Okay. So, I started this site around 1998 or so. It’s 2020 as I write this, so that’s a pretty long time ago now. It’s kind of amazing that I have managed to keep this thing online for so long! The site has moved around a bit and had a few makeovers, but the review content has pretty much stayed the same.
I made this site to celebrate my horrible money-draining habit — buying random shoujo manga. I purchase manga based solely on cute cover art, having no idea whatsoever what the stories may be, or often who the artists are. I have found some pretty cool manga series this way. At the time I started this, there weren’t very many sites that focused on Shoujo Manga. There were a bunch of series-specific sites (like for Sailor Moon) or web-rings for character shrines and such, but I wanted to make this page in hopes of drawing attention to fun series that had not been licensed in hopes that a publisher would see and maybe it would get picked up somehow. I have no idea if this helped anything at all, but it gave me a purpose, lol.
Shoujo Manga is manga aimed at young and early teen girls. However I have included some series on this page that are aimed at a somewhat older audience- late teens, young women or housewives. Technically that manga shouldn’t really be considered shoujo but instead should be classified as josei, “ladies” or maybe even seinen manga. However, to make things simpler for me, I am lumping every manga aimed towards a female (young or old) under this shoujo page heading. Just be aware that shoujo is really stuff aimed at younger girls and can be defined by the target audience of the magazine that the original serialized run of the comic was published in.
A note on my summaries…
I provide a scan of the cover, along with general info about it (title, author, ISBN, publisher). I provide the ISBN so you can use it to search for the manga on sites like Amazon, Amazon JP, Kinokuniya, or Honto, etc. On some of these sites, if the ISBN I provide doesn’t yield any results, try removing the hyphens in it and search again.
Then I babble a bit about the story inside. When I list the author’s name, I will put the person’s last name in all caps, so you can tell which is the first name and which is the last (or family) name. I used to provide a picture from the inside of the manga, but I am not sure if I will bring that part back yet. Looking back now, in 2020, at some of my twenty year-old summaries, I cringe a little at my chatty enthusiasm, but I’m leaving all my summaries up anyway, even if they are embarrassing. Who knows, maybe some of y’all will think the manga series are cool too, pick them up as well, and then they will gain more recognition and rise above random status!
Please also note that all of these series I am summarizing are in Japanese, and, while my Japanese skills are okay enough for me to do summaries, complete translations are a bit beyond me, so please don’t ask me to translate for you. I wish I could, but I can’t. It would really suck, lol. I also have no idea if these series have been scanlated, so don’t ask me about that either. I do try to note in the summary if a series has been licensed in the US, which is where I am based. I don’t know about license status in other countries.
I do not provide scanlations or translations on this site, nor do I provide links to sites where you can read manga online. I trust that everyone can manage to use a search engine to find that stuff if you are that desperate, but I don’t condone it. All of these series that I talk about here are volumes that I purchased and own the actual books for.
Thank you for visiting!