EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

Onee-chan no Tomodachi ga Ecchi na Hito Bakari Datta kara stands in the hall as the benchmark of its form: the book readers keep calling the standard, even the model, of onee-shota.

It is an adult work of the onee-shota kind, about a group of older women who are friends of a boy's sister, and the boy himself. Across twenty-nine full-colour pages the plot advances by a chain, the friends appearing before him one at a time. The sister herself passes through a few panels, seen from behind, and several readers take care to note that this is not an incest story. The lead stays with the older side throughout, and the roles never reverse. That consistency, readers say, is exactly what makes the form feel dependable.

Higumaya draws round lines and lays down soft colour, and still the page never clouds or turns coarse; that is what readers mention most often. When they get specific, they name the sureness of the compositions and the way a face is caught in the instant it shifts by a fraction. Some also observe that it holds back the sweet, romantic tone of the circle's usual work.

The circle began publishing in 2011, and this is its twelfth release. In 2014 it published a book about a single friend of an older sister, and five years later it returned to the same material with the friends made plural. A form is refined by redrawing the same subject at intervals of years.

A noticeable number of readers say they found the circle through an advertisement, which also makes this a book of the period when store advertising was bringing in new readers. In the hall it stands first in both the onee-shota and the shota categories, and of the circle's twenty-one titles it is the only one with figures of a different order.