EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

Adult manga can build an entire world of its own. Implicity stands in the hall as the proof.

The setting is a far-future city cut into strata, an above and a below. In it live girls made for the peace of human society and born to be given away. The story is told from their side, in short episodes that lean on one another until a single picture of the world assembles itself.

Higashiyama Show's craft lives in what he declines to draw. The architecture of the city, its currency, its licensing of birth — little of this is ever spoken aloud. The reader builds it from a corner of a background and from the way a girl holds herself. More than one critic has arrived at the same observation: the texture of this book rises out of its empty space. The sex belongs to that same architecture. Only there does it become clear who is permitted what, and by whom. And however harsh the scene, the drawing never turns muddy — a thing readers keep noting with something close to surprise.

The serialization in COMIC LO ran four years. Eleven years after the artist's debut, this is a fifth book and a first long work.

A category prize at Kono Ero-Manga ga Sugoi!; an entry for the Japan SF Grand Prize; an animated adaptation the same year. The title is on record in Chinese-language criticism and in English-language databases alike.