EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

Adult manga is sometimes willing to spend a great deal of time before anyone takes their clothes off. A Week-Long Relation Between a Gyaru and an Introvert draws its strength from exactly that patience.

A forfeit sends Satsuki Risa, the tanned gyaru of the class, to confess to Arishima Touya, its quiet loner. She expects to be turned down. He accepts. She starts coming over to be tutored for a retake exam, a film found in his room turns out to be one they both love, and somewhere along the way she means it. Of fifty pages, a great many pass before the feeling is mutual.

The book never lets the cruelty of its opening curdle. Touya took the confession knowing it was a forfeit, and the forfeit itself had been arranged by a friend of Risa's who had noticed how he looked at her. Neither is standing anywhere that wounds them, so the two can close the distance at the same pace.

The drawing does not erase the boy. In a genre where the male side tends to thin out into a shape, he has a face and a temperament, and in the scene where he falls asleep over his books it is he who is being looked at. A condom fetched the way high-schoolers would fetch one; a kiss with light coming through the window; a last page in which the heroine has cut her hair. What readers write down again and again is not the sex but the minutes on either side of it. That so many of them identify themselves as women says something about how far this one reached.

The circle has put out only this and one further title on DLsite, in 2023. In English a fan translation ran to completion and the work acquired a database entry of its own. In the hall it stands thirteenth among doujin works, and third in the pure-love division.