Hana-chan Sleeps

**Hana-chan Sleeps** (花ちゃん寝る *Hana-chan Neru*) is an adult gag manga by Fujio Akatsuka and Fujio Pro, released in the biweekly AV entertainment magazine Talk Channel through 1987.

## Overview

In this series with gags based around the powers of promiscuity and money, the twin owners behind the Snack Hana bar get into different, 10-page encounters each time: The older sister will collect gifts from prospective partners and decide who wins a night of making love, while the younger sister is the one who gets to experience the new man.

Its title is crafted as a pun on the magazine; *Hana-chan Neru* can also sound like *Hana Channeru*; "Hana Channel" after *Hanashi no Channeru*. The sisters' designs originally were rougher and had much different faces compared to Akatsuka's usual heroines, but would evolve from chapter 4 and on to have facial features like that of Akko-chan.

The Snack Hana bar would make its debut prior to this series in a short cameo in Reading Dai-sensei, and both those series as well as Akatsuka's Yarasete-ojisan and Mean Current Affairs would run in the same time period. Even after this work wrapped, some Hana-chan cast members continued to be seen used in *Yarasete-ojisan*.

## Characters

### Hanako (the elder, aka "the upper body")

The Hana-chan who acts as "Mama" to lonely desperate men at the Snack Hana, owning the bar at her young adult age. Every night she allows drinkers to present her with presents and decides who will be the most valuable man to take to a hotel. Even though she is openly chaste and "pure", the men will compete over who gets to sway her mind. In actuality, the men who become infatuated with Hana-chan and speak of her secret lust are experiencing her twin; whenever she makes her choice of a lover, she lets her younger twin sister emerge from hiding to take over.

This Hana-chan can be told apart from her twin by her shorter hair, but their customers don't notice this or know the secret of their switch-out. It's her greed for money and gifts that allows her to keep funding the expensive lifestyle that she and her twin both love, and she will gladly put her twin even through the most painful encounters.

### Hanako (the younger, aka "the lower body")

The Hana-chan who meets men at love hotels after the bar closes, but who has much longer hair than her sister and more jewelry in the earlier stories. She has a very active libido and desire for a lover, and is up for meeting a new one each time, no matter how humiliating or embarrassing some of her experiences may be.

She vanishes for a few chapters due to being out sick, causing her sister to try to run the bar without her involvement, but returns in the final chapter to reveal her secret to Nakano-kun and Hippo.

### Nakano-kun

A desperate customer who wants so badly to get a chance with Hana-chan, but is foiled each time by other men she likes more or manipulated by the sisters. He and another, nameless hippo-faced man may act as a duo always hoping to be the new lovers of Hana-chan, and both get their chance in the finale. They become frightened once they find out "Hana-chan" is actually a pair of twins.

### "Hippo"

Another customer often seen with Nakano-kun, and evolution of the hippo-faced salaryman type character. His actual name is never said, but he is called "Hippo" by Nakano (who admits he doesn't even know the man's name).

## Serialization

* Talk Channel: January 16 to July 17, 1987

There are 13 biweekly chapters in total, with no individual titles. Due to the way the magazine's publishing schedule occurred, the first chapter was technically released at the end of 1986 and other issues' actual release dates may also differ from those listed on the covers.

1. (January 16, 1987)
2. (February 6, 1987)
3. (February 20, 1987)
4. (March 6, 1987)
5. (March 20, 1987)
6. (April 3, 1987)
7. (April 17, 1987)
8. (May 1, 1987)
9. (May 15, 1987)
10. (June 5, 1987)
11. (June 19, 1987)
12. (July 3, 1987)
13. (July 17, 1987)

## Reprints

Up unti 2021, no form of *Hana-chan Sleeps* had ever been reprinted by a publisher, even after its name was brought to more attention in the wake of the *Osomatsu-san* anime announcement (due to the presence of two adult versions of the sextuplets in chapter 7). It was one of the notoriously hard-to-find Akatsuka titles of the 1980s due to only five issues of its period being collected by well-known establishments like the National Diet Library, as well as it being rare for 1987 issues of Talk Channel to show up on any auction sites. Outside of fan recollections and an inaccurate listing by Fujio Pro, the first time it would notably come up referenced would be as a brief write-up in the book Fujio Akatsuka and Media: The Gag Guerrilla Legend of Defeat and Disapproval.

Thanks to the digitization efforts of Fujio Pro's Tatsuya Matsuki and the publisher Narinesha, the Hana-chan series was finally reprinted in the book "Fujio Akatsuka at Night" on July 28, 2021.