EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

A bad aftertaste can be the very thing a book is built around. Yui-chan Satsueikai enters the hall as proof of it.

Its twelve stories share no protagonist. There is a photo session, a sweet shop, a wooded corner of a park, a middle-aged man in a mask. Stories where the girl sets the terms and stories where she can do nothing at all are split roughly down the middle.

Kitani Shii's line is soft. The round faces, the ribs showing under a thin stomach — everything is drawn toward childishness. What the stories contain is not soft at all. The men opposite are given circumstances, reasoning, a private shame; none of them runs on violence alone. That is why a reader can stay with the people even when there is no way out for them. Warped but not yet broken is the phrase readers reach for when they try to name what the book leaves behind. What turns that discomfort into a quality is the softness of the line.

Kitani's first adult volume was Otome no Ren'ai Jouji in 2007, which placed fifth in that year's readers' poll. He went on drawing through serialisations in general-audience magazines, and this remains, for now, his last adult volume. It is also the most read and the most highly rated book he has made.

Just after release it took eleventh place in the half-year adult-comic sales at Toranoana's Akihabara store. Official translations run past ten languages, English, simplified Chinese and Korean among them. Sixth in the commercial hall.