When a zombie apocalypse suddenly breaks out during the school festival, shogi player Koutarou manages to save the beautiful and buxom Kana just before she's taken by a swarm. But when they reached Kosaka Kotaro was living his best life as a gamer otaku…until the zombie apocalypse hit. Now the streets are crawling with the undead—and his biggest regret? Dying a virgin.

Then he rescues the gorgeous Kana, who's just been bitten…and doesn't want to turn into a zombie before losing her virginity. Kotaro's happy to help—and after their steamy encounter, something incredible happens: her bite begins to fade.

Could the cure be inside Kotaro? Kana's not taking any chances. She's sticking close, keeping him busy—and making sure the “treatments” keep coming.

Let's Make a Harem in a Zombie World! has story and art by Yu Imai. English translation is done by Zihan Gao and lettering by Ludwig Sacramento. Published by Seven Seas Entertainment (January 13, 2026). Rated M.

Content Warning: Gore, Dubious Consent

Lucas Deruyter
Rating:

You know how porn parodies were semi-big in the 90s and early-mid 2000s? Well, maybe we need to bring those back because Yu Imai's Let's Make a Harem in a Zombie World! is basically a porno version of Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead and it's shockingly good! Beyond being the fun kind of skeezy rather than the scummy kind, this manga also manages to be genuinely hilarious and has better social politics than what I've come to expect from this kind of story.

From the opening pages that feature the leads recreating one-way mirror exhibitionism videos in front of the living undead, it's clear that this is a zombie apocalypse story that runs on pornoworld logic. Protagonists Kosaka Koutarou and Kido Kana begin a romantic and sexual relationship after a burgeoning zombie apocalypse and, after Kana is bitten by a zombie, quickly discover that regular “injections” of Koutarou's semen will stop her from transforming into a zombie. Oh, and her being half-zombie means that she now has super strength for some reason, which proves beneficial in enacting several exhibitionism tropes, like doing it in a clothing boutique's changing room, hooking up in a storage shed behind a school, and fucking in a broadcast studio with their audio supposedly airing for all to hear.

Throughout all of these exploits, Kana is an enthusiastic participant and even drives some of these erotic scenarios. That does a lot of work in making Harem Zombie more fun and campy than exploitative. It also helps that there's an overtly incel coded character that serves as the main villain of this volume. Like most good zombie stories, most of the drama arises from the tensions between human characters, and the central conflict is between Koutarou and Kana's faction and that of a scumbag teacher who's king of shit mountain at an all-girls school. By deliberately taking the piss out of the kind of dudes who objectify women or think they're entitled to their affection, Let's Make a Harem in a Zombie World! makes it a lot easier to engage with its premise without getting bogged down with the problematic dimensions built into its conceit.

It also helps that Harem Zombie is genuinely funny for a smut fic, both in ways overt and conceptual. Some of its best jokes include: literal fashion zombies, the visual of doing TikTok dances in front of a zombie horde, and an extended gag where a freshly turned zombie tries to bite the MC's dick off; the work inspires a lot of laughs.

If I had any criticisms of this work, it's that the dialogue can sometimes feel a bit clunky, in a way where I'm not sure if it's a consequence of subpar writing or an awkward translation. One issue that does lie at the fault of the translation, though, is how “sexy talk” is depicted on the page. Characters will elongate words or slur them during the act, which results in words like “stop” and “stole” being written as “shtoop” and “shtole,” and it can be difficult to determine the intended phonetic reading of these modified words. This ultimately makes what's supposed to be raunchier dialogue more distracting than anything else on a few occasions in this volume.

Outside of that sole criticism, though, I cannot recommend Let's Make a Harem in a Zombie World! enough, especially to folks partial to exhibitionist kinks and more ridiculous hentai. The final pages promise future hentai hijinks in a future volume, and I'm genuinely excited to experience those!

Erica Friedman
Rating:

Right at the very beginning of the story Kotarou notes that it is less believable that a loser like him is leading a raunchy life than that a zombie apocalypse is happening around them. Which is sort of true. It also true that, when confronted with the opportunity to save the girl he knows and who he likes from zombies, he saves the big-chested stranger he doesn't know and then is convinced to have sex with her so they don't die as virgins.

As a result of that decision, not only do Kido and Kotarou survive, they have delicious (we are assured) sex constantly, because Kido's been bitten by a zombie and has to have sex with Kotarou everyday to keep her from turning. And, they discover, she has developed super strength. Kotarou finds himself ready to oppose the “king,” a vile shit of a human, to save the women, and build a harem, but also because he's discovered his inner nice guy. Phew.

Fans of splooshy, drippy bodily-fluid flavored sex, big breasts, and women(ish)-shaped sex dolls will probably enjoy the porn here, but I found the sexual violence committed by the zombies…let's call it interesting, shall we. Zombies are aleady a mashup of several of humanity's worst taboo fears – cannibalism and the proximity of rotting corpses, but adding in a sexual component with a male zombie biting off another guy's dick in a way that initially looked like a sex act, brings home the horror for the presumed male reader in a way that rape and murder of female characters might not. No one escapes the fear here.

I don't know that I'd call this a good manga, but it was kind of interesting and if it's your thing, it might be a turn-on, as well.

Bolts
Rating:

What if sex was used sex to combat a zombie apocalypse? I know that sounds ridiculous, but when you consider the fact that a lot of zombie media already leans into gore and hyper sexual self indulgence, you have to wonder if it's really that big of a leap. I like the fact that this story seems to use its premise almost like a litmus test for suspension of disbelief. If you're already sitting down and reading a story with this title, then the story probably doesn't think it needs to go very far to suspend your disbelief for a lot of the narrative setups that are used to make this premise work. There's a couple that instantly falls in love with each other for the sake of getting right to sexual enjoyment, semen is used as a cure for zombie transformations and sometimes the characters will just end up in a new location without much of a gradual scene transition.

One major complaint I have against this series is that it feels very sporadic. There's not really a great narrative flow to things and there are even some moments where I had to go back and reread certain pages just to make sure I properly understood how our characters got from one area to another. However, despite the fact that I would get occasionally lost from time to time, I was still wholeheartedly entertained. This is definitely a story that leans into the absurd while still paying tribute to a lot of the tropes that people are often familiar with in zombie apocalypse stories. The story just feels like it's showing us the sex scenes that sometimes happen in zombie media while also making the sex a legitimate plot point to justify a lot more of it happening.

I have to respect the commitment in its brazenness and in the presentation. The zombies do look positively gory and the sex scenes are quite good, even if I'm not a big fan of how the sex scenes are framed or how they've censored. There's still a lot of social commentary here about the downfall of society and how people will take advantage of terrible situations just for the sake of accumulating power. However, it does feel very natural and I was surprised that there were never any points where it felt like the sex scenes were directly conflicting with the progress of the story. If anything, the integration seemed pretty seamless. I wouldn't necessarily recommend this story because it turned me on or anything since the zombie gore was never too far away from the sex scenes when they do happen. But as an adult zombie manga, I do think I could recommend this off of its entertainment value and potential to expand into other territories. The characters are ridiculous, but bounce off of each other. While the artwork goes surprisingly hard, and I do think that scenes could flow better, once I finally got a handle of where I was going, I felt like I was fully along for the ride.