The Fall 2024 Manga Guide

A Suitable Fetish (18+)

What's It About? 

Sakuramori Miu is, by all appearances, a prim and proper young lady with a respectable job in planning and development. There's no way she could be anything but vanilla and innocent! But when she's off the clock and behind closed doors, Miu's got a taste for more sensual pleasures and fetishes. To her surprise, her sales manager, Takeda Shiro, is also hiding his own secret fantasies behind his buttoned-up reputation. When the two match their desires, they'll make for one steamy office romance!

A Suitable Fetish has a story and art by Shin Kawamaru. The English translation is by Katrina Leonoudakis. This volume was lettered by Cedric Macias. Published by ‎Seven Seas' Steamship imprint (October 15, 2024).

Is It Worth Reading?

If you're picking up this Steamship release hoping for explicit content, you may want to try a different book. It's not that A Suitable Fetish doesn't have sexual content; it's more that that content isn't particularly explicit. Our main characters, Miu and Takeda, absolutely sleep together and try out one of the 48 Positions, a collection of sex positions collected in Japan. (They may or may not be sumo-inspired; I admit to only cursory research.) But it's mostly fade-to-black with bonus censorship sparklies and clothed chibis, making this probably the least explicit Steamship title I've encountered.

It's also one of the funnier ones, although I'm not one hundred percent sure that's on purpose. Miu got all of her ideas about sex from watching porn in high school, and she's been so eager to try out those forty-eight positions that she carries around a manual with her regularly. Regretfully, she's sent at least one boyfriend to the hospital with them, and in this volume, she also accidentally strangles Takeda to the point of unconsciousness; forgetting that you've tied yourself to your partner by the neck when you stand up to get a condom is a bad plan. (Who knew?) Miu is so gung-ho that she's practically Yamada from Yamada's First Time, and her big dilemma in this volume is whether she has feelings for Takeda or whether, in his words, she just wants to fuck him. Quite the moral quandary for our girl.

Takeda, for his part, is simultaneously creeped out by Miu and completely aroused by her. His big secret is that he's a masochist who's into being dominated and humiliated. It's no coincidence that the two positions he agrees to try out both involve some (neck) bondage and Miu on top, not that he's going to tell her that. Mostly his confusion about Miu comes from the fact that she's just so open about what she wants, while he feels like he needs to hide his preferences. Interestingly, that's a theme with the book's men – Jinguji, another coworker, tries to keep his past hidden, but his cover's blown by a group of women who recognize him and have zero compunctions about flashing a photo around. Like Miu, they don't see sex and sexual preferences and fetishes as something shameful. The men? Not so much.

Sakuramori Miu is a 21-year-old office lady who is secretly a huge horndog. When she has a NSFW encounter with a higher-up, she's worried it'll ruin her reputation. Luckily this is a fetish manga, and everyone working at her office is also a secret horndog. Indeed, assured mutual destruction is the only thing that prevents everyone in this manga from having a very uncomfortable talk with HR. The central pun in the title of A Suitable Fetish is that the characters are white-collar workers who also have naughty desires not far beneath the surface. Though it refrains from becoming actual porn (at least in volume 1), this comic puts titillation above reality, resulting in a fluffy, escapist rom-com.

Miu's superior, the no-nonsense Takeda Shiro, is a secret masochist. So it's lucky that she selected him of all people when she decided to ask a coworker, under the flimsiest of pretenses, to try out a sexual position from the Japanese kama sutra. Unbeknownst to her, this domineering attitude pinpoints his weakness for being dominated. A distinctly uncollegial relationship follows, and Miu and Shiro's colleagues are apparently too absorbed by their own pervy secrets to take notice. “Everybody has a secret fetish” is the manga's enduring refrain in between lines so cheesy they could be straight out of Fifty Shades of Gray.

Though things can get steamy at times, this comic never forgets its silly side. The Japanese kama sutra positions are illustrated with incongruously adorable chibis. Raucous workplace double entendres result in shock humor. One sexual mishap involves slapstick comedy that won't work for every reader when Miu accidentally strangles Shiro with his tie. Plus there's the (unintentional?) humor of Shiro narrating his corny desires like a submissive Christian Gray. In sum, this manga delivers exactly what it promises: a steamy, silly romp through the world's most inappropriate workplace.

“Everyone's got a secret fetish” is a line that ends almost every chapter of this book. However, despite the tagline, would you believe me if I said I enjoyed this story more for its comedy than its titillation? I was surprised that was my takeaway after finishing this volume. A Suitable Fetish is a story about slowly peeling back the layers of a handful of young adults to reveal the deranged perverted nature that lies beneath the surface. As someone who does practice BDSM, this is pretty common and a lot of people don't think about the idea of your average office worker having a rather extreme fetish that they practice in their downtime. At the end of the day, that's nobody's business unless you're involving yourself in those situations, but I like the overall tone and atmosphere of the story. It's very casual and everyone talks with a very matter-of-fact way of speaking, but the contrast between their tone of voice and the perverted things that they are actually saying leads to some pretty memorable moments.

I like the fact that our protagonist is a woman who jumpstarts a lot of this by being the most open and brazen about her sexual deviancy. She is someone who is far more interested in figuring out what sex means to her than hiding the fact that she wants to engage in these deranged acts at all. There's a lot of setup here for workplace drama with jealousy brewing beneath the surface and the more our lead interacts with other people, the more you begin to see that maybe no one is that much different from everyone else. All of this is communicated in a story where there are barely any visible sex scenes.

Sex does happen in the story, but it's never the focus. It's about the buildup and afterglow of the situation. The act of sex itself breaks down the more professional façade that we are forced to keep up in our day-to-day lives. This is a very enjoyable read if you're tired of the typical high school stories. The characters are likable, the comedy is solid, and who knows—maybe this will awaken something in you as well.