Takashi Natsume thinks he's found a balance between youkai and friends when he goes with a group of classmates to a country inn for a marathon cram session before school starts again. But even the prosaic threat of homework can't keep the "other world" at bay, especially when the innkeeper has been dabbling in mermaid blood!
Yuki Midorikawa's afterwords illustration of Chapter 16.
"This is the first episode that was published in monthly LaLa (as opposed to LaLa DX). They gave me space in three issues to work with, so I considered coming up with a new character. But I figured the first episode should stand alone, and had to quickly come up with another idea. I remembered that when I drew the kappa a couple years ago, my editor comment that it was the first "mainstream" yokai in the series. So I decided on a mermaid this time. I wanted to try a melancholic Japanese mermaid with black, straight hair looking like a wet snake, but everything else looked rather plain, so I made her look cute, with flowing hair. I had so much trouble with the story that I had to rewrite the whole thing multiple times, but my editor encouraged me to work through it."