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No. The novels are still going in Japan, eighteen volumes as of this month, with Yen On’s English edition sitting at seven and an eighth due November 10. Nothing about the series has ended. The thing that ended, quietly, is the YouTube channel it started as. That’s the part most people asking this question don’t know about.
I check the MF Bunko J release page for this series every few months the way other people check the weather, mostly because Mikawa Ghost puts out a volume roughly every four months and I like knowing how far behind I am. The answer this month is eleven volumes behind. That number used to upset me more than it does now.
Where Japan is
Eighteen volumes, the eighteenth having come out at the end of October, and the pace has barely wobbled since the first one in January 2021. Three a year, give or take one, with the occasional short-story book or art book in between. For a romance series with no fights in it that’s a remarkably steady clip, and it’s the single biggest reason I’d tell anyone this series is safe to start: Mikawa writes it like a job he likes.
There’s no announced ending. I went looking for one before writing this, went through the author’s account and the MF Bunko J news page, and what I found instead was a post from January about the YouTube channel going on indefinite hiatus and the novels continuing. That’s the closest thing to a status update that exists. No “final arc” announcement, none of the signaling Japanese publishers do a year or two out from a finale. Whether that means the story has years left or that Mikawa just doesn’t announce things, no idea. The news page is mostly art book announcements.
What I can say is that the shape of the first seven books doesn’t feel like a story with a near-term ending. Seven volumes cover about a year, one school year, spring to spring. If the series is counting down to graduation, which is the obvious endpoint for a high school romance, there’s at least another year of their lives to get through, and at Mikawa’s pace that’s a lot of books. I have no idea whether it ends at graduation. I’d like it to. I said the same thing about Oregairu and then it went three more volumes past where I wanted it to stop.
Where Yen On is
Seven, with volume 8 on November 10. Then the usual Yen On wait. They licensed it in the spring of 2023 and put out volume 1 that October, or that was the preorder, one of the two, and they’ve run at somewhere between two and three a year since. At that rate the English edition will be caught up to where Japan is now sometime around 2029, by which point Japan will be at twenty-five or whatever.
There’s a Hiten art book from a couple of years back that I did import, by the way, cause the covers are the covers, and it’s on the shelf next to the English volumes looking a little out of place. It has a few of the volume illustrations at a size where you can see the linework, and a couple of pages I couldn’t identify at all, which might be from the volumes I haven’t read, which means I technically spoiled myself and can’t tell.
I live on the English side on purpose. There are fan translations of the later volumes floating around, there’s a subreddit full of people who’ve read them, and I’ve decided not to. Partly because I’d rather read Yen On’s translation, which is good. Partly cause the series is slow enough that reading it eleven volumes ahead of the people I talk to about it would mean having nobody to talk to about it. That’s a weird reason to stay behind on a series and I’m aware of it.
The Yen Audio versions exist too, four of them last I looked. I listened to the first one on a long drive to my parents’ place and it’s fine, the dual-POV structure translates to audio better than I expected since you just get two narrators, though the guy reading Yuuta pitches him older than I hear him.
I read volume 4 twice, for the record, the second time the week the volume 8 preorder went up, because I wanted the confession fresh before I read what comes after it in November. That’s the kind of thing I do with this series and almost no other series. I have not reread a single volume of Overlord and I’ve been reading it for a decade.
The YouTube channel, which did end
This is the part of the status question that’s actually interesting. Days with My Stepsister didn’t start as a novel. It started in 2020 as a YouTube channel, short voiced scenes between the two leads, with a cast that later carried over to the anime, and the novels came out of that a year later. The channel kept going alongside the books for years. And then, per the author in January, it went on indefinite hiatus, and “indefinite hiatus” from a Japanese creator means what it means everywhere.
So if you’ve seen people online saying the series ended, that’s probably what they mean, and they’re half right. The channel is done or close to it. The novels are the main version now and they’re not going anywhere. I never watched much of the channel, maybe a dozen of the shorts. I remember them being pleasant and slight, two people talking in a room, which is exactly what the books are except the books have the interior monologue and the channel didn’t, so.
Season 2, or the lack of one
Not announced and not planned. The author has been unusually straight about why. The January post said, more or less, that a second season was never in the plan from the start and that the hurdles to getting one are real. Which honestly kind of floored me. Most people in this industry would go quiet for two years and let fans assume whatever they wanted before they’d say that out loud.
I’d assumed, when the anime ended in September 2024 with no sequel teaser, that the novels would wrap up within a couple of volumes, cause that’s what happened with a few other slow romances whose adaptations fizzled. The opposite happened. Mikawa has put out six or seven more volumes since the finale, I lose count, and shows no sign of slowing. So the anime not continuing seems to have had no effect on the books at all, which I didn’t expect.
The anime covers roughly the first four volumes, compressed toward the end, and stops at the point where the two of them finally say the thing out loud. Everything after that is books only and will probably stay books only.
Should you start an unfinished series like this
Yes, and this is one of the easier yeses I give. The series is ongoing but it isn’t precarious, steady author, steady publisher on both sides of the ocean, no gaps or hiatus scares, none of the thing where a series gets quietly dropped at volume 9. If anything the risk runs the other way, that it goes on longer than it should. I don’t have a prediction on that.
The other thing I’d say is that the volumes close. Each one is a season of the year, roughly, and each one ends somewhere that feels like an ending for that stretch, so even if you stop at volume 7 cause that’s where English stops, you’re not left hanging the way you are with, say, an Overlord volume. I stopped at 4 for most of a year and picked it back up this summer, and it was fine. You can walk away from it for a year and just pick it back up, which, I don’t know, maybe says something about why it isn’t on my top-five list even though I never miss a volume.
The volumes I haven’t read are sitting there in Japanese, and I’ll get to them one Yen On release at a time. November, then whenever 9 lands.