EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

Stories built on subjugation usually pay for it in the aftertaste. "Mesuneko Ingi" keeps the shape of the form and still closes on a bright morning.

An assassin in a Chinese dress enters a mansion to kill an immortal. When decapitation only leads to regeneration, she surrenders and offers her body in exchange for her life, and is marked on the tongue and the lower belly. The creature has four arms, no face, and speaks in unfailingly polite Japanese throughout.

Nemu's line work declines to remove the clothes. Shapes press through the hanging panel of the dress; scenes proceed with the garment still on. The flesh is drawn with a tonal range that readers describe as looking coloured despite being monochrome, and that quality is bound up with the insistence on cloth. The heroine's mind never falls. She is answered, defies again, and is answered again. The book ends with the creature in an apron, making breakfast. Readers who had avoided the genre entirely, and readers identifying themselves as women, gather here largely because of how it lands.

The circle Norakurari had been drawing this pair on social media; this was the first time they were gathered into a book. The later sequel, "Mesuneko Ingi 2", also holds a place in the hall. This volume stands seventeenth among doujin works.