Nana

(Viz, 1999-Present)
™ and ©1999 Yazawa Manga Seisakusho
Black and white series; read right to left.

Nana is the story of two 20-year-old women who share the same first name and nothing else. Nana Komatsu is desperately looking for love with a tendency to hook up with emotionally unavailable older men; Nana Osaki is her polar opposite, a sexually adventurous would-be punk diva who never lets relationships get in the way of where she’s going. Both are on their way to Tokyo to make their dreams come true.

Each of the book’s separate “tracks” (the Nanas never meet, at least not in this volume) are naturalistic in execution; the characters and their situations invariably seem real, whether it’s Nana O’s heady club scene or Nana K’s increasingly desperate attempts to find and hold a man.

There’s sexually charged material in this manga, but it’s nice to see it handled in such a genuinely frank fashion; there’s nothing about that it that’s salacious. (For the most part, anyway; after a show Nano O gives one of her female fans a full-on kiss that screams she’s either showing off or acting out.)

— S. A. Bennett

Jump to issue:

Notes

Writer

Artist