Japan's
birth crisis has inspired everything from boring political speeches to
desperate government measures, but the manga industry has just taken the
problem to a completely unhinged level. On February 24, 2026, Kodansha's Weekly
Young Magazine premiered Official Adultery? (Kōshiki
Furin?), a new series that basically turns infidelity into a
state-sponsored patriotic obligation.
Infidelity
financed with your taxes
The mind
behind this madness is Nikumaru, an author who already has
experience drawing toxic and morally questionable relationships with works such
as Bad Girl and Someone's Girlfriend. Its new
protagonist is Fumiya, an average office worker who has been married for seven
years. The marriage has a lethal problem by government standards: the flame of
intimacy has been extinguished, and they have no children.
Instead of
offering them couples therapy or tax incentives, the government of this
dystopian Japan intervenes with a brutal law: couples without children must be
forced to separate and start living with "new partners"
assigned by the state. That's right, the government pairs you with someone
else and forces you to have an extramarital affair to see if they can finally
raise the country's birth rate.
The
perfect excuse for seinen drama
What
makes Official Adultery? is making so much noise from its
first chapter is how it uses a real socio-demographic problem (the aging of the
Japanese population) to justify a premise worthy of adult cinema. The series is
shaping up to be a heavy psychological drama, where the characters will have to
deal with guilt, jealousy and the ethical dilemma of being unfaithful because
"the law demands it". The mere fact that the title bears a question
mark is already a mockery of the morality of this extreme measure.
Being
a seinen published in the same magazine that houses mature and
uncensored stories, we can expect Nikumaru to hold nothing back when it comes
to portraying the emotional (and carnal) chaos of his characters. For now, the
manga is exclusive to Japan, but with such a divisive premise, it's only a
matter of time before Western forums start hotly debating each chapter.
