EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

In 2002, readers distributed their allotted points and chose the book of the year. Stringendo stands in the hall on those votes. What opened this hall's gate was not a digital sales record but the ballots of its own contemporaries — and in the age of print, this was a book that went back to press again and again.

It is an adult school story set in a high school, in which popular girls choose, on their own initiative, boys who would ordinarily be thought out of their league. It opens with a single note summoning a boy, and what drives it from first to last is the will of the girls.

Yuuki Seto's draftsmanship was called exceptional even then. Later readers, too, have left behind their surprise that drawing like this existed in 2002. At the 2002 Ero-Manga Awards the book edged out Tsukino Jogi's ♭37℃ by a narrow margin.

Gathering a year of serialization in COMIC MUJIN, it is the artist's first book. Over two decades and more the collected volumes number only five, and the first of them is still the summit.

The publisher advertised the combined print run of this book and its sequel Accelerando as a record for adult comics. An animated adaptation began in 2006 and ran for six years. There is an entry in the Spanish-language encyclopedia, and in the Chinese-speaking world the work is known as 漸進曲.