EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

In most books built on hypnosis, whoever casts it keeps the upper hand to the last page. Hitozukiai ga Nigate na Miboujin no Yukionna-san to Noroi no Yubiwa lets that upper hand go halfway through.

A young man inherits an apartment block for yokai from a father who died suddenly. Among the tenants is a snow woman, Yukino, widowed. After a careless remark opens a distance between them, he finds a ring left behind in his father's rooms — a ring that bends yokai to the wearer's will. He means to use it to ease her circumstances. That is not what happens.

All seventy pages are in full colour, and a great many of them are given to one contrast: black underwear against white skin. Almost every detail readers single out sits there. The give of skin under a finger, the framing of two bodies laid together. Then, in the back half, the ring's price begins to take shape. Who is asking and who is consenting change places, and the story tilts quietly toward ghost story. That it refused to let the ring stay a convenient device is what readers set down as its strength.

The circle Puu no Puupuupuu, run by the artist Puuzaki Puuna, opened with four books released together in September 2021. This one came three weeks later, its seventh. From February 2022 a commercial label began issuing it in instalments, and a television anime is set to air in October 2026.

Second in the hypnosis category, where two books from another of the circle's series stand sixth and eighth. Readership leans heavily to FANZA: 146,000 there against 46,000 on DLsite.