EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

A single doujinshi can give rise to a serialization for general readers and even become a subject of scholarship. Karami Zakari stands in the hall as the starting point of a series that reached that far.

It is an adult doujinshi, an ensemble coming-of-age story built on the friendships and unrequited feelings of four boys and girls in the same class. Its subject is netorare, of the type later named BSS, short for boku ga saki ni suki datta no ni, the lament of the one who fell in love first and lost out. It is the first of a three-part main series.

What readers single out is storytelling that does not lean on dialogue. The protagonist's state of mind comes across with words held back, through drawing, composition and the cut of the panels. Readers also take it as an ensemble in which relationships tangle without anyone being the villain.

The author, Katsura Airi, uses the same name for the circle. The work first appeared on FANZA in October 2018; the edition in the hall is the monochrome version released on DLsite in November 2020. From late 2020, Kodansha's Young Magazine Web ran a remake for general readers, Karami Zakari: Boku no Honto to Kimi no Uso, drawn by a different artist, which ran to eight volumes. A spin-off based on Katsura Airi's concept has appeared since 2024, and there has been an adult live-action adaptation.

In 2025 the journal Manga Kenkyu, published by the Japan Society for Studies in Cartoons and Comics, carried a paper that took the work as its subject in discussing how the BSS genre took shape. It stands 57th among the hall's doujin works.