Alice in Wonderland and Chronicles of Narnia count as Isekai.
They should be even older stories than that, though.
I can't for the life of me name the title, right now, but there is some famous Chinese story of a man dreaming of an alternate life in some Chinese city where he experienced childhood to his deathbed, only to suddenly wake up and wonder if everything was just a dream.
How does that not make it an isekai? They made an anime, and I assume you're the guy who said isekai can only be anime.
That is very doubtful.
The concept is just too obvious and interesting.
They're not. Alice in Wonderland is base Fantasy.
Chronicles of Narnia are 7 books with different cast and adventures that happen in and around Narnia. The Magician's Nephew is the closest thing to Isekai.
Which if you didn't know, is the obviously the source of inspiration for last season's The Wiseman's Granson. In more ways than just the genre, of course.
I think it's insulting to refer to older anime about people thrown into different worlds as isekai. To me, the main characteristics of what is broadly known today as isekai are not the transportations themselves or the fish out of water element. Instead, it's the absolute laziness of the settings, the lack of world building, the reliance on video game systems and the brazen wish fulfillment what I associate with the genre. In many of them the travel is irrelevant after the first 5 minutes. That's why I'm so in favor of the native isekai tag. UchiMusume is the latest example: after watching the first episode I could have swore I had been watching another isekai, and it wasn't until I was reading the thread that I realized it wasn't technically one. That kind of swill could never register as fantasy in my mind when it's so clear that no effort whatsoever went into world building and that it lacks any sense of wonderment or discovery. If those are the expectations that come with the word "isekai", how could I ever refer to something like Juuni Kokki as one?
Inuyasha was the source of my bones as a kid
That's pretty gay.
Based.
Pretty much.
Do yourself a favor and stop saying "is a" because you're only going to confuse yourself and others. It is the name of a category. It makes betters sense to say it goes "in" and "under" - then it can be intuited that it's a category and not an individual identity. It's a collective identity. It does what other stories do- and that group is given a name.
Fairy Tale is the genre. Fairy Tales end on magical consequence. In Urashima Taro's case, you might think it's Isekai because he's spirited away to an underwater palace (which has already been explained 100x that's not what isekai is), the point of the story is the magic box he's not suppose to open. And Instantly ages him.
Of course, "fairy tales" are classics that are so well now they get used as motifs in adapted and hodgepodge classical crossovers. There's a team in Yu Yu Hakusho that's uses Japanese Fairy Tale Gimmicks. The magic box (mist) from Urashima Taro is used on Kurama, for example.
You could say Yu Yu Hakusho is another case of being spirited away (to the demon realms) and I would argue that it is Isekai, but predominantly the genre is Martial Arts. The story places more importance on the training and upgrades than on the world.
It's like. The difference between Scifi and Fantasy is a story with space travel and a story about spacetravel. Scifi is speculative fiction that explores the consequence of science and technology.