Bagudan is ending less than a year after it started. The December issue of Kodansha’s Monthly Dessert announced that Yūichirō Momose and artist Hina Hinata’s Bagudan: Sono Otoko-tachi Toriatsukai Chūi ni Tsuki will finish in the magazine’s next issue on November 24.
The full title translates roughly as Bagudan: Handle These Men with Care, which tells you most of what the series is about. It launched in Monthly Dessert on March 24, and the first collected volume shipped on July 13. That puts the whole run at eight months and a handful of chapters.
The premise
Tokiko is a high school student who spends her free time on otome games. Then five handsome men from a game she is playing get reincarnated, and they land in her class as classmates. From her point of view this is the best thing that has ever happened. From everyone else’s, it is a problem: the guys keep doing the heart-throbbing gestures they were programmed to do, and the rest of the class finds it unbearable to watch.
That gap between how Tokiko sees the five and how the room sees them is the joke the series runs on. It is a reverse harem comedy where the harem is the embarrassment, and the heroine is the only person who does not notice.
Momose’s day job
Momose is best known as the main scenario writer for Hypnosis Mic, King Records’ rap project where voice actors perform as original characters. That started in September 2017, and its first full album, Enter the Hypnosis Microphone, came out in April 2018. A rap battle franchise built on character personas is good training for writing five beautiful men who cannot turn off their stage presence.
He has been unusually busy this year. Gyakusatsu Kigen, which he writes with artist Shiwasu Hoshikawa, started in Kodansha’s Afternoon on May 25, and it is about as far from a romantic comedy as you can get. Set in a Japan saturated with reports of brutal crimes, it follows a high schooler named Rakki who gets pulled into a killing spree by a delinquent called “A” after murderers named “K” and “D” show up.
There is also Datewars, the music project Momose launched in August 2025 with character designer Hanaharu Naruko and producer Mino. It involves fourteen voice actresses, and the stated plan is to expand into manga, anime, mobile games, concerts, films, and stage events.
What an eight-month run says
Monthly Dessert is a magazine aimed at teenage girls and young women, and it gives new series a fairly quick verdict. Bagudan got a single volume out and a second one presumably following the finale, and now it is done. That is not a failure so much as the normal life cycle of a mid-list monthly series in Japan: a year or so to find readers, then a decision.
For readers who liked it, the consolation is that the ending is announced, not abrupt. Momose and Hinata get the November 24 issue to land it properly. It joins a long list of manga wrapping up this month, including Norimitsu Kaiho’s Akarui Mirai.
Kodansha has not said anything about a second volume date or an English release. Monthly Dessert titles travel less often than Shōnen Magazine ones, and a romantic comedy about otome game characters is a harder sell abroad than the premise suggests, mostly because the humour depends on how the five men read to a Japanese classroom full of teenagers.
The November 24 issue of Monthly Dessert closes the series. After that, Momose’s schedule belongs to Gyakusatsu Kigen, Datewars, and whatever he signs next.
Source: Monthly Dessert December issue, via Anime News Network
Featured image: Bagudan: Sono Otoko-tachi Toriatsukai Chūi ni Tsuki volume 1 cover art, via Yūichirō Momose / Hina Hinata / Kodansha.
