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The best story I have ever read is Mushoku Tensei. The original webnovel, although I believe the light novel is just a more edited and refined version of it (and the anime is also fantastic although it skips a lot of the deeper worldbuilding and isn't finished yet).
A lot of people bounce off of it, because first of all it's very japanese weeb anime harem. And the main character starts off as a creepy pervert scumbag with some very uncomfortable behaviors that turn a lot of people off. And the story does not smite him down with the force of a thousand suns. It gives him time. It lets him grow and change and learn and slowly become a better person. Slowly, there isn't ever a moment where the story tells him "no, you were bad and now you have to do a 180 and become the opposite and shun everything you once were." It's about redemption through slow and gradual growth and understanding. And also building a harem of cute anime waifus, there is still that, so it's not actually a story for everyone. But it basically mastered the isekai genre before it was even a proper genre, and every generic isekai slop to come out has been cargo culting features from Mushoku Tensei without understanding why they were there in the first place.
I highly recommend it. It's super long, it has a single broad overarching plot that was planned for from the very beginning rather than the author flailing around inventing new plot threads every arc, and it masterfully sets up characters and plot elements in early chapters that show up again way later in interesting ways. And it subverts a lot of tropes too and does stuff with the main character and villain and side characters that I haven't seen in other stories. It's not for everyone, but people who do like it it really really really like it. It's my favorite story ever, so I recommend it.
LOL gotta say not something I expected, but that makes it more fun! I've been enjoying some isekai anime so it would be a good change of pace to read some instead.
It's called the "grandfather of isekai" for a reason. Not that it was the first ever isekai, but that it was fairly early, and so fantastic that everyone wanted to copy it, and also made a bunch of people want to make isekai and read isekai. The only reason I got into the genre was because Mushoku Tensei was the best story I've ever read and I wanted to find more stuff like it, although everything since hasn't quite lived up to it (some of the better ones come close).
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So, what about that shrine with the girls underwear in his basement?
To be clear, he never fundamentally changes who he is as a person. He starts as a creepy pervert who steals panties, molests sleeping girls, and tries to groom his childhood friend, and progresses into a mostly harmless pervert who respects boundaries, asks for consent, has multiple wives but doesn't cheat on them, doesn't steal additional panties anymore even when offered on a silver platter by his minions, and keeps his panty shrine in the basement where others don't have to see it (also, it's less creepy after they're married, though only slightly).
He's still the same person, he still has the same desires, but he learns how to channel them into unharmful ways. I suppose you could say the lesson this teaches is "You're not automatically a bad person if you're a pervert, you just have to curtail the parts that actually harm the people around you. You can enjoy yourself AND be a good person if you do it correctly." Which, while highly controversial, seems like an excellent lesson to teach people, especially people with similar proclivities.
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