Artist Spotlight: Sakana Tojo

I’m sure everyone else has them, too: artists we would ride or die for. If someone insults them, we will defend them with our dying breath. We gaze lovingly at their art as if it’s a masterpiece in the Louvre, taking in every single detail from all angles. We follow and purchase every single thing they release, read every social media post by or about them, and have read every book multiple times. Well, that’s how I feel about Sakana Tojo.

Sakana Tojo / Sakana Toujou
東条さかな（とうじょうさかな）
Twitter: @diabolism_st
Portfolio: click

Available on Renta!:
My Lovely Bunny (星のうさぎ)
Love At First Bite (君と美味しい愛のコトノハ)
Baby, Sugar, Succubus (ベイビー、シュガー、サキュバス)
I Wanna Love You, Kiss You, Bite You (恋して キスして かんじゃいたい)
My Cat And My Bed (猫とベッド)
Endless After-School Honey (ホウカゴ・エンドレスハニー)

Sakana Tojo specializes in very fluffy, sweet, intense smut. A majority of her BL are released through Junet, a publishing line that caters to the more ero rather than story oriented side of the genre. She started out as an ero manga artist, and still does illustrations for various types of manga, light novels, etc.

I’d known of Sakana Tojo for quite a while, having been introduced to her through her earlier artwork, but the book that really sold me on her was My Lovely Bunny. My Lovely Bunny is a book about two high schoolers who’re madly in love, and it’s six chapters of them being in love and cuddling and having incredibly sweet, gentle, loving sex. Then I read Tojo-sensei’s omegaverse story Mitsu ni Kiba (which is unfortunately not localized) and have been following her work closely ever since. While some who prefer incredibly intense, hard plot might be wondering where the drama is, the appeal is that… there isn’t any. The stories are gentle and soft and cute and sexy, and mixed with her absolutely stunning artwork, it just makes all of her works a feast for the eyes.

Her sense of anatomy is also *chef’s kiss* level. I’m someone who really loves beautiful, soft linework in the content I read (another fav of mine is Hakase) and Sakana Tojo supremely delivers on that front. The way she poses the bodies during intimate scenes, the way she draws hand-holding, the softness of the anatomy that gives the bodies dimension… every aspect of the artwork is just stunning. 10/10. I have a tendency to always buy the hard copies of books I intend to read multiple times, which I do just to look at specific scenes or panels over and over again, and needless to say I have almost all of her books in both digital and physical. In particular, I’m obsessed with the way she draws hands—they look so beautiful and elegant. I’m glad she always includes lots illustrations of hands in her scenes. But it’s not just her hands—it’s the gentle taper of the waist and hips of her characters, the thin lines of their wrists and collar bones, the lean muscle tone, the soft way she draws their butts and thighs and even chests… her characters just feel soft.

In terms of plots, as was noted before in nearly all her series the stories tend to be kept quite light. Even the manga that have heavier themes (such as her most recent work) tend to move quite slowly, focusing instead on the character interactions as they work through any issues together and become more intimate. There’s never anything too painful or upsetting.

The gentleness of the storytelling matches the gentleness of the ero scenes, which is Sakana Tojo’s specialty. There’s always an incredible sense of intimacy and lovingness between her characters. Another thing that’s a highlight of Sakana Tojo’s content is her sex scenes are always extremely consensual. You won’t find the bottom saying no, or not wanting it just as much as the top does. I can assure you, after a day at the job reading “kyaaa, nooo, dame…!” in a lot of other content I check, both characters equally wanting to be intimate and sexual and touch each other feels like a huge breath of fresh air.

But don’t let the intimacy and sweetness of the scenes fool you; Sakana Tojo’s work is definitely on the more “adult” side of the BL spectrum, as comes with the territory of her background in erotic content. Her sex scenes are incredibly long and gratuitous and intense, sometimes even taking up a majority of each chapter. Even with the heavy censoring that’s usually required of Junet works, Tojo-sensei finds ways to make it clear just how filthy the entire scene is, whether through posing or dirty talk or facial expressions.

It’s rare to find an artist who so deftly walks the border between sweet and sexy, but Sakana Tojo has found a way to write stories where they meld seamlessly.

Overall, as usual, I highly recommend you go and take a look at the chapter previews and see for yourself just how stunning her art is. Her characters might look too young for some people (particularly in her older content), so be careful if that’s something you’re uncomfortable with. If you’re looking for something to read that will just fill you with fluffy, happy emotions while you have the creepy fujoshi grin plastered on your face (you know what I’m talking about; don’t lie), I can’t recommend her work enough.