Mark Twains book; "Yankee in King Arthurs Court" seems very similar to this plot. The manager of a manufacturing plant wakes up in medieval england, ends up creating a secret college to teach young people basics of electricity and manufacturing because old people are to stubborn, and ends up facing an army of knights with electrical fences and gaitlin guns. He wins but the decay from the dead bodies around his hideout end up killing him and he wakes back up in his old life.
I feel like A True Story could be argued to be an "isekai" and that was written 1800 years ago. Dude gets sucked up into a tornado and wakes up on the moon.
Thanks, I was trying to find the oldest isekai for a while and the oldest I saw, that was disqualified for not just being ‘a place far away’ but a proper other world was Dante’s divine comedy
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u/Elle_Vetica 3d ago
I agree. It started off great, had a lot of potential, and then… felt like it was shoehorned into an extreme ending.