EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

How does one come to understand a partner with whom no language is shared? Shikijou Reikan stands in the hall for letting its readers live through that process themselves, by means of a device built into the page.

A woman whose strong appetite keeps her relationships short is singled out by the ghost of a heavily muscled man who haunts her room, and the two end up living together. It is an adult work of the interspecies kind, its partner a spirit; it opens with contact made without consent, during sleep and sleep paralysis, and moves toward a consensual relationship and a happy ending.

The ghost's speech is set in garbled characters, with the meaning added alongside. On rereading it becomes legible, and readers grow used to the ghost together with the heroine. Separate readers have singled out this device from the first days of release. They also praise the design of the ghost, eerie and raw yet handsome too, its skin rendered down to raised veins and dampness.

Readers who had shied away from horror or the monstrous, and readers who arrived through the artist's social media to buy adult work for the first time, wrote that they were drawn in. It reached well beyond the usual audience for its subject.

Since 2017 the circle Norakurari has drawn partners who are not human, cats and sirens among them. Released in 2022, two years after the artist Nemu's Mesuneko Ingi, this work stands 56th among the hall's doujin works.