EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

Adult manga does not have to run on guilt. Doutei Danshi Kousei Iinkai holds that position from cover to cover, and of Tamagoro's four volumes in the hall it stands the highest.

This is bicchi-mono, fiction built around sexually forthright heroines, and two serials carry the book: the three-chapter title sequence, about a studious boy who is still a virgin and two women, and a six-chapter run set in a fishing village on a remote island, its last chapter drawn new for the collection. Two short pieces sit between them. The island serial is onee-shota, the type that pairs an older woman with a younger boy. No shadow falls on any chapter. Reader after reader, independently, reaches for the same words: dry, breezy, nothing sour in it.

Tamagoro's pages are bright and, above all, legible. The outlines are cleaned up and the tone shadows sit only where they are needed; when readers name the ease of reading as a skill, this economy is what they mean. The dialogue is short, people saying what they think as they think it. The brightness of the book comes from line and dialogue together.

Three years after the first collection, this is the third. Characters from the earlier books turn up again. Kirara Hoshino from the debut volume returns, and "TAKE OUT" from the second gets a sequel, so that a book of short pieces widens, volume by volume, into one continuous world. The artist stayed with the same publisher throughout, and was later taken into the magazine's fortieth-anniversary anthology.

10th among the commercial works in the hall. Nine years on, readers' words keep piling up at two storefronts, and new comments are still being added.