19 reviews in this genre
by Reiko Momochi
A review of Confidential Confessions (問題提起作品集) by Reiko Momochi — the Dessert anthology that walked teenage readers straight through suicide, self-harm, prostitution, and rape without softening a single panel.
by Moto Hagio
Yu's review of A Cruel God Reigns by Moto Hagio — Jeremy's stepfather abuses him; Jeremy kills him; the next 16 volumes show what happens to a person after that. One of manga's most honest portraits of trauma and the possibility of recovery.
by Shuho Sato
Eijiro Saito is a young medical resident who has just started at a Tokyo university hospital. He wants to help people. Across 13 volumes, Shuho Sato shows him what Japanese hospital medicine actually is — cancer wards, neonatal ICU, psychiatric care, organ transplantation, oncology — and what the system does to patients and doctors. The author released the work copyright-free in 2012. Cultural impact in Japan was significant; English licensing remains pending.
by Shohei Manabe
Shohei Manabe's 46-volume manga (2004–2019) about Kaoru Ushijima, the founder of Cau-Cau Finance — an illegal Tokyo loan-shark operation charging 50% interest per 10 days. Each multi-chapter arc follows a different debtor's life: how they ended up at Ushijima's door, what they tried to do about their situation, and what Ushijima's operation does to them when they cannot pay. Yamada Takayuki starred in the 2010–2014 drama and films. Unlicensed in English.
by Osamu Tezuka
Dotsuitare is Osamu Tezuka's semi-autobiographical drama about young men scraping a life out of the burnt-out ruins of postwar Osaka — an unfinished, rarely discussed work where Tetsu, a war orphan turned shoeshine-boy boss, nurses a private rage against General MacArthur.
by Naoki Urasawa
A review of Mujirushi: The Sign of Dreams — Naoki Urasawa's single-volume manga (Big Comic Original, October 2017–February 2018), commissioned by the Louvre. VIZ Signature published the English edition with color pages on July 21, 2020.
by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
Yu's review of A Drifting Life — Yoshihiro Tatsumi's 800-page autobiographical epic about growing up obsessed with manga in postwar Japan and helping invent gekiga, the gritty, adult comics movement that changed the medium.
by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
Yu's review of Abandon the Old in Tokyo — a Drawn & Quarterly collection of Yoshihiro Tatsumi's bleak 1970 gekiga short stories about alienated, defeated working men on the margins of booming postwar Tokyo.
by Osamu Tezuka
Yu's review of Message to Adolf (Adolf ni Tsugu) — Osamu Tezuka's historical epic following three men named Adolf through WWII and beyond, a devastating story of how war and ideology deform individual lives.
by Osamu Tezuka
Yu's review of Buddha — Osamu Tezuka's sweeping, fictionalized retelling of the life of Siddhartha Gautama, told through a huge cast of invented characters whose suffering makes the Buddha's questions feel like questions you actually have.
by Keiji Nakazawa
Yu's review of Barefoot Gen (はだしのゲン) — Keiji Nakazawa's semi-autobiographical manga about a six-year-old boy who survives the Hiroshima atomic bombing on August 6, 1945, watches his father and two siblings burn under their collapsed house, and tries to keep what's left of his family alive. Drawn by a man who was actually there.
by Shigeru Mizuki
Shigeru Mizuki, the man who drew friendly yokai in GeGeGe no Kitaro, also drew the life of Adolf Hitler — a sober, anti-war biography in a single volume.
by Osamu Tezuka
Tezuka condensed Dostoevsky's novel into one short 1953 volume — and gave it an ending the original never had.
by Harold Sakuishi
Yu's review of Beck: Mongolian Chop Squad — Yukio 'Koyuki' Tanaka is a fourteen-year-old with nothing going for him until he rescues a strange dog and meets Ryusuke, a guitarist back from America with a bullet-scarred Les Paul named Lucille.
by Quimchee
A review of I Love Yoo, the WEBTOON original by Quimchee — a drama disguised as a romance about a girl whose mother left, whose father drinks, and whose new friends are the wealthy Hirahara brothers.
by Tsugumi Ohba / Takeshi Obata
Yu's review of Bakuman — ninth-graders Moritaka Mashiro and Akito Takagi form a manga duo and fight their way through Weekly Shonen Jump's serialization machine, driven by a promise: Mashiro will marry his crush Miho Azuki when she voices the heroine in their anime. From the Death Note team, the most honest manga ever made about making manga.
by Osamu Tezuka
Yu's review of Ayako — a few years after the war, the Tenge landlord family locks their youngest daughter Ayako in a storehouse to silence what she saw; she grows up underground for over twenty years; when she finally comes out, the country has moved on but the family's rot hasn't. Osamu Tezuka's darkest postwar thriller about the secrets Japan buried instead of facing.
by Yuki Suenaga (story) / Takamasa Moue (art)
Akane Sakurasaki's father was a promising rakugo (traditional storytelling) student. The day before his shinuchi (master) promotion, he was expelled from his school in a humiliation that broke him as a performer. Akane was a child watching it happen. Now in high school, she has secretly trained in rakugo herself — taking the stage name Akane Arakawa — and is climbing the same school's ranks to prove what her father could have been. Yuki Suenaga and Takamasa Moue's ongoing Weekly Shonen Jump manga began 2022 and has 21 volumes as of 2026. Anime adaptation began April 2026.
by Tatsuya Matsuki (story) / Shiro Usazaki (art)
Yu's review of Act-Age — Kei Yonagi is a teenager raising her siblings alone, with a dangerous gift: she doesn't play roles, she becomes them, mining her own grief to inhabit characters. Director Sumiji Kuroyama discovers her in an audition and pulls her into professional acting. Tatsuya Matsuki and Shiro Usazaki's acting manga reached 12 volumes in Japan before it was discontinued and scrubbed from every store in 2020 after the writer's arrest — which is why almost no one can legally read it anymore.