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.

The setting is a high school. It opens with a note passed to a boy, and it is the girls who reach out first. The boys are the ones left uncertain. The balance of power that dominated adult manga at the time is inverted here from the first page.

Yuuki Seto's draftsmanship was called exceptional even then. The obsessiveness poured into the drawing of mouths — fetishistic, people said — remains what this artist is known for more than twenty years on. It is not merely careful work. Forwardness is drawn as intimacy rather than coarseness, and the will of the girl carries straight through into the energy of the line. 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. In the two decades since he has published only about five volumes, 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.