Why Tenga Muranishi's "My Student is a Porn Actress and I'm Her Director" is a true thinking man's adult manga

By Victor Hernandez

The manga is called My Student is a Porn Actress and I'm Her Director. The author is manga artist Tenga Muranishi. It is one of the best adult manga produced in Japan in the last 20 years.

I found this manga towards the end of 2020 through BookWalker.jp, the digital comics and books store. At first I didn't have a lot time to read it, but I bought it anyway simply because the premise seemed interestig. "It would be an interesting read later," I thought at the time.

The premmise is this: An Ethics teacher  called Yuji Saiji loses his job in an expensive private high school after trying to protect one of his students, a girl named Akari Kuhara, from being expelled for displaying her affection towards her teacher.

After months of unemployment, Saiji is offered a job as a production assistant by an old friend who started an adult video company. Shortly after, Akari learns about Saiji's new job and asks him to recommend her so she can work at the company doing production work--not porn--as her parents will not pay for her to go to college (it should be noted that the manga deals with issues of social inequality very effectively.) This triggers a series of events in which Saiji is forced to confront his own notions of ethics with the reality of the need to have a job, the discovery of an inner desire for "perversion" (ecchi) and the erotic, and the day to day reality of the adult video industry.

And indeed reading the manga has been a delightful experience. Tenga Muranishi created a true "thinking man's" adult manga in which he combines actual philosophy, humor and the actual inner workings of the Japanese porn industry to explore issues that are seldom explored in any type of popular culture product.

Typically the adult video industry is presented in popular culture in a way that's simply not true. It's either exaggerated, or romanticized, or demonized, but it is hardly ever shown as it actually is. In My Student is a Porn Actress and I'm Her Director, Tenga Muranishi presents the adult video industry in Japan as it actually is; a job that requires a lot of work, a lot of people, and that deals with the same issues any other business deals with, but with the added stigma of being "perverted" and "morally wrong" to some people. It is one of the few popular culture products that can actually help people to better understand what the adult industry really is like, with its good and with its bad aspects. In short, it brings people closer to the truth.

What makes the manga successful is the way in which it mixes philosophical concepts with porn. At some point, Saiji tells Akari young people should explore their interests, and asks her to stop working in the adult industry (again, just doing production, not performing on camera). Akari's response is a philosphical question: "But what if a person's interest is in perversion? What should that person do?"

Other times the philosophic mix leads to surreal comedy. At some point Saiji gets an assigment to recruit amateur performers for adult video. He contacts a girl who likes sex as a hobby, but thinks doing professional porn is not the same. As a result, Saiji tries to convince her to do professional porn by explaining to her Adam Smith's theory of economics. That is, the invisible hand of the market. That one page is mostly dialog, but it is beyond surreal in its comedic effect. It reminded me of some of the most sophisticated jokes in Seinfeld. "How come Kramer can have sex here but not me?" asked George Costanza to his parents when he was living with them. "Psychologically is different," responds Frank Costanza in a quasi-philosophical tone. Same energy, as kids say today.

Now, keep in mind I do not speak Japanese. I speak Spanish and English, and I live in Mexico. I can't read Japanese kanjis either. What I do in order to read manga is I use Google Translate to scan the dialog from each page frame by frame and build a translation. It's not an easy process, since Google Translate is no 100% accurate and often it misreads the kanjis, so I have to draw them on the app to complete the translation. Reading one page of a manga can take me a while. I only do it for a very small amount of manga titles that I actually think are worth the time. In the case of Tenga Muranishi's My Student is a Porn Actress and I'm Her Director, it is absolutely worth the time to read it in this way.

So far two book collection volumes of the manga have been published. Volume 1 presents the first 6 weekly chapters, but re-edited into 10 segments with new titles. In this volume we meet the main characters and the story is set in motion. It has a very real, very warm, very sexy, very philosophical, and very funny tone.

Volume 2 collects the weekly chapters 7 through 12.5 (most weekly chapters feature 2 stories). In this volume we get a bit deeper into the development of the character of Yuji Saiji. My only criticism is the development of Akari's character could've been explored a bit more, but I think her character will be developed further in subsequent chapters. Still, the volume is a great read and it also has a few extras; a side story featuring Saiji and Akari going to a mall to shop for adult props, and author's commentaries on all of the chapters published in book collections so far. These commentaries shed more light into Tenga Muranishi's writing process, which is often based on actual real life events at an adult video production company in Japan.

A couple of days ago I asked Tenga Muranishi on Twitter if he would publish a prototype for his manga in Volume 3. I asked because he posted a couple of frames from the prototype on Twitter and the character design was different from the design used for the manga. His reply was that it was undecided if there would be a third volume or any other volumes. That made me panic. "What? There may not be a Volume 3??" I immediately bought the individual chapters after Volume 2 (I was waiting for them to be published in book format.) These chapters, or the future Volume 3, take a funny and surreal turn when the adult video production company decides to hold a "race" to shoot content. The story's pace picks up and we see the characters being forced to deal with the contradictory emotions of working in porn and longing for each other. We also see different perspectives on porn, exhibitionism and perversion by other characters, always with a comedy effect.

Only once before I've felt this enthusiastic about an adult manga. And that was with Ryuta Amazume's Nana to Kaoru, because of its brilliant mix of psychology and sadomasochism. I have the same enthusiasm for Tenga Muranishi's My Student is a Porn Actress and I'm Her Director. It is on the right track to become one of the most important adult manga today. Indeed a true thinking man's adult manga. It deserves a Volume 3, Volume 4,Volume 5, etc. And the public deserves to enjoy this wonderful work of art.