Suits and pumps. The five-day commute, a group gathering at fixed hours, the rank of superior and subordinate. Once the youth story staged at school has come to a close, the workplace is chosen as the site where the characters, now working adults, continue as subjects of desire.

Overview

Shokuba-mono (職場もの) is the umbrella term for the adult-fiction genre that unfolds sexual action mainly in the working space of the company or office. Using occupational role relations (office lady, secretary, superior, subordinate, client) as a narrative device, it is established across eromanga, adult games, and doujinshi. As an adult-reader counterpart to the school genre, its consolidation as a standalone genre advanced from the 2000s.

The basic structure stages the company as a socially hierarchical space and uses occupational role relations (superior-subordinate, senior-junior, colleague, client) as a narrative device. Where the school genre carries the fixed hierarchy of teacher-student and classmate, the workplace genre uses employment contracts, promotion competition, and personnel evaluation as background, a frame that can develop a more adult story. Typical settings include the office interior (desk, meeting room, pantry, copy room), overtime (the monopolised space after most have gone home), the trip destination (hotel, bullet train, taxi), entertaining and parties (the night as an extension of the workplace), and warehouses and underground car parks. In commercial distribution, “OL,” “office worker,” and “workplace” are set as standalone search tags on DLsite and FANZA doujin; the readership skews older than the school genre.

Etymology

“Shokuba-mono” is a combination of native nouns denoting works that thematise the workplace space. Circulating from the 2000s in the doujin scene and adult-manga editorial work, it is organised as a setting category parallel to the school genre. The lineage of sexual expression set in the company traces to postwar erotic novels and weekly-magazine reading matter. Against the OL boom of the 1980s, the office lady consolidated as a standalone character type, and the derived form organising this as a setting settled as the workplace genre. From the bubble era into the mid-Heisei period, SM magazines and erotic novels carried many works using a superior’s sexual harassment as a narrative device, forming the direct prehistory of the contemporary workplace genre.

The workplace as a narrative device

Use of hierarchy

The heart of the device is the transfer of the hierarchical structure inherent in employment onto the sexual relationship. Superior-subordinate, senior-junior, full-time versus dispatched, client versus contractor: these vertical relations function as the narrative engine. Both the case where the hierarchy and the sexual roles align and the case where they invert are established as standard patterns, the latter forming an independent derived form as the comeuppance and reversal workplace genre.

Costume signs

The uniform-like clothing of the office lady and secretary (suit, tight skirt, pumps, tights) is the indispensable visual sign of the genre, occupying a position equivalent to the school uniform and bearing the genre’s identifying function. Visual templates such as the contrast of the suit and the underwear beneath it, skin through tights, and the moment of stepping out of heels recur repeatedly.

Temporal device

Time outside normal business hours (overtime, holiday work, business trips) is used as a device. Settings such as two people alone during after-hours overtime, the office on a holiday, and a hotel on a business trip work to turn the everyday work space temporarily into a monopolised space.

Derived forms

The superior-subordinate type is the highest-volume derived form, using workplace hierarchy directly as a device; both male-superior-female-subordinate and female-superior-male-subordinate pairings are continuously published, the latter often combining with the chijo and mature-woman lines. The colleague type depicts relationships among peers at the same level. The infidelity type depicts relations between married and single staff, often combining with the married-woman and NTR lines. The entertaining and sales type thematises relations with clients, often as an extension of sexual harassment. The female-teacher, office-lady, and secretary lines are sub-divisions focused on particular occupations, each with its own uniform, props, and behaviour forming an independent sub-genre.

Contrast with the school genre

The school genre and the workplace genre are contrasted by the characters’ age, social role, and relationship structure. Where the school genre handles youth, first experience, and friendship, the workplace genre tends to handle power relations, economic dependence, and married relations. By label, some media centre the school genre and others the workplace genre, advancing a division by reader age.

Reception

The core pleasure device is the familiarity of the setting, sexual development on the extension of real social relations: the workplace space most readers experience daily becomes the stage, overlapping personal experience with the narrative device. At the same time, the liberation of crossing, in the story, hierarchical relations that cannot be crossed in reality (romance with a superior, a relationship with a client) functions as the genre’s particular appeal. From the standpoint of gender studies and labour sociology, the relation between entertaining sexual incidents in the workplace and the real social problems of harassment is continuously raised as a point; commercial distribution standardly runs the explicit indication of consent and the confirmation of age, a form that avoids direct intervention in the real labour environment.

Related terms

• Office lady (OL)
• Secretary
• Female teacher
• Sexual harassment
• Chakuero
• Eromanga