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Josei manga (女性漫画, lit. comics for women, pronounced [dʑosei]) also known as "ladies" (レディース redīsu) or "ladies' comics" (レディコミ redikomi, lit. "LadyComi"), is a term that refers to the target demographic of manga created mostly by women for late teenage and adult female audiences. Readers range from 15-44.[1] In Japanese, the word josei means simply "woman", "female", "feminine", "womanhood" and has no manga-related connotations at all.
The stories tend to be about everyday experiences of women living in Japan. Though there are some that cover high school, most cover the lives of adult women. The style also tends to be a more restrained, realistic version of shōjo manga, keeping some of the wispy features and getting rid of the very large sparkly eyes. There are exceptions in the style described above, but what defines josei is some degree of stylistic continuity of comics within this particular demographic (the same is true with different demographics that have different stylistic tendencies).
Josei comics can portray realistic romance, as opposed to the mostly idealized romance of shōjo manga, but it does not always have to be. A famous example of a josei is Honey and Clover, which was animated, which is unusual for josei comics. Josei tends to be both more sexually explicit and contain more mature storytelling, although that is not always true either. It is also not unusual for themes such as infidelity and rape to occur in josei manga target specifically towards more mature audiences. Some other famously popular josei series include Yun Kouga's Loveless, Ai Yazawa's Paradise Kiss, and the award-winning works of Erica Sakurazawa.
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The reported average circulations for some of the top-selling josei manga magazines in 2007 are as follows:
| Magazine title | Reported circulation |
|---|---|
| You | 194,791 |
| Be-Love | 194,333 |
| Kiss | 167,600 |
| Chorus | 162,916 |
| Elegance Eve | 150,000 |
| For Mrs. | 150,000 |
| Romance White Paper Pastel | 150,000 |
| Dessert | 149,333 |
| The Dessert | 141,664 |
| Office You | 117,916 |
For comparison, here are the circulations for the top-selling magazines in other categories for 2007.
| Category | Magazine title | Reported circulation |
|---|---|---|
| Top-selling shōnen manga magazine | Weekly Shōnen Jump | 2,778,750 |
| Top-selling seinen manga magazine | Weekly Young Magazine | 981,229 |
| Top-selling shōjo manga magazine | Ciao | 982,834 |
| Top-selling non-manga magazine | Monthly The Television | 1,018,919 |
(Source for all circulation figures: Japan Magazine Publishers Association[2])
Josei manga (then called Ladies Comics, or Redikomi) began to appear in the 1980s, during a boom period in manga, when the girls who had read shoujo manga in the 1950s and 60s wanted manga for adult women.[3] The first ladies comic magazine, Be-Love, was printed in 1980. At the end of 1980 there were two ladies comics magazines, at the end of 1989 there were over fifty.[4] Early ladies comics were sexually free, and the comics became more and more sexually extreme until the early 1990s.[1] Manga branded as "Ladies' Comics" has acquired a reputation for being low-brow, and "dirty", and the term josei was created to move away from that image.[5]
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