Ushimitsu Gao Is A Ghost Cuckold Romance Manga For Folks Who Defend Beastars (Me)

While “auteurism” can sometimes feel like a pretentious label, there’s a real thrill in watching a creator unapologetically pour their tastes into their work. Doubly so if it’s some freaky shit. Mangaka Paru Itagaki’s new ghost cuckold manga proves that she knows how to let her freak flag fly without getting lost in the weeds of her kinky illustrations.

Paru Itagaki may be the daughter of Baki the Grappler’s Keisuke Itagaki, but her true claim to fame has nothing to do with her nepo baby status — it’s being the genius behind Beastars (AKA NSFW Zootopia). At its core, Beastars is a bold exploration of class divides between carnivores and herbivores, gang violence, and the budding romance between a meek teenage wolf named Legoshi and a promiscuous white rabbit, Haru. When Studio Orange’s anime adaptation of Beastars first released on Netflix in 2020, it sparked a phenomenon in the anime community: much like people who hesitantly recommend It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia with warnings, Beastars' problem was that it was too hot and uncomfortable to handle.  

Watch/read Beastars, cowards 

In the climax of its second episode, Beastars confronted viewers with its stark approach to depicting sexuality, with Haru mistakenly assuming Legoshi meeting her in the shed on the roof of their campus was for sex. For many, this was an instant vibe check, sending the “I’m not a furry, bro” crowd for the hills and dismissing the show as the “furry porn fanservice” show. Like the Digging for Diamonds meme, folks quit too early, like cowards, before Beastars started cooking a deeply considered narrative about how the pair’s evolving relationship with sex, the implicit power dynamics between their species, and the broader taboo of interspecies romance reflected the sociological failings of their conservative society. By the final season, the series cemented itself as a provocative, well-crafted examination of these themes, proving there was far more at play than hetero (and homoerotic) anthropomorphic animals giving each other “come fuck me” eyes. 

Beastars is what sold me on Itagaki as a weird, smart, and appropriately unhinged creator to keep an eye on. She’s funny on social media, has an all-timer mangaka disguise, and knows how to tackle big ideas without letting spicy stuff overpower themes. With Ushimitsu Gao, she’s leaning into the sexy stuff that scared the hoes with Beastars, writing a horror romance manga that’s equal parts sensual, thought-provoking, and most importantly, a mesmerizing read.

Ushimitsu Gao is Itagaki in her freaky Kate Chopin bag

Ushimitsu Gao (Her Face at the Witching Hour) centers on Megumi Sano, a young housewife who’s always had a knack for seeing spirits. No matter where she goes, girly be seeing ghosts. Her unconventional trick to send them on their merry way is doing something lewd or obscene, because ghosts “dislike erotic stuff” — a fact I can’t help but think is a subliminal diss at folks who wrote off Beastars’ eroticism.  

One night, while she and her exhausted salaryman husband, Yuji, are trying to conceive — an activity she describes as an unenthusiastic endeavor devoid of passion and climaxes for both parties — she spots a tall ghost Blair Witching in the corner of their bedroom while they make the beast with two backs. If the above sentence sounds like the most cursed thing you've read, that's because it is, and that's a part of the charm.

If you thought the premise would play out in a storyline where the ghost sits in the corner watching Megumi and Yuji make love, you’d be wrong. Yuji gets put in the proverbial accent chair, when Megumi’s efforts to have such fantastic sex with Yuji that it helps the dullahan pass on to the afterlife (or to exorcise him with salt) lead her to discover it's the unliving entity that’s turning her on. Her sensitivity to ghosts allows her to feel it place its salt-covered hand, too powerful to be exorcised, on her lips, and she responds in kind by sucking on his thumb. One morning, she even wakes up to Kinbaku rope marks on her skin after her resident ghost visits her in the night.

Megumi gives her paranormal service top a nickname, Ghost-kun, or Gou-kun (she almost nicknames him Yuurie or Yuu-san until she thinks better of it, as it sounds too close to her husband’s pet name, Yuu-kun) leaves spider lilies out for him, and covers her bedroom window with cardboard so they can get down during the day while her hubby is away, on top of the two having sex every night while her husband, who doesn’t believe in the paranormal, sleeps with his back to them getting it on. 

Undoubtedly, this manga is freaky, and Itagaki is a real one. I kid you not, the moment Gou-kun's head fell off mid-sex, I joked to myself about how funny it would be if the manga made a joke about giving head. Itagaki immediately called my jest in a time-skip page-turn where Megumi casually mentioned her go-to kink request was for Gou-kun to do precisely that, while the rest of his body caresses her. The manga might only be a year old, but I spent a short evening getting caught up on it over the weekend, and I’m sat for more. 

As mentioned up top, Her Face at the Witching Hour isn’t just a smutty NTR manga. It also examines the unhealthy nature of the love triangle’s arrangement for all parties involved. Despite Megumi rightfully shaming a friend’s insistence that her affair is saving her marriage with an analogy about cheating wives that, like the hirugao flower, “come in bloom during the day, when the husband is away,” it later becomes the bedrock of her infidelity. To Megumi, her shacking up with Gou-kun is safe from scrutiny because he, in the technical sense, isn’t real. However, there are consequences to her affair: Every time they make love, Gou-kun is sapping the vitality out of Megumi, growing more handsome and less macabre (save for his protruding, Mileena-esque teeth poking out of his cheeks). To everyone else, her post-sex glow is her becoming more gaunt. Instead of taking that as a sign to stop cheating on her husband with a ghost, she takes it as a sign to eat more so she’ll have more energy left after their entanglement. The manga also doesn’t mince words by presenting their supernatural situation as anything other than Megumi cheating on Yuji.  

As mentioned above, the story is more than just the sensationalism of its premise; it is brutally honest in its discussions about consent and includes a couple of chapters on certain reliable manga reading sites that provide content warnings. It doubles down by making matters all the more stark when body-snatching, signaled by Gou-kun code word “I will curse you,” comes into play. And Gou-kun is still being a homewrecker, declaring that Yuji and Megumi’s love is a thing of the past and that Yuji is neglecting Megumi’s feelings. While there’s some truth worth exploring in Gou-kun’s second point, the manga is also signaling that their outs are the awkward aftershock of the married couple being out of their honeymoon period.

Itagaki’s unflinching storytelling in both Beastars and Her Face at the Witching Hour is a rare fascination in the world of manga, where sexuality is often boxed into empty fan service or sanitized detachment. She refuses to be confined by those limitations, instead opting to employ horror, romance, and infidelity as rich narrative tools for exploring the tangled realities of self-discovery and desire. 

There’s almost a The Awakening-style unraveling in Megumi’s journey where her pursuit of sexual liberation sends her soaring, only for the reentry flames of consequence to send her careening back down to earth. It’s exciting to see a creator evoke Kate Chopin vibes while writing about ghost cuckoldry. But good art strives to craft a compelling narrative that challenges, unsettles, and excites in equal measure. I think Itagaki is a creative deep in her bag.