EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

Posit one fictional law, then fill in the society that lives under it, a chapter at a time. Shoujo Konkatsu Jidai: Looking for the one stands in the hall for the way it builds an ensemble serial on an institution used as its stage.

In an imagined society where the legal age of marriage has been drastically lowered, girls of elementary and middle-school age go looking for older men to meet through arranged introductions and to marry. On that premise, the six chapters of the title serial each follow a different pair, and three fantasy stories about an elf, a serpent god and a hermit sage, first printed in the anthology Towako, complete the book. Official listings file it as an adult collection under loli, age gap and fantasy.

Reviewers converge on the construction of the premise. Parents press their children to marry; the unmarried fret about being left behind. Small details that turn familiar values inside out give the invented society its texture, and the comedy comes from the gap between the one altered institution and the otherwise ordinary people living around it. The line is clean. Several reviewers also note that the book takes no dark turns.

Gengoro's earliest confirmed appearance in an adult magazine is in COMIC LO in 2010. Arriving about two and a half years after Osanazuma to Issho, this third collection moves from that book's single married couple to an ensemble, looking at marriage from the side of the institution.

Print and digital editions both appeared in January 2018. It is the second of the artist's three works in the hall and ranks 152nd among commercial works.