Gunjou Gunzou

[MangaDex]

 

[beep_repair]

1-2) I Don't Even Know Her Name

In the first half of this two-part story, a shy and bookish teenage boy accompanies a female classmate on her rounds as JK prostitute. Though their relationship is unclear, he seems to act as her unpaid assistant, even offering up his apartment so she can conduct business. In the second chapter, they begin to have sex occasionally, a few minor secrets are revealed, and the girl eventually drops out of school.​

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The story is rather bleak and transactional on the surface, but there's a core of not-quite-vanilla sweetness that becomes dominant toward the end part two, eventually suggesting a possible happy ending for the pair. As a result, I enjoyed this one quite a bit.​

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3) Scrap Girl and Teacher

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Another story in the vein of the two-part opener, though the narrative is much simpler here, stripped down to R18 essentials. Again, the heroine is a casually promiscuous teenager, and her partner, a shady male teacher, seems to be sleepwalking through life. However, there's no lovey-dovey warmth to break the chill, and no insight into what brought the anti-heroic protagonists to this point. We're offered little but a frame for loveless sex between "broken" but stoic people. Nevertheless, the story is engaging and the characters are credible, even somewhat relatable (provided you can suspend judgment about their behavior).​

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I like the sensibility expressed in these first three chapters. The themes and action suggest edgy nihilism in the vein of Koji Wakamatsu's Go, Go, Second Time Virgin, but they're delivered without the corrosive cruelty that tends to accompany such fare. The characters don't seemed inescapably doomed or miserable so much as disaffected, and their willingness to live outside conventional social bounds is granted a perverse kind of nobility. Good stuff.​

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4) Ahiru to Akane

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More of the same, though not in a bad way. Chapter four concerns the friendship between two JK prostitutes, one beautiful, the other plain. Due to this focus (and strangely for the genre), the men they have sex with are insignificant. They come and go without leaving a mark. And again, mangaka Arai Kei underplays a situation that other writers would pump up and exploit for cruel shock or moralistic tragedy, presenting it as a simple, low-stakes "slice-of-life".​

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I'm noticing that all these stories treat sex as an act of very little significance, an ordinary and therefore unremarkable human social behavior like sharing a meal or working a job. While the characters like and pursue sex, they don't seem to care about it. Interesting and kind of refreshing.​

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5) Neighbors' Love Trouble

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A slight change of pace in that both characters here are adults: a single man and a married woman who live next door to one another in a small apartment building. Adultery ensues, and while the mood is less gloomy than in previous chapters, the sex is again presented as a casual physical act without moral consequence. It's also a good deal hotter here than in previous chapters. The image on page 24 of the heroine luxuriating in the sticky afterglow is especially memorable.​

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I should mention that the art throughout these stories is quite good, though not strongly distinctive, and that Arai-sensei excels at evoking authentic, three-dimensional characters in just a few pages of non-sexual dialogue. Everything rings true, which is rare in this sort of R18 work.​

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6) Madame Is My Sex Friend

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More adultery, this time involving a predatory salaryman and his boss's young wife. Though it's a netori story, the last couple pages emphasize the cheerfully oblivious husband's cuckolding, giving things a bit of netorare spice.​

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There's also a brief moment of forcible coercion at the start of the cheating pair's (otherwise enthusiastically consensual) encounter. It took me by surprise, as none of the other stories in this collection include anything similar. Reading it, I was for some reason reminded how much I hated - genuinely hated - such scenes when I first encountered eromanga, and struck in turn by how profoundly desensitized I've become in the years since. Not a great feeling...​

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Anyway, this is the most generic and least interesting chapter in the collection. Not actively bad, and somewhat amusing towards the end, but definitely sub-par for the author.​

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7-9) Shot-put Girlfriend

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Gunjou Gunzou closes with a full-blown netorare story in three parts. I'd like to say that it goes out on a high note, but I found this one more "interesting" than appealing. It's ambitious in that it deploys several common NTR tropes and character types (lovely teen athlete heroine, sleazebag ugly bastard coach, smol & lovelorn childhood friend) only to subvert and twist them in unexpected ways. And despite some heartbreaking cruelty and betrayal along the way, it eventually works its way toward a lovey-dovey happy end.​

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There's a lot to admire here. Akira, the statuesque track & field star heroine, is gorgeous beyond belief, easily the most beautiful girl in this collection (dig if you will her smile and sun-dappled tan on page 8 of chapter 7 ❤️). As a reworking of standard NTR elements, it's quite clever, and it pushes deeper into Arai's interrogation of conventional sexual morality than the other stories in this collection.​

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Unfortunately, it's so concerned with ideas over character that the plot becomes contrived and even silly, sacrificing the down-to-earth authenticity of chapters 1 through 5. Nonetheless, it's a worthy experiment and a welcome corrective to the sadistic miserabilism of most generic netorare fodder.​

 

[Laparoscopic]

Welp. I cant be as detailed as that ⬆️, but I will say that most of these are more depressing than arousing, despite the nice artwork. Neighbors’ Love Trouble was the most pleasant of the lot, despite the NTR.