Haruko Ichikawa, who spent twelve years cheerfully grinding her crystalline heroes into powder in Land of the Lustrous, is back with a new series, and this time she says it’s about happiness. Readers who survived what happened to poor Phosphophyllite may be forgiven for checking the small print.
The December issue of Kodansha’s Monthly Afternoon announced on Friday that Cosmic Mimimi will begin in the magazine’s next issue, out on 25 November. It is being billed as “neo kawaii sci-fi” and follows Mimimi, a creature who lives in a city described as both cool and dreaming, and whose goal is to make everyone happy. Strange and happy things, we are promised, are sure to occur around this creature of happiness. No trailer, no volume plans and no English-language licence have been announced yet, which is normal for a series that hasn’t actually printed its first chapter.
It’s the first new series from Ichikawa since Land of the Lustrous wrapped up its 108-chapter run in Afternoon in April 2024, the 13th and final collected volume following that November. That series, set on a far-future Earth where gem-bodied immortals fend off raids from the Lunarians, gathered a reputation as one of the most beautiful and quietly devastating science fiction manga of its era. The 2017 3DCG anime by Orange was a showcase of what computer animation could do with light passing through crystal, and the manga went on to win the grand prize at the 45th Nihon SF Taisho Awards in 2025, along with the top Sense of Gender Award that August. Kodansha USA publishes it in English, if you have somehow missed it.
Science fiction has always been a little suspicious of anything whose job is to make everybody happy. Huxley gave us soma, Star Trek gave us the euphoric spores of “This Side of Paradise”, and Doctor Who fans of a certain vintage will still shudder at “The Happiness Patrol”, in which Sylvester McCoy faced down a planet where sadness was a crime and the executioner was a robot made of sweets. Whether Mimimi turns out to be a fluffy palate cleanser after the long agonies of the Lustrous or something altogether stranger in a cute disguise, the creator’s track record suggests that the cuteness will be precise and the sci-fi will be real.
Here at SFcrowsnest, we’ll be keeping an eye on 25 November with a mixture of excitement and a box of tissues on standby, just in case.
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