EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

An artist who had built a career on short stories settled, for the first time, into a story told across several chapters. Majiwari no Yado stands in the hall as Bifidus's fourth book, the one in which that experiment reached the annual print rankings.

The three-chapter title story, first published in ANGEL Club, is joined by five further pieces, a short series and standalone stories. In the title story a young man who has run away from his job collapses on a trip and is taken in by a household of a widowed mother and her daughter, where he slowly finds a place for himself. The other stories turn to relationships with older women: an aunt, a female boss, a married woman.

What reviewers on both stores return to most often is the care taken with the characters' inner lives. The contrast between quiet panels of everyday life and the heat of the scenes, and a pace that never skips the steps by which a relationship forms, keep story and sexual content in balance. At its centre is a sincere love story, and many readers mention the warmth it leaves behind.

In the afterword Bifidus calls this the fourth collected volume of their career and hopes readers will feel a change in texture from the novella-length stories of two and three chapters. Seiai Onsen followed the next year.

The print and digital editions appeared on the same day, 17 November 2020. The publisher, Angel Shuppan, advertised that the serial had held first place in the magazine's reader survey. In FANZA's annual mail-order ranking of comics for 2020 it placed 44th. It ranks 212th among the hall's commercial works.