Shiva drawn with heavier lines, Teacher’s cloak less fluid, their distance more literal. You see the evolution of intimacy in the art itself. There’s a two-page spread of snow textures alone that made me cry. It’s not canon. It’s better: it’s intention made visible.
- “The Boy Who Drew the Moon” (2020, Manga Time Kirara Max): Yes, this is the same short included in the Deluxe Edition — but reading it *separately*, in its original magazine context, changes everything. It’s not a coda. It’s a companion piece — a parallel story about another child drawing constellations on a wall while adults debate boundaries. Its final line — “She didn’t draw the moon to wish for anything. She drew it because it was already there.” — reframes the entire manga. Not “I wish we could stay.” But “We *were* here.”
- The 2023 Kyoto International Manga Museum Exhibition Catalog Entry: This is obscure. Hard to find. Probably costs ¥4,800 if you track down a used copy. But the essay on thematic closure — written by curator Dr. Emi Tanaka — is essential. She argues that Nagabe uses the *absence* of Volume 4 as narrative architecture: “The silence after Shiva’s name fades isn’t empty. It’s filled with everything the reader carries forward — grief, gratitude, the weight of a hand held too briefly.” That’s not academic jargon. That’s the thesis statement of the whole series.
None of these are “Volume 4.” None pretend to be. They’re invitations — to sit with the ending, not escape it.
Why This Confusion Hurts — And Why It Also Means Something Beautiful
I won’t pretend the Vol. 4 myth is harmless. It’s led to real frustration. To pre-orders canceled. To fan translations slapped with fake “Vol. 4” covers on Imgur. To reviewers writing “disappointing conclusion” takes based on mislabeled French editions. That’s messy. That’s bad publishing hygiene.
But underneath the chaos? There’s something tender happening. People aren’t searching for Volume 4 because they think the story was rushed. They’re searching because it *worked too well*. Because Nagabe made them feel the fragility of that world so acutely that its absence leaves a physical ache. Because Shiva’s laugh — soft, hesitant, always slightly muffled by her hood — echoes long after the last page.
In a landscape saturated with endless sequels, 20-volume arcs, and franchises designed to outlive their creators, The Girl from the Other Side is radical in its brevity. Three volumes. One story. No spin-offs. No prequels. No “Teacher’s Origin Story” one-shots. Just a single, sustained note — held until it trembles, then released.
That’s rare. That’s precious. And yes — that’s also why it’s confusing. We’ve been trained to expect more. To scroll, to binge, to click “next episode.” Nagabe asked us to stop. To close the book. To look up. To feel the quiet.
A Note on the 2024 Dark Horse Reissue (Because You’ll Ask)
Yes, it exists. Yes, it’s lovely. Thick matte cover. New translation notes. That haunting afterword where Nagabe writes: “Some readers told me they cried when Shiva let go. Others said they smiled. I realized then — she didn’t let go. She simply stopped holding on *to the idea* of holding on.”
It includes the original 2016 afterword, too — where Nagabe admits they wrote the final chapter twice, scrapping the first version because “it felt like cheating.” The second version — the one we have — was drawn in one sitting, with no corrections, during a snowstorm in Sapporo.
No Volume 4. Just that. Just snow. Just honesty.
So What Should You Read Next?
If you’re mourning the lack of Volume 4, read The Ancient Magus’ Bride — not for plot, but for its similar obsession with liminal spaces and quiet devotion. Or Solanin, for how it treats endings as acts of courage, not failure. Or My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness, for its raw, unflinching respect for emotional truth over narrative convenience.
Or — and I say this without irony — reread Volume 3. Start at page 1. Don’t rush. Notice how Shiva’s hair gets lighter with each volume. How Teacher’s gloves fray. How the panels get quieter, the sound effects scarcer, until the final pages contain only snow, breath, and the faintest trace of ink.
That’s not the absence of Volume 4.
That’s the presence of everything that matters.
