Novel Recommendation
Kurosaki Witch Detective Office (Syosetu n2598ep) - Netorase
First of all, the MTL quality of this novel is excellent. By 'excellent', I mean that the machine translation - regardless of its inherent inaccuracies - still allows for an extremely coherent story. Preface indicates this is a foreigner learning Japanese, which probably is correlated. I've read everything to date over the last 48 hours and had no trouble following the story. Names are only a little bit tricky at times, but the context and color scheme used for witches (black, white, and ROYGBIV) being an alternative identifier makes it trivially difficult.
The prologue is ridiculously 56 episodes long due to a POV retelling that encompasses 38 [!] parts. It starts off slow, and it may not even feel like cheating for most of the prologue's scenes, but the sexcapades are inventive and thrilling on their own, and the prologue does establish an extremely solid foundation. In fact, it's precisely this attentiveness to detail and world building that sets this story apart from the usual crude novels.
Past the prologue, more erotic avenues finally open up and sex is often segmented into at least 2 parts. Author switches up perspectives frequently and really goes out of his way to have unique scenarios, so it avoids or limits overall repetitiveness. Hentai factor is high and writing competence similarly seems to follow for a Syosetu publication, so IMO this is no doubt the best R18 NTR story I've read given the massive language barrier. Times like this make me regret not learning Japanese.
Will this be in everyone's strike zone? No idea but:
1. Protagonist is a shota, so if that's a hard no, then I guess don't bother reading it. (Honestly, other than the fact his age is brought up here and there, for the hentai scenes it's really not relevant. It is, however, important as to why he joins the agency.)
2. While netori elements are high from numerous males in the world, overall netorare 'despair elements' that don't naturally blend in with netorase themes are low to non-existent.
3. White-on-black text due to the black background is not universally liked.
I refuse to post spoilers so don't ask me for a summary. If you're interested in reading something, I honestly cannot recommend this enough. The only reason why I tried it is because I've seen it mentioned in passing a long time ago in this thread I think, though I can't find anything through forum search.
You
have to be ready to keep reading past the very beginning; don't stop, trust me. At the very least, try to get to the ero parts and remember that there's a POV -- 2, even! -- retellings that are essential to the background. I didn't give this a fair shake a while ago, so it's only coincidence that I tried again recently and realized it was different than the assortment of low quality efforts that litter the site.
Lastly:
if anyone has recommendations, please share!!! Waiting for new parts is tragic...
