Serina, the new transfer into Akito's class, recognizes him as someone who saved her from a tight spot several years ago. Unfortunately, he doesn't remember her. She won't let that stop her from trying to get together with him though. With the help of one of Akito's friends, Serina might have a chance, but she may have asked the wrong friend…

My Long-Lost Childhood Friend Is Stolen Away has story and art by Darunekohanten. English translation is done by Chad O. and lettering by Joe Lou. Published by Irodori (December 3, 2025). Rated M.

CW: Noncon, Somnophilia

Lucas DeRuyter
Rating:

Darunekohanten's My Long Lost Childhood Friend is Stolen Away is less a piece of erotica and more an exercise in nihilistic sexual exploitation. The premise is simple: childhood friends Aki and Seri reconnect when she transfers to Aki's high school, the two immediately enter into a romantic relationship, and then Seri is repeatedly sexually assaulted by another of their classmates. When Aki discovers Seri being assaulted at the end of this short read, he immediately becomes aroused and laments that he is incapable of bringing himself to have rougher sex with her. This doujinshi ends with the two still in a relationship and having a cute moment together, and the multiple sexual assaults Seri endured and Aki's apparent cuckolding fethish going unspoken.

To be blunt, the writing in My Long Lost Childhood Friend is awful and the actions of the leading characters makes very little sense. When Aki awakens in a room alone with a crying Seri, who had just been roofied and sexually assaulted, rather than ask what's wrong, he just says that it makes him sad to see her cry and that they should start dating. Similarly, when Seri confronts her attacker later in school with a knife, this situation somehow turns into her having to have sex with him again because she feels so guilty over attempting to physically harm someone who physically harmed her.

It's very clear that My Long Lost Childhood Friend was written with a cuckolding theme and a handful of specific sex scenes in mind, with little thought going into the events that set these up. Especially with characters lacking any kind of interiority and behaving in ways that feel strange even with the benefit of suspended disbelief, this work just feels wrong and unappealing. Especially with the art style being so flat, there's no sexiness in this work and just left me feeling like I was reading about a couple of assaults and a third party's inappropriate reaction to them.

This story ending with Aki and Seri still being a loving couple and not addressing any of the events of the story is also incredibly discordant. Cuckolding stories can have a happy ending, but only if the main characters in it acknowledge what's happening to them and that the dynamic is good for them and/or has brought them closer together. By not having the main characters ever talk to each other in a meaningful way, My Long Lost Childhood Friend is unintentionally dark and the ending feels like two people just ignoring the most traumatic event of either of their lives.

The nicest thing I can say about this work is that Chad O did a solid job with the translation and that Joe Lou was similarly competent with the lettering.

Bolts
Rating:

This story confuses me because, for most of it, things felt pretty standard. I was actually impressed with how much buildup there was going into the story considering that it takes awhile to get to the first sex scene and it almost seemed like the classic bully character was planning to play the long game with his conquest. The story is about two childhood friends that want to get closer, and so the girl goes to a classmate who promises to set up a situation where they can engage in some intimacy. For a split second, I almost thought that the story was going to go into a different direction, but it ends up quickly falling into the usual trope of the classmate taking the girl for himself. Throw in some blackmail and it seems like a pretty open case, right?

Well, then I get to the final third of the story and it just sort of assaults me with a bunch of different plot points that have no room whatsoever and then the story just sort of ends. Weirdly enough, this felt like a first chapter to what might've been a larger psychological story because after the initial rape scene, the childhood friend has a very reasonable crash out by going after the bully that gets turned on her, and then suddenly the story gets really vague about whether or not she is enjoying the situation that she is in now? Then it also ends with the target of her actual affections witnessing everything only for him to realize that he might actually have a cuckolding fetish. What is this story and why does it feel like it suddenly was building up to a bunch of different things within the last couple of pages?

Honestly, I feel like I could recommend this to some people but not because I actually find it titillating. This is the type of porn story that really has no sense of structure or direction despite falling into a genre that has a very conventional set up. Maybe there will be a follow up chapter to this that will explore a lot of the stuff that got randomly dumped on me in those final pages but even if I was into this, it's hard to find things titillating when the set up and sex scenes can't properly stick the landing.