Title: Drip, Drip
Mangaka: Paru Itagaki
US Publisher: VIZ Media
Status: Complete (Oneshot)
Age Relevance: Adult
How Essential Is It?: Nice to Have
Reader’s Advisory Tags: Feminism, gender relations, sexuality
Content Warnings: Gore, sexual content, generational trauma
Publisher Synopsis: Whenever Mako Higari comes in contact with something she perceives as dirty, she gets a massive nosebleed. How can she find a loving partner and commit to a meaningful intimate relationship when just touching another person makes her bleed out? Especially when most of the men she meets are sleazy creeps! Her first challenge might be learning to love herself… Plus, a short story starring Santa Claus as we’ve never seen him before!
Drip, Drip is inherently a feminist work, dealing with sociey’s predisposition to condition women to view sex as dirty. Maru Higari is desperate to have sex- but she has uncontrollable and horrific nosebleeds every time she interacts with somethings she perceives as dirty, and she especially sees sex that way. Maru’s absurd adventures are really about how the trauma of societal conditioning can hinder intimacy, just conveyed in a way that might squick out some readers.
Because of the subject matter, this is really a manga for adult readers, but it’s a solid purchase for adult collections. The additional story at the end is silly and a lot of fun, and this volume is a great insight into Itagaki’s creativity and thinking. There’s certainly a correlation to Beastars, and the connection is interesting.
