At a certain school, students are being killed one after another. The culprit is the teacher. The other students are completely unaware. Only “DESIRE” knows the teacher is the murderer. In order to protect her secret, the teacher surrenders her body to “DESIRE”. Although “DESIRE” is mercilessly brutal, her cunning words and “cunning” actions push the teacher towards hedonism.

—Manga Mavericks Books

This isn’t my first rodeo with Aneido. I reviewed another work, Now No One Lurks Beneath the Snow, which I really liked. I…don’t feel that way about this one. I like dark stories, and this one is quite dark, but it just didn’t do it for me overall.

There are neat things that this manga tries to do. Each student at the unnamed school is named after an emotion, and orders from above (whoever that may be) dictate which emotion Sensei should kill.

It got me thinking–likely overthinking–trying to figure out what each emotion means to Sensei, but the only ones that are deeply explored are Sorrow and Desire, with a brief appearance by Guilt. This is an interesting concept! But these other emotions Sensei killed (mentioned more as an afterthought) aren’t explored.

Desire’s character interpretation is not what I expected. Desire is dark, manipulative, and a bully. She is relentless and jealous. She tries to jump Sensei every chance she gets, and as much as Desire claims to love Sensei, I never really saw love there. I guess the lesson is that Love and Desire can’t be mistaken for one another. But…Desire is just so messed up! This really is a bleak interpretation of that emotion, and I sort of wanted to see elements of Desire that could be positive. But this is definitely not that kind of story.

Actually, now that I’ve explored Desire a little more for this review, I’m kind of liking this human girls representing emotions that Sensei has to kill. I wanted to see more, but Desire is the focus here.

Desire is pushy and dominant and teasing (in kind of a mean way) during the sex scenes in the manga. They’re explicit with a smidgen of censoring that leaves very little to the imagination. I think because Desire leans towards the abusive, I didn’t find these scenes very titillating…then again, this is my first girls’ love manga and I’m reading it as a straight woman. I’m probably not the target audience here.

There were things in this manga I tried to “get” and sometimes I couldn’t. I would overthink it and underthink it. As a reader, I did wonder who was going to get murdered next and why, and who would be left to survive, and what that all meant.

Overall, despite this being a yuri manga, this is a psychological exploration. I didn’t think it went deep enough, despite my struggles with it. I greatly appreciated the afterword that Aneido included that kind of explains what the manga was going for, and that’s something you might like, too.

Honestly, I don’t know what to think of this manga. I like the concept. I think the manga is trying to do interesting things. Maybe if it was longer than 90 pages we could get a more thorough exploration of the death of the “emotions” (students).

I’m going to recommend this manga to you despite some of my misgivings. I keep going back and forth between liking it and being disappointed by it. But I think a lot of you readers out there who enjoy dark romance, girls’ love stories, and twisted psychology, will find something to like here.

---

The Murderer and Her Runaway Desire is available both in digital and print from the Manga Mavericks shop. If you order a print copy, you’ll get bonuses such as beautiful embossed lettering on the cover, and a bookmark as well. The manga released July 16, 2025.