Ko Yamori, a middle schooler, decides to stop going to school. The reason is not dramatic. He cannot work out why friends are supposed to feel good, or why romance is, and sitting in a classroom in that condition became unbearable. So he sleeps through the day and walks the neighbourhood at night.
Nazuna Nanakusa, who he meets out there, is a vampire. Instead of biting him she offers him a place to sleep, and from then on they walk together every night. Becoming a vampire requires falling in love with the vampire who bit you, which is an inconvenient condition to attach to a boy who says he does not understand love.
Night here is a refuge rather than a mood. Convenience store light, the ground in front of a vending machine, the top of a pedestrian bridge: unremarkable places, where the characters say the things they cannot say in daylight. It is less a horror story or a sexy one than a story about people who cannot sleep.
Kotoyama began serialisation in Weekly Shonen Sunday on 28 August 2019 and closed it with chapter 203 on 24 January 2024, collected in 20 volumes. In France it took first place in the new manga category of the 2023 Daruma awards.
LIDENFILMS animated the first season, thirteen episodes from 8 July 2022. It picks a very different palette for the night scenes than the manga, which makes the comparison with the black and white pages worth making.
This one doubles in effect if you read it late. The cost is the following morning.
