The next morning in Tokyo, a fine drizzle was falling.
Tsushima Kagami stood in the entryway of his apartment, adjusting his uniform collar in the full-length mirror behind the door.
The boy in the mirror had clean, delicate features, but it was his neck that drew the eye.
From his collarbone all the way up to just below his ear, dark red marks crowded together like sucker prints left by some sea creature that had wrapped itself around him.
They were, in fact, hickeys. "Strawberries" that Yukinoshita Shizuku had planted one by one with her lips the night before.
Coming home yesterday, he had expected her to be angry, to freeze him out entirely.
He had prepared no end of excuses and explanations.
Instead, the moment he stepped through the door, Yukinoshita Shizuku caught sight of the marks on his neck.
And hauled him straight into the bedroom…
"Is this actually going to cover them…" he muttered, tugging the collar up another notch.
"Kagami, if you don't leave now you'll be late."
"Coming!" Tsushima Kagami called back in a hurry, hearing Yukinoshita Shizuku already waiting downstairs.
He shouldered his bag, pushed open the apartment door, and walked out into the rain.
He didn't absorb a single word of the morning's classes.
Not that Inoue, seated diagonally behind him, hadn't been staring at his neck the entire time.
But it wasn't shame over the exposed marks that had him distracted.
It was the faint sense that the mood today was wrong.
At the school gate, the old guard had given him a look with something odd in it.
At the door of the classroom building, two underclassmen girls had passed him whispering to each other.
During the break, on his way to the toilet, a boy from the class next door had clapped him on the shoulder, snickered for no reason at all, then waved and walked off.
By the lunch break, Tsushima Kagami was sitting alone at his seat by the window.
He was just about to start eating.
"Kagami!"
He looked up to see Yamada Kenta come tearing into the classroom at a near-sprint, a magazine held high above his head, his face a tangle of emotions as he pulled up beside Kagami's desk.
"Something wrong?" Tsushima Kagami asked, looking at him.
"…?"
"You mean you don't know yet?"
"Should I?"
Seeing that Kagami really did seem to have no idea what was going on,
Yamada Kenta shoved the magazine at him.
Only once it was in his hands did Kagami see that it was Shukan Bunshun.
"Kagami, your image just collapsed!" Yamada Kenta jabbed his index finger hard at the headline on the cover.
Kagami looked down.
It was the newest issue of Shukan Bunshun.
On the cover was a photograph of a back he knew far too well. His own.
It took only a moment's thought to place it: yesterday, outside wani.
Had some paparazzo caught him on camera again?
Then he read the headline, blown up huge across the cover.
[SHOCKING! The Man Believed to Be Dassai-ya Turns Out to Have THIS Kind of Relationship with wani!]
The headline didn't point very hard at anything in particular.
The article was hedged from beginning to end: it is speculated, it is possible, every equivocation in the book.
It even closed with a note that if they had gotten it wrong, the writer was willing to apologize.
But once the story was out, it took no time at all.
The rubbernecking public ignored every one of those careful qualifiers.
They simply took it as established fact that Tsushima Kagami was the doujinshi artist.
On that assumption, a brand-new war of opinion erupted.
That same day the comment sections of Yahoo News filled with a dense, fast-scrolling flood of posts.
The most-liked among them read:
"Where's the dignity of a great author? You call this stuff art?"
"Drawing things like that at seventeen. What on earth has happened to education in Japan?"
"I actually bought his No Longer Human before. Now it just makes me sick."
"A disgrace to serious literature."
Shukan Bunshun's half-fabricated, half-factual scoop was like dropping a Fat Man and a Little Boy over Tokyo.
Into the flat, flavorless lives of the city's residents, it dropped a small jolt of two-dimensional shock.
The next day, the major outlets picked it up.
Nikkan Gendai.
FLASH.
Daily Shincho.
One gossip magazine after another rolled out its own exclusive angle, each headline hitting harder than the last.
"Akutagawa Prize Winner, Seventeen-Year-Old High School Literary Prodigy. True Identity: Adult Manga Artist!"
"Two Faces, Serious Literature and Erotic Manga: The Double Life of a Seventeen-Year-Old Boy!"
"Shocking Truth! Winner of a New Writers' Literary Prize Is Secretly a Doujinshi Artist of THAT Kind!"
"Astonishment! The Other Side of the Author of No Longer Human… Experts Explain the Gray Zone Between 'Doujinshi Manga' and Serious Literature."
The split between the conservative press and the liberal press began almost simultaneously.
In the Sankei Shimbun's opinion pages, a columnist writing under the byline "Society for the Study of Educational Issues" published a piece titled "Literary Prizes and the Moral Bottom Line."
The wording was severe.
"A high school student, a minor, is handed the highest honor in Japanese letters with one hand while producing sexually suggestive manga aimed at adults with the other.
Such a contradiction is not merely a deception of readers. It is a serious corruption of the values of our young people.
The PTA, the Parent-Teacher Association, should intervene, and intervene seriously."
The Asahi Shimbun's culture pages presented an entirely different account. One critic wrote:
"Consider Junichiro Tanizaki's Naomi. A great many of Japan's major writers and literary masters have written sensual novels.
And the contents of those sensual novels go every bit as far as anything in Tsushima Kagami's doujinshi, if not further.
If anything, they are less fit for young readers: violent, offensive against ordinary morality.
The same holds in the visual arts. Both nihonga and ukiyo-e include shunga, erotic pictures.
Japanese literature has never shied away from the expression of desire.
Tsushima Kagami's problem is not what he drew at all. It is our society's prejudice against the form of manga itself."
The fracture in public opinion showed most clearly on social media.
The tag "Tsushima Kagami Adult Manga Artist" shot to number one on Japan's trending list the day the story broke.
But click into it, and the people genuinely raging at him were far outnumbered by the ones cracking jokes and asking questions.
"Hold on. Dassai-ya, no, sorry, Xuanyaye. The doujinshi manga he draws are pure love???"
"If it wasn't top-tier I wouldn't be reading it in the first place!"
"I went out and bought Hiiragi-senpai today specially. Finished it and cried all night."
"@above, you sure it was you crying all night and not your little brother?"
"I've read the ending of The Lady Next Door three times, and every time my little brother and I cry together. What kind of monster is this seventeen-year-old high schooler?"
"Real talk, Dassai-ya's manga is seriously lewd. I never used to read this stuff. Now I have no choice."
Contrast. That became the core keyword of the entire storm.
The "sleazy adult manga artist" the public expected, against the "pure love" they found once they actually opened a volume: the gulf between the two produced a strange sort of entertainment.
Curiosity drove more and more people to buy up back issues, just to see what this seventeen-year-old high schooler, currently being torn apart by the whole country, had actually drawn.
And what they found was…
that at the heart of those works, it really was pure love.
In The Lady Next Door: the hero's years of unspoken love for his married neighbor, his careful approaches, and the tenderness of finally choosing to let her go.
In Hiiragi-senpai: the almost Platonic density of feeling between a boy and an older woman.
In Inorganic Girl: forty-nine straight pages of emotional groundwork, the hero's complete inner journey from confusion about the heroine to understanding to acceptance…
All of it stood against the public's stereotype of "adult manga": immoral, crude, objectifying, plotless.
The contrast was enormous. Enormous to the point of absurdity.
"This isn't smut. This is a clear stream running through the doujinshi world. This is salvation. This is holy light!" wrote one online manga critic on Yahoo.
"He uses the least understood of forms to express the purest of feelings."
That line was shared more than a hundred thousand times.
The label "God of Pure Love" began appearing in magazines and online media.
It started as fans joking around, then gradually escaped otaku circles altogether and entered mainstream discourse.
Even literary critics who ordinarily never touched a manga started using the phrase to describe the Tsushima Kagami phenomenon.
"In the most marginal of forms, he has expressed the most central of human needs," a cultural studies scholar at Waseda University wrote on his blog.
By the fourth day of the affair, the situation began to shift in subtle ways.
After several days of silence, confirmation came at last from Tsushima Kagami himself.
Apart from his three longtime supporters, Professors Kosaka, Takeuchi, and Matsushita, who had waded in from the very beginning with a pile of articles in his defense,
the first to publicly take his side was Professor Oie Masaaki of Gakushuin University.
A seventy-three-year-old authority on Japanese literature and a senior member of the Akutagawa Prize selection committee,
he said something in a telephone interview with the Yomiuri Shimbun that a great many people did not expect.
"I have read Tsushima-kun's manga."
"I said as much to my colleagues on the committee at the time: this young man's literary gift shows itself not only in No Longer Human, but in his manga as well.
The form of a work has no bearing on the judgment of its artistic value. What matters is what the creator wishes to express.
In their aesthetic aspirations, Tsushima-kun's manga and the first wave of innovative literature I read in my youth are one and the same thing."
Professor Oie's words landed like a gavel setting the tone.
Right behind him, Professor Ogasawara of Kyoto University spoke out publicly in the Fuji News.
"Whether Tsushima-kun's work is morally controversial is for readers to decide for themselves.
But to brand him harmful or vulgar flattens the very dimensions along which art can be evaluated.
In the history of Japanese literature, from The Tale of Genji in the Heian period to Junichiro Tanizaki in the modern era,
the expression of desire has always been one of literature's essential themes.
The question is not what he drew, but how he drew it.
Seen from that angle, in narrative structure and emotional expression, Tsushima-kun's manga far exceeds the standard one should expect of someone his age."
At a public lecture, Professor Takahashi of Kyushu University was asked by a student what he thought of "the Tsushima Kagami incident."
The comparative literature scholar took off his glasses and said something to the students in the hall that they promptly posted online, where it spread like wildfire.
"You say he is a literary master who has gone down into the gutter trade. I would say he is a manga artist who used the vehicle of manga to write a work of serious literature.
The very fact that we are making such a fuss exposes our own prejudice against manga as a medium.
The same story, written as a novel, would strike no one as a problem.
Drawn as a manga, it becomes a scandal.
That isn't fair."
With his consent, the clip ran hot online for a time, and was picked up and quoted all over again by the print press.
As professors from one top university after another spoke up, they injected a powerful dose of "authoritative endorsement" into the discourse.
But what truly built a moat around him was the collective action of the publishing industry.
Shinchosha issued a statement first.
"Dassai-ya is a new literary talent whom this company holds in the highest regard. His creative activity in the field of manga falls within the scope of personal freedom of expression.
It does not affect this company's assessment of his literary value.
This company will continue to support Dassai-ya's literary work going forward."
Kodansha joined in after that.
Even Shueisha, with whom Tsushima Kagami had never had any dealings at all, stepped forward to praise his literary standing, and at the same time to declare that his talent as a manga artist had pushed the industry forward by at least ten years, adding that they hoped for a chance to work together someday.
wani and Akane Shinsha had wanted to say something too, but given that they were now cast as the ones who had dragged a decent man into the water with them, they settled on silence.
That posture from the big, famous houses gave pause to several outlets that had been preparing to keep attacking.
Meanwhile, the elder statesmen of the literary world began speaking up one after another.
Kiyoko Murata, the well-known novelist who had once met Tsushima Kagami in passing, wrote in her newspaper column:
"I met Dassai-ya once, at a symposium for new writers.
He barely said a word the whole time, but at the end, when he was asked why he writes, he said something very interesting.
'Because there are things that will kill you if you don't say them.'
Thinking back on it now, I suspect the things he meant were not only his novels, but his manga as well."
Hikaru Okuizumi, novelist and current member of the Akutagawa Prize selection committee, put it almost casually when interviewed.
"There is nothing wrong with Dassai-ya's talent, none at all.
As for the rest, that is his private life and his creative freedom.
A seventeen-year-old kid draws a few manga. Is all this really warranted?"
This turn in opinion, from "moral judgment" to "who cares," spread rapidly in the forty-eight hours after the authorities of every field had their say.
People kept pointing out one crucial fact.
In the history of Japanese literature, the writers enshrined as classics had written "out of bounds" material well beyond anything in Tsushima Kagami's handful of manga.
"These literary giants you're all hyping now, by the standards of their own day, every last one of them was a bestselling erotica writer."
One user's comment collected an avalanche of shares and likes.
"Set beside them, Tsushima Kagami's few manga are kindergarten reading material."
The comment was screenshotted, reposted, and quoted until it hardened into a new narrative.
It wasn't that Tsushima Kagami had gone too far. It was that society as a whole had chosen to forget the erotic tradition running through Japanese literature.
"I went in wanting to have a good laugh at Dassai-ya," one user wrote.
"But after reading and comparing, I've concluded that Junichiro Tanizaki was the bigger deviant.
And nobody thinks Tanizaki doesn't deserve his place of honor in literary history. So where exactly is the problem?"
The problem lay in the status of manga as a medium.
That was the truth a great many people came around to over the course of that week.
On the sixth day of the affair, something happened that no outlet had anticipated.
Sales of Tsushima Kagami's older manga, which had long since leveled off, exploded.
Most of the buyers had come straight from the news. Some out of curiosity, some on a fan's recommendation, and some… simply wanting to see what could possibly have earned a person this much abuse.
The result was a phenomenon: the more he was cursed, the more he sold.
The more he was covered, the better the books moved.
The phenomenon itself became the subject of a fresh round of reporting.
The Nikkei even ran a dedicated analysis in its business section, titled "The Tsushima Kagami Effect: How Moral Controversy Converts into Purchasing Power."
The piece dissected the phenomenon from the angles of communication studies and economics.
The louder the voices of moral condemnation, the stronger the curiosity of potential consumers.
And once the first wave of "curiosity buyers" had made their purchases and posted positive reviews, cognitive dissonance appeared in the discourse.
This did not match the criticism people had been hearing at all, and that mismatch by itself drove still more people to go and verify it in person.
"That is the core mechanism of the Tsushima Kagami Effect," the article wrote.
"The criticism itself became the most effective advertising. And the quality of the product was high enough to sustain positive feedback from consumers, forming a virtuous cycle of word of mouth.
In marketing terms this is a case that is all but impossible to replicate, because it requires the coexistence of two extreme conditions.
The first is moral criticism on a sufficiently vast scale. The second is a product of sufficiently high quality.
Neither can be missing."
Business commentators compared the phenomenon to the sales trajectories of certain controversial works in history.
D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, for instance, was banned in its day on charges of "obscenity," which only sharpened the public's appetite to read it and made it one of the bestselling literary works of the twentieth century.
"Tsushima Kagami is simply that pattern repeating itself in the world of manga."
Readers voting with their wallets became the most forceful rebuttal of all.
If his manga were truly vulgar, truly harmful, truly "poisoning the youth" the way the PTA parents claimed,
then why were so many adults, so many perfectly ordinary people, willing to pay money for them?
And why, having bought them, was there no anger, no complaints filed, no returns, but instead long, closely argued analyses and recommendations posted on social media?
"I've finished every one of Dassai-ya's manga," said a thirty-year-old male office worker in an interview.
"At first it honestly was curiosity. I wanted to see how far he'd go.
It ended up making me cry.
How the hell is this adult manga?
This is pure love literature wearing an adult shell!"
A woman reader in her forties left a comment of her own.
"I have never read a doujinshi manga in my life.
My daughter recommended this one to me. I read The Lady Next Door and cried on the spot.
It reminded me that I had a love of my own that came to nothing when I was young.
The content of this manga is every bit as good as the morning dramas and the prime-time slots!"
Even inside the PTA, different voices began to be heard.
A PTA representative from one of Tokyo's wards still voiced "concern" in an interview, but the wording had clearly softened.
"We are not denying Dassai-ya's talent as a writer. We would simply like to see clearer age labeling on the covers, so that parents can make their own judgments."
That was a considerable retreat from the "we demand the school impose serious disciplinary action" of a few days earlier.
The scales of public opinion were tipping at a speed that left people staring.
The affair went on building, and the Tsushima Kagami Effect was written into case libraries of business analysis everywhere.
In the end, Shukan Bunshun's exposé not only failed to deliver Tsushima Kagami a devastating image collapse, it helped him, absurdly enough, achieve a reverse breakout.
A high school student who had been famous only within the small circles of literature enthusiasts and manga readers had, through a nationwide storm of public opinion, become in a single stroke a genuine "phenomenon-level celebrity."
____
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