EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

A thinly peopled village and the smallest possible cast. Inaka ni wa Kore kurai shika Goraku ga Nai renders that closed setting through assured composition, and stands in the hall as the starting point of a six-volume series.

A young man who failed to land a job and turned to relatives in the country becomes tutor to the modest honor student the whole village speaks well of. Set in that village, it is a 33-page story of the age gap between a tutor and his pupil, and among its official tags is wakan, the label for consensual sex. Near the end the heroine's friend appears, pointing toward a sequel.

Reviewers agree on its bold allotment of pages: the setup is dispatched in a few, and the rest goes to the main story. The devices are many, from a fixed, camera-like viewpoint held across panels to a scene shown only as shadows through a paper screen. The heroine's design, her eyes half hidden by her fringe, and the air of a village set apart from the outside world are noted as well.

Riku no Kotoutei is said to have begun with fan-made doujinshi, and this was the circle's first work on DLsite. By 2025 the series had reached a sixth volume and a compilation.

The print doujinshi came out at Comic Market 99 in December 2021, and digital editions went up on DLsite and FANZA the same day. Most of its readers came through FANZA. By a rough count, doujin manga with inaka, countryside, in their titles more than doubled that year, and the book can be read as one of that wave. It stands 76th among the hall's doujin works.