Often times, hentai manga are only concerned with getting straight to the action as fast as possible. You’ve got familiar character archetypes in expected situations to help expedite the process of seeing them a bone. It’s definitely fun and sexy, but I find myself wishing for better-developed characters a lot of the time. Enter: Special Days, a new manga release by Shibasaki Shouji that focuses less on the sex, and a lot more on the characters who are having sex.
While Special Days clocks in at an average length of 213 pages, the book surprisingly only has seven chapters. Initially, I was worried about there being so few chapters. After finishing the book, though, I absolutely appreciate the approach of “quality over quantity” that Shibasaki Shouji took with this anthology. Each story in this volume runs for 30 pages or more, giving an incredible amount of room for the characters to interact or develop their relationships in slow, natural ways. In some chapters, this extended length gives us an extra beefy amount of sex scenes to soak in. In others, it gives us a variety of smaller sex scenes interspersed with full, meaty story arcs. The result is well-developed stories that make each of their characters, both the guys and girls, feel way more natural and three-dimensional than a lot of other hentai characters.
It also helps that each story features an entirely different looking, yet equally gorgeous girl. Even the boys in the stories have nicely varied designs, for the most part. While there’s a consistent art style in Special Days, each girl is differently designed in every aspect, from their face to their hair and even their body type, ensuring nobody ever felt like a simple costume swap or something. The girls in Special Days all have beautiful natural bodies, with plush thighs, realistic hips and soft bellies that bend and fold just like you’d expect them to. The stories in this manga are slow and down to earth, so having this low-key and realistic art style to match them is a wonderful combination.
There’s also an incredible charming quality to the art of Special Days that left me feeling so impressed. A big part of why I was happy to see these chapters run for so long is that it gave me more pages of non-sexual scenes with well-drawn characters and facial expressions to appreciate. Shibasaki Shouji draws well-defined faces and silhouettes with sometimes rough or uneven lines that create this incredible visual appeal reminiscent of indie web manga or something. I would easily read all of these stories even if there were no sex because even the regular art in this book is well-realized and incredibly pretty.
It’s hard to comment on the quality of the colored artwork in Special Days, because there’s literally none. While the front cover and back cover is full-color, there are no colored chapter pages, pin-up illustrations or even inside-cover inserts. There are nice blended shadows and soft, natural colors used in the colored cover illustrations that I appreciate a lot, and the front cover even has some sharp coloring work that does a great job of rendering the rain-soaked shirts of the protagonists featured on it. You can see the blurry colors of their skin and pants under their white tops in a realistic way, and I appreciated that a lot.
I wish there were more colored pages to appreciate, but thankfully, Special Days make up for the lack of colored pages with a different kind of bonus feature that I appreciated even more. Many of the stories in this volume, originally published in hentai magazines, now feature bonus short epilogue chapters that give us some more time with the characters. While they don’t feature any sex, they’re cute little side-stories that give us an extra peek into the world of these adorable protagonists. I wish that every story in the book got these epilogues instead of only three of them getting them, but thankfully, some of my favorite chapters were the ones blessed with a bonus epilogue.
Take, for example, the opening chapter Because It’s You. In this story, highschooler Ishiyama is a little concerned about his caring, blonde-haired girlfriend Tooru. Lately, whenever he asks to do something, she says she has plans and can’t. She still makes him lunch every day, but he can’t help but wonder what’s keeping her so busy. As he leaves school alone, he spots her riding her bike somewhere…with a baby attached to her back. Confused, he decides to ask her about the baby the next day, and she embarrassingly reveals that her parents decided to have another kid out of the blue, leaving her to be in charge of babysitting since her mom works evenings. Tooru wants Ishiyama to forget about it, and not tell anyone about the baby. Instead, he asks to come over to her house to help watch the child. While they’re there, Tooru can’t help but be happy by how well her boyfriend is handling the baby situation, and her love for him sparks even brighter, leading to the two having some intimate fun as their feelings rush over them.
This story is a perfect example of the kind of slow, soft pacing of the chapters in Special Days. There isn’t any kind of sexual activity until page 17 of Because It’s You. Up to that point, it’s just Tooru and Ishiyama talking, spending time for each other, and learning more about each other’s feelings and personalities. I loved this because it helps make their relationship seem so much more natural. You get to see the way they interact with each other at school, contrasted with the more comfortable tone they take with each other alone at home, on top of the flirty and sarcastic sexy talk they engage in when they start fooling around. This is one of the most realistic couples I’ve ever seen in a hentai manga, making this an absolute favorite story of mine.
Special Days may be light on content, but the stuff that’s there is incredibly memorable. There are only seven chapters, sure, but each of those chapters contains some of the most well-developed characters and satisfyingly paced stories I’ve ever seen in a manga. Is it a shame that there are no colored pages and only a few special mini-chapters? Sure, but I think I would take these lengthy, memorable stories over short and sexy full-color adventures any day. Special Days by Shibasaki Shouji is available at our shop here, along with many other great hentai manga series.
