Bitchery, this request comes from me (Amanda) and I’m abusing my powers to get some recs! I used to be a huge manga reader, but it goes in waves. A couple years ago, I checked the site where I read a lot of manga, mainly scans and translations. I was shocked – SHOCKED – to discover that the site had been hacked and the owner didn’t have the energy to bring it back.
Which fine, no problems. I’m sure we’ve all been exhausted by a pet project.
But, that meant I could access my “reading list” from the site to write down what I was currently reading to try and read elsewhere. So I’m coming to you!
I’ve read and enjoyed manga like Midnight Secretary and the utterly bonkers 100% Real Girl. I prefer manga (or manhwa) with a central romance; the subgenre doesn’t really matter as I’ve read things across the board. All I ask is that it was published in the last decade and doesn’t shy away from sexy times.
Anything older, I’ve probably already read!
All right, Bitchery, what d’ya got?
All my recommandations would be BL/yaoi because this is the type of manga I mostly read… and even on a non-yaoi thread I must absolutely, positively recommand “Cute Devil (Kawaii Akuma)” by Hiro Madarame. The mangaka takes (most) of the genre’s clichés and puts them on their head in a very.satisfying.way.
In the shojo & josei genre, my favs series are usually the not-smutty one because they have more plot. Right now the only one I’m really keen to follow is the manhwa “Cheese in the Trap” by Soonkki and amthing by Kyoko Hikawa but as I said, no sexy.
I love manga!
Here are a few recs (in no specific order):
– Paradise Kiss
– Butterfly Night
– Tsuki ni Kiss no Hanataba wo
– The One (chinese manga)
– MARS
– Red River (aka: Anatolia Story)
Also, did you know there are several manga adaptations of actual Harlequin novels? They’re just one shot (short) stories. Search for manga by Fujita Kakuzo or Sagara Kyouko, for example.
My #1 all-time favorite manga is “Cat Street”. It’s about recovery from depression, social anxiety, bullying. But there are no sexy times.
Amanda, I highly recommend you checking out Otakumole for manga raws and translation. It’s on membership basis and I think Raff (the site owner) is limiting the amount of invite to keep the site low key. They have very good quality new manga series.
I believe the appropriate genre that you’re looking for is Josei. I’m a huge Josei manga reader myself. I highly recommend anything by Nishi Keiko, Mitsuki Kako, Kazui Kazumi and Ohmi Tomu. Btw, Ohmi Tomu has a couple of new series since finishing Midnight Secretary
I am currently reading “Love Phantom” by Mitsuki Kako, “Kitto Aishite Shimaun Da” by Kazui Kazumi, “Totsuzen Desu Ga, Ashita Kekkon Shimasu” by Miyazono Izumi and “Bread & Butter” by Ashihara Hinako. All ongoing series in Japan though! So I go through the angst of waiting for the next chapter every month.
Mostly I’ve been reading yaoi (M/M) manga, and they have a LOT of smut but can be cute. Yondaime Ooyamato Tatsuyuki by Scarlet Beriko is one of the best I’ve read so far. Such excellent art, although trigger warnings aplenty.
@Chika: Thank you for the heads up about Otakumole! I’ll definitely check it out.
Peach Heaven! (Momoiro Heaven).
A teenage girl who became an erotica author/ghostwriter (and breadwinner) to replace her dead father tangles with a heartthrob media “idol” schoolmate after he discovers her secret.
Sex comedy situations abound, but most of the sexy action takes place in the heroine’s imagination, or is contained in the bawdy humour (especially via dialogue); the ‘true love’ scenes are a bit more soft focus.
Cons: There’s a plot hole shortly before the ending. If I understood Google-translated blog comments correctly, readers of the magazine did NOT like this manga’s penultimate plot twist and the writer was ordered to do damage control and wind up the series hastily. Also, scanlation and official translations are not yet complete. [+ A con specific to learners of Japanese: least legible furigana EVER.]
I loved ” moonlight drawn by clouds” that I started reading because of the k-drama that I watched based on the manga. So many of the Chinese/Korean drama shows are based on them. Previous example “cheese in the trap. ”
If you didn’t read boys over flowers it’s insanely addictive.
I would also look at the online ones that come out in installments these are super popular too and many have translations. Many go by webtoons.
Amanda, if you do get to check out these recommendations please make a new post about it with your impressions.
I’d love to see more manga posts around here.
The erotic romance one shot “Lion” by Hinase Yuuki.
The characters are postgrad student scientists. Lab coats are involved. No idea why that didn’t make the cover. It would make a lot of people very happy.
(Btw the official blurb is wildly inaccurate. Not a particularly pushy hero. More like of those “I dare you to kiss me and NOT melt” types that Jennifer Hayward specialises in writing for Harlequin.)
Also try Afterschool Nightmare and ES (Eternal Sabbeth). Some sexxy times but a really good read.
I don’t read a lot of manga or manwha but there is a great one called Blood Bank. It’s an m/m romance between a human and vampire in a world where vampires keep humans in subjugation. And it’s fantastic.
I forgot to mention Blood Bank does have BDSM themes, if that is or is not your jam.
**Full disclosure: I was an intern for a few months at VIZ Media, but I’ve been a reader and a fan of their shoujo manga selection for as long as I’ve been reading manga.**
Can we please have more josei manga licensed for the U.S.? The ones I’ve read and enjoyed are:
Happy Marriage?! by Maki Enjoji
Spell of Desire by Tomu Ohmi
Butterflies, Flowers by Yuki Yoshihara
Library Wars: Love & War by Kiiro Yumi & Hiro Arikawa (not a sexy manga but it features adults and I thoroughly enjoyed the romance!)
And of course the hundreds of Harlequin manga out there but they are usually more of a miss than a hit, for me.
I’m reading Happy Marriage right now. I’m on volume 8 I assume it will continue to be excellent. It’s about an arranged marriage situation and it’s just delightful.
I just finished the second volume of Everyone’s Getting Married which is not as good as Happy Marriage but it’s more realistic and I quite like the main character.
Also on the yaoi side I will recommend anything and everything by Fumi Yoshinaga. She writes the best characters. My favourite series by her is Antique Bakery. Like it isn’t really romance but its good. She also has this series about an older gay couple called What Did You Eat Yesterday? and its really sweet.
But yeah anything by her has never let me down
No sexy times, but Princess Jellyfish by Akiko Higashimura makes me so happy. The heroine is an extremely shy introvert, and the hero is a gregarious cross-dresser. They end up battling gentrification and designing clothes together.
It’s not manga BUT it is fabulously smutty and in comic form: Smutpeddler
I started with the 2014 anthology: https://ironcircus.com/shop/books/32-smut-peddler-2014-softcover.html
It’s inclusive, imaginative, sexy, and fun!
Another rec for Happy Marriage?!
In mangaupdates.com, you can easily search by genre like shoujo, josei,smut (yay!), etc and filter results using tags like “strong female lead”. Then it even lets you sort your results alphabetically, by year, or even by rating! If you create a profile, you can even keep track of manga you want to read, are reading, etc. I love that website! ❤
I’m not sure how to link to the search page, but you can navigate to it from their homepage using the menu on the left…click “Genres” then at the top of the genre list that appears, click the link for “Advanced Search by Genre”.
@KD: I use MangaUpdates! And honestly, I should have cross-referenced and added my previous manga I was reading to MU, as a way of backing things up.
One thing though is that their database is so large that searching for specifics is a bit daunting, haha.
I generally read across genres. Love Yoki Yoshihara (Itadakimasu) crazy humour.
I liked honey X honey drops, black bird, ookami shoujo to kuro ouji, majo no biyaku.
Also reading the popular fantasy, action ecchi manga (Fairy tail).
This one skirts the edges of your request and comes with some caveats, but I luuuuuurve it so I felt the need to bring it up: Skip Beat! by Yoshiki Nakamura. It starts with a girl who follows her childhood crush to Tokyo. He is a budding pop star and basically uses her as a maid. In the first chapter he abandons her. He is a giant douche. And then, in stark contrast to what the Shoujo Heroine is Supposed to Do, she flies into a rage and swears revenge. This leads to her pursuing a career in show business, and butting heads with her ex-crush’s rival, an extremely handsome and talented actor.
Caveats: The heroine is 16 and the hero is 20. 16 is legal to marry in Japan, but I absolutely respect if that’s a hard no for anyone. Also trigger warning for flashbacks to (mostly) emotional child abuse. While the romance aspects are important to the story, the central narrative is the heroine’s development as a performer and a person. This thing is veeeeery long, and it’s ongoing, and the romance is an [i]extremely[/i] slow burn.
why I luuurve it: The character development is uncommonly solid, complex, and nuanced. The heroine has a great deal of will and agency. She is in some ways very vulnerable, and in others a veritable force of nature. And I love the way she turns tropes and expectations upside down (for once it’s the heroine who has sworn off love because of a bad man) It’s the kind of story where almost every time I notice some detail that seems weird or out of place, it turns out later to be foreshadowing. Every time there is a show-within-a-show type situation, the fictional tv show or movie or whatever sounds like it could actually be good. And sometimes it’s very funny.
Seconding Skip Beat. It is glorious. Also, I can testify as an ACON that it’s accurate. (on that note, the comedy combined with PTSD recovery might be just what the Anne Shirley fans are looking for, the ones saying ‘why not write something original instead’ of harshing up L M Montgomery via Anne With An E.)
Additional trigger warnings for attempted rape, and also the story being too much about the reactions of the men at that point.
I really hate Skip Beat.
Years ago I started reading a few chapters, became hooked, but then it just went on and on with the story going nowhere.
Right now it’s ongoing at almost 300 (THREE HUNDRED) chapters with no end in sight. The author is obviously milking this cash cow for all its worth and more.
There’s no satisfaction in reading Skip Beat because you get no resolution. The author teases you and keeps delaying the ending.
Also there is no kissing or makeouts or anything.
Re Skip Beat.
Chapter number, about 250. About the same as the number of SBTB podcasts.
The Japanese fans selected the chapters with making out for the drama cds. The cheek kiss one, and in the last year or so, the guam kissy one and the sexy shirtless love bite one.
Not everyone’s cup of tea, but not ‘clean and wholesome’ by a long stretch.
3AM Dangerous Zone – Josei about a young art/design graduate who gets her first job at a design firm making pachinko machine backgrounds. Her coworkers are all eccentric and the guy she has a maybe-maybe-not thing with has a secret. I started reading it because I liked the heroine’s outfits but kept reading because it kind of captures that fledgling feeling of Being An Adult (O M G) for the first time – getting the job and then not being so great at it, wanting something with people and maybe life or that person themselves getting in the way of it, staring at your weirdass coworkers thinking that they’re admirable in their own way but also they’re so old and weird, is this what I’m in for? LOL that last one is maybe my own circumstance. There’s a guy but I’d say the central romance is the heroine paired with herself.
Around this time I started a manga called Cousin, I need to go back and finish it. It was about an overweight girl who loses weight for the usual reasons. There weren’t any shoujo bubbles in the relationships but it does have the shoujo trope of the beautiful new girl (her Cousin is a famous Tokyo-based model). I thought it was interesting that the series is named after the other girl when the story is so very on the main character’s side. I felt like it did a good job showing that feeling of not deserving one’s own life. Again, there’s a guy but this story was more on the trajectory of the heroine learning to love herself.
NODAME CANTABILE. Just read it! It’s about music students at a conservatory and I think shortly after they graduate; it’s super funny and super stylish. What they’re doing is actually important in the story and to them, it’s not just a backdrop. Reading about them being so passionate about music actually made me sit down at the piano again. There was also a live action drama that was really well done and it even incorporated visual effects to simulate some of the slapstick from the comic.
Ugh there was a m/m slice of life that was so well done…it was a straight laced teacher guy and his SO wore a lot of dumb printed shirts. I just remember his chili pepper shirt and one time they fought and the one of them wanted to apologize but chickened out and tried to hide behind a telephone pole. The fact that one was a teacher is really skewing these search results lol.
Thirding or fourthing Skip Beat! – is it still going on?? I stopped around the Guam part because it was getting kind of dumb. Plus the Cain siblings arc went on for too long. The first couple arcs make it worth it, like Kiyoko’s auditions, at the tea ceremony set, on the Moon remake set, figuring out how to avoid typecasting, and others. Basically anywhere where she’s figuring out how to be good at her job – and this is the large majority of the series – is going to be funny and it’s hard not to root for her.
Happy Marriage definitely ^^. There was a drama adaption for it as well
re: Skip Beat
When I first started, I couldn’t get the past 50 chapters but couple of years later, I come back to it and now eagerly waiting for the monthly chapters. So yeah it definitely has a YMMV to it
Ooku- the inner chamber. They publish one volume a year, currently on volume 12. It’s a story about an alternative universe – if 75% of males all died from a disease and the government is made up of mainly women with a few men to show other countries as a front. It’s not real but an alternative universe. There are many different stories, mainly higher level women are trying to find younger men to fill their harem, mate and reproduce. There are some interesting issues, you might agree or disagree. Maybe you’re reading it now.
[…] This series also started as a manga but quickly grew into a wildly popular anime with the same name. [8] My older brother and younger sister both loved manga, and living in a home where we always had the latest editions of popular series, there were many temptations. [9] It took the world by storm and has quickly become one of the most popular video games, mangas, and animes in the entire world. [8] Reading the popular fantasy, action ecchi manga (Fairy tail). [10] […]