Chiikawa is a small white shape that hardly ever speaks. The daily routine is pulling weeds or taking an extermination job, then spending the wages on food. Because the strip is built around labour and pay, it reads less like a character-goods drawing and more like a record of getting by.
The art is gentle; the world is not. The things being exterminated are genuinely dangerous, certification exams get failed, and creatures who were around last week sometimes stop being around. A bright instalment sits next to a cold one, so you never quite know what the next page holds. That is a large part of why adult readers in Japan took to it.
It began on a social account. Nagano started posting short comics to their X account on 19 January 2020, and Kodansha picked up the publishing rights in February 2021. The route ran from a personal timeline straight to bookshelves, with no magazine serialisation in between. Volume 9 is scheduled for 20 November 2026.
Doga Kobo animates it. The series started on 4 April 2022 as a short segment inside a Fuji TV morning programme and is still running. Season two, 122 episodes in all, began rolling out on Disney+ in March 2026, and there is a theatrical film as well.
Each instalment is short, so there is almost no barrier to starting. Stay with it, though, and a moment arrives when you notice what the strip is actually about. The cuteness is the surface. Underneath it are work, money and the people you keep.
