It’s time for a special kind of retrospective of the year 2018. In the past 12 months, three of my favourite manga series of the past decade ended – titles that, to me, could be called instant classics. In the rush of new manga publications, it can always be a little hard to remember the good stuff that no longer have an on-going status. For this reason, I’m taking a loving look back at these three now finished yet unforgettable works of art: Kamatani Yuhki’s LBGTQ coming-of-age drama Shimanami Tasogare, Andō Yuki’s Machida-kun no Sekai with its one-of-a-kind protagonist, and Stand Up! by clb ..read more

Imagine finding yourself in the body of somebody else, all of a sudden able to explore another person’s life while also being cut off from the life you lead in your ‘old’ body. And finding out the previous ‘owner’ of your current body is now living in your ‘old’ body. Sounds both frightening and kind of exciting, doesn’t it? In Yamashita Tomoko’s 2-volume manga WHITE NOTE PAD, two people leading fundamentally different lives have become victims of such a body swap experience caused by supposedly cosmic circumstances: 17-year-old schoolgirl Odamaki Hana and 38-year-old automobile engineer Kine ..read more

If you’re a dedicated follower of a manga artist, nothing feels more troubling than when their current series goes on hiatus, especially for health reasons. From a completely selfish perspective, it might mean you’ll never be able to read the end of that series. But of course it also makes you worry for the mangaka, the person who’s been working hard to deliver new chapters of their work. Accidents, illnesses, the inability to continue working due to high levels of stress, they aren’t that rare when it comes to interfering with a manga arist’s life and bringing their career to a halt. To the a ..read more

From mid-2015 to late 2016, a strange candy-coloured jewel sparkled brightly in Shueisha’s Gekkan YOU, a monthly josei manga magazine which has a target demographic from youngish female office workers to women in their 50s who all have been reading shoujo manga for a long time, and which usually offers a line-up of mostly romance, comedy and slice of life josei manga by shoujo manga veterans. Yet sometimes it is in the most unexpected places you can find the most unusual, charming little gems, in this case a short series called Kokage-kun wa Majo (subtitled Kokage-kun Bewitched, but more liter ..read more

In the past few years, the big three manga magazines for elementary school girls have been spicing up their usual mix of romantic comedies, school dramas, idol and magical girl manga with a spine-tingling element of horror. Ribon‘s most successful title of this wave is Ishikawa Emi’s Zekkyō Gakkyū (Screaming Lessons, alternatively Scary Lessons for its French and German translations by Tokyo Pop) which was published as 20 volumes from 2009 to 2015. This collection of surprisingly shocking short stories – considering its young target readership – was turned into a live-action movie in 2013, rec ..read more

Our last review discussed the return of a widely loved Hana to Yume series featuring a clan and a curse forcing them to transform into animals when touched or stressed. Today this theme gets turned on its head as we witness the comeback of another Hana to Yume veteran, with a series featuring a hedgehog turning into a handsome young man! Following Takaya Natsuki and her Fruits Basket revival with Fruits Basket another, another big name formerly associated with Hakusensha’s semi-monthly Hana to Yume has moved to its monthly sister magazine, Bessatsu Hana to Yume (BetsuHana) with a new series: N ..read more

If you were a manga reader around the time the world moved into the current millenium, you probably remember the birth of an unforgettable shōjo manga mega hit series featuring a lonely girl meeting a mysterious clan of people cursed to turn into animals under various circumstances. While Takaya Natsuki‘s manga Fruits Basket, published in Hakusensha’s bimonthly magazine Hana to Yume, had already started its run in 1998, it was in 2001, with the winning of the Kodansha Manga Award in the shōjo manga category and – most importantly – the airing of its TV anime adaptation, that Fruits Basket cros ..read more

Impulse-buying a book, especially a comic, solely based on its cover isn’t all that unusual. In fact, there’s an expression in the Japanese language that describes just that: jakettogai or, in its short form, jakegai. But buying a book mainly because of its title admittedly might be an even rarer thing. Moon River… You read the title and instantly hear the same-titled song in your head as an air of bittersweet nostalgia brings back memories of the lovely Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany‘s… A closer look at the cover illustration of Hongō Chika’s one-volume manga Moon River might give you ..read more

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