EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

A niche appetite is easily reduced to decoration stuck on the outside of a story. Otona ni Naru Natsu: Oboetate H ni Dohamari suru Inaka Oneshota puts one at the centre and makes the story hold.

A boy is sent to relatives in the countryside because of trouble at home, and spends a summer with an older cousin. Of eighty-three pages, the first ten or so are nothing but a holiday. The two fall into a pond, wash each other off, and things change from there. The boy was once laughed at for wetting himself at school, and at first he refuses hard.

What the circle states outright as its focus is that very act. The cling of soaked cloth, the force and the splash-back, the volume. But the book does not work on draughtsmanship alone. Because the woman takes the same shame onto herself, it stops being punishment and becomes something the two of them hold together. Past that point, in the last stretch, the boy who had been led starts to move on his own. That order of events is what readers set down again and again.

Tamabon, the artist behind the circle, had been drawing for Kairakuten since 2022. Kotetsu Shabondama has released nothing else in Japanese to this day, and the first collected volume under the artist's own name, Dadamore!, appeared at the end of the same year. The doujin came first.

Fifth in the older-woman-younger-boy category, twelfth in pure love. Sold on DLsite alone, it circulates in official English, simplified and traditional Chinese, Korean and Spanish editions among others.