BECK: Mongolian Chop Squad
BECK
Fourteen-year-old Yukio Tanaka, nicknamed Koyuki, drifts through a dull middle-school life until he rescues a patched-together dog named Beck from some neighborhood kids. The dog belongs to Ryusuke Minami, a sixteen-year-old guitarist back from America, whose playing pulls Koyuki toward music and a guitar of his own. As Ryusuke assembles a band, an ordinary boy with no background in performing starts learning to play and sing, drawn into the group's struggle to be heard and into his feelings for Ryusuke's half-sister Maho.
Battle Royale
バトル・ロワイアル
In an authoritarian Japan known as the Republic of Greater East Asia, a class of junior-high students on a school trip is gassed and shipped to a deserted island for a government program: each is given a random weapon and ordered to kill one another until a single survivor remains, with explosive collars guaranteeing no one stalls. Shuya Nanahara refuses to play along and tries to keep Noriko Nakagawa alive, aided by transfer student Shogo Kawada, who has survived the program before. Masayuki Taguchi draws the manga from Koushun Takami's novel.
The Wallflower
ヤマトナデシコ七変化♥
After a boy mocked her as ugly, Sunako Nakahara retreated into horror films and the dark, shunning anything beautiful. Her aunt Mine owns a mansion where four strikingly handsome students live rent-free, and she strikes a bargain: turn the reclusive Sunako into a refined lady and the rent stays waived. Kyohei Takano, Takenaga Oda, Ranmaru Morii, and Yukinojo Toyama find that polishing her appearance is easy, but her ghoulish tastes and refusal to change make the deal far harder than they expected.
NOiSE
NOiSE
Detective Susono Musubi works a string of child abductions in a sprawling underground city, until the case turns personal when a fanatical cult murders her partner. Stonewalled by her superiors and carrying only a strange sword, she descends into the lower levels of the decaying metropolis for answers. Set thousands of years before Blame!, this prequel by Tsutomu Nihei traces the early Megastructure and the origins of the Safeguard and the Silicon Life.
Kino's Journey: The Beautiful World
キノの旅 -the Beautiful World-
Kino travels from country to country on a talking motorcycle named Hermes, staying nowhere longer than three days and two nights. Each land runs on its own customs and laws, some gentle and some brutal, and Kino observes them with a traveler's distance and a pistol close at hand. The episodic journey turns each stop into a self-contained portrait of how a people choose to live.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
ゼルダの伝説 時のオカリナ
Link, a boy raised among the forest-dwelling Kokiri, is sent off on a quest when the fairy Navi joins him at the Great Deku Tree's bidding. Charged with gathering the Spiritual Stones and reaching Princess Zelda in Hyrule, he sets out across the kingdom as the desert king Ganondorf schemes to seize the Triforce. This manga adapts the Nintendo 64 game in two volumes split into Child and Adult sagas, expanding on the game's characters and scenes.
Karate Shokoushi Kohinata Minoru
空手小公子 小日向海流
Kohinata Minoru is a freshman at Reinan University, a school stacked with elite sports clubs, who is pushed out of the gymnastics team and blamed for losing its competition spot. After karate club member Mutou Ryuuji beats him for failing to stand up for his friend Nana, Minoru is drawn into the school's Second Karate Club and its brutal full-contact Kaburagi-ryu style. His gymnast's body proves a hidden asset as he trains under harsh conditions and works his way up through the club's rivalries.
Dogs: Prelude
DOGS: Stray Dogs Howling in the Dark
In a post-apocalyptic city where genetic experiments and street violence are routine, four loners circle the same underworld in search of answers to their pasts. Four loosely connected chapters introduce the ex-hitman turned bartender Mihai, the white-haired killer Haine, the vengeful Naoto, and the chain-smoking freelancer Badou, each chasing a way 'below' the city. This prelude sets up the cast and world later expanded in Dogs: Bullets & Carnage.
The Summit of the Gods
神々の山嶺
In Kathmandu, photojournalist Makoto Fukamachi comes across a battered camera that may have belonged to George Mallory, the climber who vanished near the top of Everest in 1924. Chasing the question of whether Mallory reached the summit decades before Hillary, Fukamachi traces the camera to Joji Habu, a reclusive Japanese mountaineer nicknamed the Venomous Snake. Habu's own obsession with Everest pulls Fukamachi into the harsh world of high-altitude climbing. Taniguchi adapts Baku Yumemakura's novel.
Full Metal Panic!
フルメタル・パニック！
Sousuke Sagara is a teenage soldier of the covert anti-terror outfit Mithril, raised in the war zones of Afghanistan and far more at ease with a rifle than a classroom. His new assignment: pose as an ordinary transfer student to guard Kaname Chidori, a hot-tempered Japanese high schooler who unknowingly carries coveted knowledge as one of the so-called Whispered. Sousuke shadows her without telling her she is in danger, and his combat instincts keep colliding with the routines of everyday school life.
The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service
黒鷺死体宅配便
Five graduates of a Buddhist university find their supernatural talents useless for ordinary jobs, so they put them to work for the dead instead. Kuro Karatsu can hear and briefly animate corpses with the help of a scarred spirit named Yaichi; alongside dowser Makoto Numata, embalmer Keiko Makino, and the puppet-channeling Yuji Yata, he forms the Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service. The crew tracks down bodies, learns their final wishes, and carries them wherever they need to go to rest.
Chobits
ちょびっツ
Hideki Motosuwa is a country boy in Tokyo studying to pass his college entrance exams when he finds a discarded persocom — a personal computer built in the shape of a human — on the street. He takes it home and switches it on; the only word it can say at first is 'Chi', so that becomes its name. As Hideki teaches Chi to speak and live among people, he begins to wonder where she came from and whether a persocom can truly feel anything for the person who owns it.
Black Cat
BLACK CAT
Train Heartnet was once XIII, an elite assassin for the world-spanning organization Chronos, until he walked away to live as an easygoing bounty hunter, or Sweeper. He travels with his partner Sven Vollfied, a former police agent, taking jobs across the country. A run-in with the thief Rinslet Walker leads them to Eve, a girl engineered as a living bio-weapon, whom Train and Sven decide to free and take in.
Tokyo Mew Mew
東京ミュウミュウ
Ichigo Momomiya cares about little beyond catching the eye of her classmate Masaya Aoyama, until a date at an endangered-animals exhibit fuses her DNA with that of the Iriomote cat. The change leaves her with feline reflexes, a tendency to turn into a black cat, and a new role as the lead of five girls who transform into the Mew Mews. Working from a cafe by day, Ichigo and her teammates defend Earth from aliens who mean to reclaim the planet for themselves.
Gantz
GANTZ
High schooler Kei Kurono dies trying to save a drunk man who fell onto subway tracks, alongside his childhood friend Masaru Kato. Instead of an afterlife, both wake in a bare Tokyo apartment with other recently deceased strangers and a black sphere called Gantz, which equips them with futuristic suits and weapons and orders them to hunt aliens hidden across the city. Survivors earn points; reaching one hundred buys a way out, a stronger weapon, or a teammate's revival.
Cromartie High School
魁!!クロマティ高校
Takashi Kamiyama is a diligent honor student who, to stay near a friend, takes the entrance exam for Cromartie High, a school stuffed with the country's most fearsome delinquents. His friend never enrolls, leaving Kamiyama the lone normal kid among musclebound tough guys who mostly stand around debating nonsense. A gorilla, a robot, and a silent mustachioed figure named Freddie round out the cast in this deadpan parody of old-school yankii manga.
Holyland
ホーリーランド
Yuu Kamishiro, a withdrawn high schooler worn down by relentless bullying, teaches himself a single boxing punch from a manual and starts walking Tokyo's night streets looking for a place he belongs. As he picks fights with delinquents and survives them, rumors spread of a lone teen taking down thugs, and he earns the street name "Thug Hunter." Each encounter pulls Yuu deeper into the city's after-dark territory of brawlers and gangs, where the techniques and limits of real martial arts decide who walks away.
Dorohedoro
ドロヘドロ
Caiman wakes with a reptile's head and no memory of who he was, sure only that a Magic User did this to him. With his friend Nikaido, who runs a gyoza joint called the Hungry Bug, he prowls the grimy slum known as the Hole, biting down on captured sorcerers because a strange man living inside his throat can identify the one who cursed him. The Magic Users treat the Hole as their playground, crossing over from their own world to test cruel spells on the people trapped there.
Millennium Snow
千年の雪
Chiyuki Matsuoka has a weak heart and has been told since birth that she may not live past fifteen, yet she refuses to cling to life at any cost. Her path crosses with Toya Kano, an eighteen-year-old vampire who could extend her life by taking her as his thousand-year human companion, sharing his lifespan in exchange for her blood. Toya, however, wants nothing to do with humans, leaving the two at odds even as their fates pull together.
Lilim Kiss
リリムキッス
Takaya Saiki, a high-schooler with a tough reputation, picks up a stray pendant and accidentally breaks its seal. Out comes Lilim, a demon girl who drains life energy through kisses, and she promptly knocks him out with one. She returns declaring his energy the tastiest she has found, settles into his home as a live-in companion, and Takaya is left navigating school and family with a hungry demon at his side. This is a short two-volume romantic comedy.
Nana
NANA
Two women named Nana meet on a train to Tokyo and end up sharing an apartment. Nana Osaki is a sharp-edged punk vocalist chasing a record deal with her band, Black Stones, after a hard breakup with its former bassist. Nana Komatsu, nicknamed Hachi, follows a boyfriend to the city and falls for people fast and often. From their cramped shared flat, the two build a friendship that runs alongside Osaki's ambitions and the rival band Trapnest.
Honey and Clover
ハチミツとクローバー
Yuta Takemoto shares a run-down Tokyo apartment building with fellow art-college students Takumi Mayama and Shinobu Morita, getting by on cheap meals and unfinished assignments. Their routine shifts when professor Shuji Hanamoto introduces Hagumi Hanamoto, a tiny, childlike art prodigy who enrolls as a first-year. Both Takemoto and Morita are drawn to Hagu, and Takemoto keeps his feelings to himself as the group muddles through coursework, part-time jobs, and the uncertainty of what comes after graduation.
Tramps Like Us
きみはペット
Sumire Iwaya is an accomplished newspaper journalist whose career and engagement have both fallen apart. One night she finds a young injured man sleeping in a box outside her building and takes him in. Half as a joke, she offers to keep him as a pet, and to her surprise he agrees, accepting the name Momo after her childhood dog. Sumire gives him a home and a routine while keeping her demanding public life entirely separate.