EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

Craft in adult manga cannot hide, not even in a book of twenty-odd pages. Afterschool Science Club stands in the hall as the proof.

An injury is why the girl's mother still drives her to and from school, and while she waits she spends the afternoon in the science room. She sits beside an easy-going teacher and watches animal videos. That is what she sees. What is happening is something else. Twenty-two pages of story run on that doubleness alone.

The craft lives in the speech balloons. Under hypnosis the words the girl hears bend, overlap, blur and go out. Inside a single panel the reader is made to take in her understanding and the actual event at once, and more than one reader has named that handling of lettering specifically. The bodies are drawn with the same precision. What is praised again and again is a figure held on the border between child and adult without collapsing into either — and for all the harshness of the material the drawing never turns muddy, a point women readers in particular have gone out of their way to record.

The circle Fukafuka is the doujin name of the manga artist Sekiya Asami. She debuted in 2002; in the twenty years since, five adult collections. This is what that sparing hand did once it worked outside the commercial page.

Among doujin manga on DLsite, nothing outranks this title in downloads. It circulates in official editions in ten further languages — English, simplified and traditional Chinese, Korean among them.