Pick your poison! These are reviews of the series in my raw Japanese manga collection, which I have been slowly amassing over the years. My taste runs pretty mainstream, but I am open to just about anything provided that the story sounds good. Before jumping in, it might help skim over the Information section. Enjoy your stay, and I hope you find something interesting to read!

Shoujo and Josei Reviews
This section covers manga written for a female audience. Roughly speaking, shoujo manga is for girls while josei manga is more literarily-minded series for women (as opposed to ladies series, which are the manga equivalents of Harlequin novels). However, the line between a girl's series and a woman's series is often blurry. This section also includes the classic catagory shounen-ai.

Boys Love (Yaoi) Reviews
Boys Love, or BL, are homosensual or homoerotic manga written for women featuring stories about men (never older) and boys (sometimes younger), which grew out shoujo/josei sub-genre shounen ai. It is usually referred to as yaoi among fans, but there is a lot of confusion over the correct usage of the term. The word 'yaoi' supposedly originated among doujinshi ('fan magazine') fans as a derogatory term describing plotless gay sex stories written for women, so I choose to stick with 'BL', which is a neutral publishers' term.

Shounen and Seinen Reviews
Finally, here is a small section for manga written for boys (shounen) and young men (seinen). Unlike the shoujo and josei catagory, there is a more obvious demarcation between what is a boys' series and what is a men's series, so in the future I might sub-divided the section further. Shounen manga is the most popular genre among Japanese readers, even among female audiences. If you are new to manga, it is worth keeping in mind that there is much more shounen manga out there than shoujo, despite what you find here.

{ main }