The Tale of Genji, that classic of Japanese literature, may just be the world's first romance novel. Despite that, romance fiction worldwide is often, as scholar Eileen B. Mikals-Adachi puts it, “still viewed as a ‘low’ form of writing in many literary circles.” That's true in Japan, too; Mikals-Adachi is specifically talking about ren'ai shōsetsu, or Japanese romance novels. It's wild to think that the culture that gave us Genji doesn't respect the very genre it spawned (or one of them; the novel's impact and influence can't be overstated), but it's a problem that extends far beyond any one country. If we want to indulge in literary conspiracy theories, one reason for it could be that romance is generally regarded as women's fiction…and women as an audience aren't traditionally very respected. (Looking at you, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and your “damned scribbling women” comment.) And as strange as it may sound, this global disdain for romance fiction can have real impacts on what manga gets licensed for English-language release. I speak, of course, of TL manga, TL being short for “teens' love,” a by-women-for-women genre of manga equivalent to the Western romance genre, because for most of my adult manga reading life, adult manga for women has been noticeably missing from the shelves.
Panel from My Cranky Butler Won't Take His Glasses Off in Bed! © 2020 Sachino Kouzuki
Four years ago, I wrote about Harlequin romances and their manga counterparts. 2022 certainly wasn't the first time manga adaptations of Harlequin romances made their way into English, but it did mark the moment when publisher SB Creative went all-in on bringing both actual adaptations and Harlequin-style manga romances to English-speaking audiences. It was an exciting turning point, and not just because romance is both academically interesting and very enjoyable as a genre: it was also significant because it recognized something important – that little girls who begged their parents to buy them copies of Sailor Moon and Magic Knight Rayearth have grown up to be adult women with disposable incomes…and that they just might want some stories targeted at them.
It's a realization that's been a long time coming. While Viz certainly dabbled in R-rated manga romances, most of their early offerings in that space were aimed at men. They did eventually branch out into titles like Yuki Yoshihara 's Butterflies, Flowers , Maki Enjōji 's An Incurable Case of Love , and Tomu Ohmi 's Midnight Secretary , and of course there was their earlier release of Mayu Shinjo 's Sensual Phrase , but most of these are on the tamer side of what's out there. ( Tokyopop made a run at a dedicated josei imprint in 2004, Passion Fruit, but it didn't focus on racy romances and is outside the scope of this piece.) In 2007, Aurora Publishing launched its Luv Luv line in the first real effort to tap into the market, but it didn't last particularly long. And while you could find racy TL manga on various websites (fan or otherwise), what really seems to have changed the conversation is Seven Seas ' release of Tanishi Kawano 's Fire in his Fingertips in print in 2020.
What makes Kawano's series significant? Explicitness. It took Mayu Shinjo years of drawing racy manga before she began to acknowledge the physical signs of female arousal, and drawing actual genitals was off the table. But Kawano? She leaves nothing to the imagination. Sure, they might not be detailed, but you can tell you're looking at a vulva or a penis, and whether or not that penis is wearing a condom. The story also, unlike many of Luv Luv's titles, spanned multiple volumes, creating a narrative more similar to what Western readers expect from their romance fiction. And Kawano herself wasn't pioneering any of this – she's just the first creator (or one of the first) whose work was licensed for the mainstream paperback manga market.
Ripping off the Bodice
That's even more bizarre when you think about the evolution of romance as a genre, both in the East and in the West. As I mentioned before, Murasaki Shikibu 's 11th-century novel was groundbreaking. Not only did this book establish thematic norms still used in modern fiction (such as a hero and an antihero), but it also primarily revolved around romance, namely that of the protagonist, Hikaru Genji. While a male primary protagonist is slightly unusual in romance fiction today, the book still essentially establishes the dual perspective tradition in romance novels, where readers can get inside the heads of both (or all, in the case of poly romances) romantic leads.
While in the West we can also go back quite a ways – some Medieval romances carry the seeds of the genre – Western romance fiction as we know it today began to rise to popularity with the pulp magazines of the early 20th century, starting with Love Story Magazine in May of 1921. They were tame by our standards, although they absolutely ventured into weird territory, like the mildly infamous “The Clergyman and the Actress” by Beulah Poynter, published in All-Story Love Stories in 1937. Japan got a head start here – the earliest girls' magazine containing similar illustrated stories and poems was published in 1902, Shoujo -kai. There were, of course, women's magazines in other countries by this point, but they weren't necessarily specifically for romance and fiction. Some of the earliest shoujo manga can also be found in these magazines.
Cover of Shojo Sekai Image via www.wikipedia.com
By the American Golden Age of Comics, the pulps began to feed into, and later give way to, comic books, and romance was a bustling genre up through the 1970s. Pre-code comics took some risks (although characters who had premarital sex invariably died), but post-code things got pretty tame…although with the sexual revolution, some creators got a bit saucier. Romance comics were so popular that even authors like Stan Lee wrote them – a particular gem is one from the early 70s called “His Hair is Long, But I Love Him!” Similarly, many early romance manga were created by men for a female audience, with the shift to manga from short stories coming at around the same point, in the 1950s. At this point, there are some very clear parallel paths in the genre, although the emergence of BL comes rather earlier in Japan, at least in the mainstream.
With the rise of the mass market paperback, though, the landscape shifted again, and by the late 1970s, things were morphing into the genre as we know it today. Kathleen Woodiwiss' Shanna (1977) gets a lot of credit for that change; the book was hugely popular. It's also incredibly problematic, using for one of its central conceits the idea that the “hero” wants Shanna so badly that he can't control himself, resulting in her sexual assault. In 1979, Harlequin started translating its novels into Japanese and other languages, and this was so successful that in some countries, such as Germany, homegrown authors were encouraged to use “American” or “Western” pen names to make their books more “trustworthy” or popular. And as romance novels grew in popularity, they often got damned as ladies' porn, with the implication that that was a bad thing. Perhaps that idea that romance fiction is something to be ashamed of is what stalled the American manga market – after all, romance has a huge market share in traditional publishing, so why wouldn't romance readers want to try some manga?
The original cover of Shanna © 1977 Kathleen E. Woodiwiss
One answer may be the fact that American culture treats explicit images as much more “dangerous” than explicit text. Any Steamship title today comes wrapped in plastic, which was the case for earlier offerings as well, but you can saunter over to a different section of the bookstore and open up to page fifty, one hundred, or one hundred fifty (seriously, this is a real pattern) and find something far more explicit. It all goes back to the Comics Code Authority and the moral panics of the 1950s, and that's a lot for a manga publisher to overcome. And it may have felt like asking too much after Luv Luv's short lifespan.
Steaming into the Harbor
Fire in his Fingertips
In 2022,launched their Steamship line, which has always felt like the turning point to me. You'll notice that this is two years aftercame out, so the easy assumption to make is that the publisher's gamble in TL paid off, and it was worth creating a dedicated imprint. According to Sales & Marketing Manager Lianne Sentar , “We've long had our eye on this underserved audience. Asandreaders grow older, many of them crave more risque romance to spice up their bookshelves. Romance novel fans in the West have a broad selection of options, so we're bringing that same philosophy to the manga section: if ladies want it hot, look for the Steamship logo.” The imprint launched with four titles:, and. While all of these are explicit, they also each fill a different subgenre niche:is a reverse harem,is contemporary romance,explores gender dynamics and power kink, andis isekai.
This diversity of subgenre is one of the best things about Steamship. While there are plenty of subgenre repeats, the line seems committed to providing a title for as many different readers as possible. Shifter romance? Loving Moon Dog stars a hero who transforms into a Doberman Pinscher, while Werewolves are Going Crazy Over Me features more traditional werewolves. Dubious consent/noncon romance? Guilty Smile is waiting for you. Sex as vengeance? Revenge: Mrs. Wrong pits two sisters against each other in a twisted game of sex and love. There are several versions of omegaverse, a couple of flavors of expressly fetish manga (size difference, voice kink, etc.), sex espionage…about the only subgenre I haven't seen in the imprint is “why choose,” and that may be because I haven't finished reading Outbride yet. To make it even more impressive, the imprint covers manga, manhwa , and light novels; the only real caveat is that it's limited to heterosexual romances, with BL and GL found in their own dedicated imprints.
From Harlequin to Bodice Ripper
's BisouBisou digital-only imprint is nearly as diverse as Steamship, and for readers who prefer not to advertise what they're reading, it's a very nice selection of titles. It's also cheaper than even the digital editions of' books – while those tend to stay at $9.99 ($13.99-$22.99 in print), BisouBisou's books are priced no higher than $8.99, with many titles coming in at $6.15 or $5.15, and books frequently discounted as low as $1.99. Since romance readers tend to be vociferous, this makes it particularly easy to sample a wide variety of titles or to go through a favorite author's catalog; BisouBisou is also very good at bringing over multiple titles by a single creator, so if you end up liking's work, for example, you have plenty to read – and even better, they release multiple volumes a week, averaging about five new titles. It's an impressive output, and one that speaks to the popularity of romance manga in Japan, because they couldn't be translating and releasing them if they didn't already exist.
Broadly, BisouBisou divides its catalog into three categories: romantasy, historical romance, and contemporary romance. There's some definite overlap between the first two, as “historical” does a lot of heavy lifting at times; for every Taisho Newlywed Romance, there's a The Cold Prime Minister Won't Let Go of His Imperfect Wife, set in a nebulously “European” country sometime between the 18th and 19th centuries. Romantasy titles are pretty easy to recognize on their own, though; there's not much else that The Wolf King's Bride or The Villainess with One Year Left Will Enjoy a Reverse Harem in Her Remaining Life could be. (BisouBisou has a healthy selection of villainess romances and a surprising number of books with “wolf” in the title.)
On the whole, BisouBisou's line is a bit less explicit than Steamship's, but really only in terms of drawing genitals; after all, the line's name translates to “kiss kiss” if they'd wanted to go full porn, they would have called it “BaiserBaiser,” or “fuck fuck.” (As a verb, “baiser” means “to fuck,” which is confusing because “un baiser” is “a kiss.” Ah, French, just as weird as any other language.) These are not what's known in romance fiction as fade-to-black books, however; characters very much have sex on the page, and nipples, both male and female, are omnipresent.
So what's the point? Why should anyone care about this particular genre? Because they care about the readers, who are, by and large, women. To return to Mikals-Adachi, romance fiction, whether in novel or manga form, is about bringing stories to women that they can enjoy and relate to. She describes prolific Japanese romance novelist's works, saying, “without question [they] 'celebrate female power,' in the same way that most romance writing does, as [American author] Jayne Ann Krentz states in her introduction to.” While Yuikawa is specifically referring to the novel form of the genre (and remember that Steamship does include some of those in their lineup), she could be talking about TL manga as well. Despite a trove of subgenres that may look antifeminist, spicy romance manga puts the power in the heroine's hands.gets to decide if she's going to date the pushy CEO, if she's going to let the weredoberman into her apartment, or if she's going to help the hero. If she decides she no longer wants him, she gets to leave. And of course, these are women in charge of their own sexuality, learning and heeding their own physical pleasure. Each BisouBisou, Steamship, or other TL title simply transfers those elements to a visual form.
Page from Loving Moon Dog © Nanpei Yamada 2019 / HAKUSENSHA, INC.
In 2017, romance authors Christina Lauren (a two-author team) wrote an article for TIME magazine where they discussed some of the misconceptions about what they do: “Mothers of our kids' friends would ask us if our books were 'trashy.' Book clubs would invite us to come and talk about our novels, and then ask if we had ‘unnatural obsessions’ with sex. People misunderstood why we left our [prior] jobs, with some hilariously assuming we had left to make pornographic films; in their heads, writing romance and making porn were that tightly connected.” If you've been a romance reader, you're probably familiar with these assumptions; hell, if you've been in the anime fandom long enough, you've likely heard them hurled at anime and manga as a whole. And that means that you know that such accusations are both ridiculous and untrue.
It's worth thinking about why it took until 2022 for the English manga industry to finally make real progress in bodice ripper-equivalent titles. Why was it okay for Urotsukidoji to be released in 2002 but not a TL title? Patriarchy? Archaic notions about female pleasure? Outmoded fears of female sexuality? The idea that vaginas are icky? Take your pick. But even if you never pick one up, thank Seven Seas and HarperCollins Japan , and any other publisher who is putting out volumes of raunchy manga aimed at ladies. Because we all deserve to have books aimed squarely at us.
Raunchy Readings: A Brief Selection
With a veritable embarrassment of riches at this point in the smutty romance treasure chest, where do you start? My first recommendation is to browse Steamship's page or BisouBisou's Amazon page . But if that's too overwhelming, here's a list of a few titles you might enjoy.
I Wanted to Give Birth in Secret, but My Brilliant CEO Had Other Plans by Megumu Minami , based on a novel by Mira Samon
Publisher: Bisou Bisou
Trope(s): Secret Baby, CEO
I admit it, I picked this one up because I thought the title was entertainingly stupid, but I ended up surprised by how much I enjoyed the two-volume series. Heroine Haruka is an appealing mix of naïve and very much in control of her own life, and if hero Ren is perhaps a bit too single-minded in his focus (he literally buys the company she works for), he also clearly adores her. The central conflict could of course be solved by a single conversation, but the ending is really very sweet, in a delightfully soapy way.
Healer for the Shadow Hero by Kyu Azagishi and Ako
Publisher: Steamship
Trope(s): Only She Can Save Him
In a LitRPG world, Nanna's special power is that she can cure any one person of their ailment if she gives them her virginity – and that person is going to be the so-called “shadow hero” of the kingdom, who is suffering from a mysterious disease. But what starts as a requirement morphs into love as they both realize that they're carrying wounds in their hearts as well. It's an appealing mix of steamy and adorable, which more than makes up for some of the stiffness in the art.
Midnight Secretary by Tomu Ohmi
Trope(s): Vampire, CEO
Vampires are rarely my thing, but there's something so utterly over-the-top about Midnight Secretary that it's hard to resist. Is it good? Not objectively – heroine Kaya isn't quite as strong as Ohmi wants her to be, and hero Kyohei is an old-school jerk. But the art is luscious, and the plot is just this side of crazy (whichever side you want that to be). It's not hard to see why this was one of Viz's early romance manga efforts.
The Demon Marquis' Dangerous Infatuation by Isotetsu based on a novel by Hiroro Akizakura
Publisher: BisouBisou
Trope(s): She Doesn't Know She's Beautiful
Poor Melissa has spent her life being told by society that she's ugly because she's got large breasts. She squashes herself into terrible binders, convinced no man will ever want or love her. Luckily for her, she faints in the arms of Marquis Grey, who cuts off her corset and discovers the bounty within. This all sounds terribly trashy (and it is), but the heart of the story is Melissa learning that she doesn't have to conform to anyone's standards – because her husband may have initially been attracted to her body, but before too long it's Melissa herself that he loves.
Got other recommendations? Share them in the forum!