Nana (manga)

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 5th of March 2001, two women who share the name Nana meet in Tokyo. Both are 20 years old. That coincidence of names is where Ai Yazawa's manga Nana begins. One of them has come to the city to make her name as a singer. The other has come mostly for love. They agree to become roommates, partly to save money on rent, and that small decision pulls the rest of the story along behind it. Their personalities clash, yet something keeps them together. What makes that bond so strong? What happens when fame, jealousy and romance press on it from every side? And why does a story that readers followed for years now sit unfinished?

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• 2. Hachi and Her Circle

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  Nana Komatsu is called Hachi because Nana Osaki compared her kindness and faithfulness to the dog Hachikō. The nickname also keeps the two Nanas apart on the page. Hachi falls in love quickly and often. In her third year of high school she carried on a secret affair with Takashi Asano, a married man. It ended when he was abruptly transferred to Tokyo. Her imagination runs wild, and when misfortune strikes she tends to blame a figure she calls the "demon lord".

  Shōji Endō is the boyfriend Hachi moved to Tokyo to be near. He is a struggling art student who works as a waiter, and he later becomes her ex. Sachiko Kawamura, a coworker at his restaurant, becomes his new girlfriend.

  Junko Saotome is the friend who keeps Hachi grounded. She is sensible, blunt and far more emotionally mature, and she keeps nudging Hachi toward independence and responsibility. Junko shares an apartment with her boyfriend Kyōsuke Takakura, who is also friends with Hachi and Shōji. His easygoing attitude can make him look like a slacker, but he is actually quite perceptive.

  Natsuko Komatsu, Hachi's mother, is kind and understanding, and Nana Osaki considers her cool. Hachi's older sister Nao lives close to the family home.

  Sakagami, a 38-year-old woman, is Hachi's boss at her new job in magazine production. She is crude and scornful and will insult even the smallest mistake. At the Jackson's Burger restaurant, a waiter named Kōichi Satō is friendly with Hachi, Junko and Shōji. Oddly, they all call him by his full name.

  Hachi's world is full of ordinary people with ordinary troubles. The Nana who named her lives among musicians, and her band is called Black Stones.

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• 3. The Punk Band

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  Shin'ichi Okazaki told his bandmates he was 18, but he was really 15. Black Stones let him stay even after learning the truth. The band, shortened to Blast, plays punk rock with Nana Osaki as lead vocalist. Shin took the bass after Ren left, and he seems mature for his age. He confides in the guitarist Nobu and views Hachi as a mother figure. Because he was born and raised in Sweden, Japanese culture is unfamiliar to him.

  Nobuo Terashima, called Nobu, plays guitar and has been Nana Osaki's best friend since high school. He does not smoke and has a low tolerance for alcohol. His wealthy family owns a Japanese-style inn, and they disowned him when he chose a career in music.

  Yasushi Takagi, known as Yasu, drums for the band. By day he is a trainee lawyer. He acts as the group's leader and handles the business partnerships and financial decisions that its success requires. His maturity makes him something like an older brother to the others.

  The band gathers a large following and eventually signs with Gaia Records. Gō Kanemoto leads the corporation that owns the label. Blast's manager, Ginpei Shiroboshi, is gay and makes no secret of his interest in Yasu.

  Mai Tsuzuki, an ardent fan since the band's earliest days, goes by the name Misato Uehara. She says a fortune-teller promised the name would bring her closer to Nana. It is also the name of Nana's half-sister, which may be the real reason she chose it. She later joins the staff at Gaia.

  The band's lodgings are a hostel, guarded by Yamagishi, who looks like a gangster and often sleeps at his post. Miu Shinoda, an actress who seems aloof but is perceptive, lives there too. So does Yuri Kōsaka, a porn star pressured by her manager to keep making films when her debt is almost paid.

  The bassist whom Shin replaced was Ren Honjō, and he did not leave music. He left to join Trapnest.

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• 4. The Other Band

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  Ren Honjō grew up in an orphanage alongside Yasu. He found school boring and preferred to practice guitar alone. Before Trapnest, he was Black Stones' original bassist and Nana Osaki's boyfriend. When he left for Tokyo to join Trapnest, the two broke up, because Nana Osaki felt his success would cheapen her own fame. They later reconciled. Ren is deeply in love with her, yet he senses a growing distance between them as Black Stones becomes famous.

  Reira Serizawa is Trapnest's 22-year-old vocalist and lyricist. She has been friends with Takumi, and in love with him, since childhood. It frustrates her that he sees her only as a muse and the face of the band. In high school she dated Yasu for two years.

  Takumi Ichinose, 23, leads Trapnest and plays bass under the stage name "Takumi". He is handsome and something of a playboy. He is also a workaholic, devoted to shaping the image of the band, especially Reira's.

  Naoki Fujieda, the drummer, is sharp-tongued. Takumi awakened his interest in music back in middle school, and he hoped playing in a band would attract girls. He became the band's playboy and tricked his bandmates into funding their cause.

  Mitsuru Narita runs Cookie Music. He is flamboyant and reasonably talented, and he often works with Takumi on Trapnest's music and marketing. He also supplies Ren with drugs, a powder that Takumi later identifies as heroin. In exchange, Ren must keep writing hit songs. The story implies that Narita introduced Ren to heroin and regretted it once Ren became addicted.

  Takumi's attention, meanwhile, is about to settle on a young woman from Black Stones' circle.

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• 5. Tangled Hearts

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  Hachi ends things with her unfaithful boyfriend and soon becomes involved with Takumi, Trapnest's bassist. The closeness complicates her friendship with Nana Osaki, who is rekindling her relationship with Ren, Trapnest's guitarist. Hachi also develops feelings for Nobu. Then she discovers she is pregnant and marries Takumi. Their daughter is Satsuki Ichinose.

  Nana Osaki is distressed by the growing distance between herself and Hachi. Her answer is to raise Black Stones to greater success, in the hope of winning the friendship back.

  Search magazine runs the tabloid coverage of both bands. Its editor-in-charge, Kudō, is meant to answer to a higher supervisor named Yokoyama, but he prefers impulsive action. He sends Miyake and Kurada to investigate in his place. Yoshiyuki Arai, the editor-in-chief, has been married for two years and often scolds Kudō for his brash methods. Minoru Kurada is a photographer hired to track Nana Osaki and Ren. He disagrees with Kudō and claims he never forgets a face once he has seen it.

  A tabloid story exposing the relationship between Nana Osaki and Ren brings Black Stones widespread recognition, and the band debuts professionally. The engagement between the two still deteriorates, driven by her jealousy and by Ren's addiction. As media scrutiny grows, Hachi uncovers details about Nana Osaki's family, including her birth mother.

  Shin is arrested before the band's first tour, and Nana Osaki turns to a solo career. Soon afterward, Ren dies in a car accident. She grieves, and she begins to question how heavily she has leaned on Hachi.

  Years later in the story, rumors circulate that Nana Osaki has died. Hachi and their friends discover she fled to England, and they set out to find her. Readers who followed that search had no way of knowing how long they would wait for answers.

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• 6. Ink and Interruption

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  In 1999, Shueisha launched the magazine Cookie, a sister publication of Ribon, and asked Ai Yazawa for two one-shot stories. She made the two stories related, so they would be easy to follow if the publisher chose to serialize them. Together they became the two-part prologue of Nana.

  Yazawa had drawn I'm No Angel in the early 1990s and had wanted then to tell a story about a rockabilly band. She had already given one of that book's main characters a pompadour. So for Nana she turned to a punk band instead.

  On the 26th of May 2000, as Cookie relaunched as a monthly, Nana began its serialization in the July 2000 issue. The run lasted 84 chapters and ended on the 26th of May 2009, in the July 2009 issue.

  Shueisha gathered the chapters into 21 tankōbon volumes under its Ribon Mascot Comics Cookie imprint, published between the 15th of May 2000 and the 13th of March 2009. Each volume carries a short bonus comic called Junko's Room, in which Junko owns a bar and characters from Yazawa's other works make guest appearances. The latest four chapters have never appeared in a volume.

  Clothing from Vivienne Westwood appears throughout the series, because Yazawa herself is a fan of the brand. Some of the outfits come from her personal collection.

  Viz Media licensed the manga for North America and ran it in its anthology Shojo Beat, from the debut issue of July 2005 until the August 2007 issue. The 21 volumes were published between the 6th of December 2005 and the 6th of July 2010. Viz added the series to its Viz Manga digital service in May 2023. On the 24th of January 2025, it announced a 2-in-1 omnibus edition beginning in the fourth quarter of that year.

  In June 2009, a month after the last serialized chapter, it was announced that the series would pause because Yazawa had fallen ill. She returned from the hospital in early April 2010, but no one said when or whether the manga would resume. At her 2022 art exhibition, she said she would like to continue the series once she was able.

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• 7. Screen and Song

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  The first live-action film, Nana, opened on the 3rd of September 2005. Mika Nakashima played Nana Osaki and Aoi Miyazaki played Hachi. Ryuhei Matsuda took the role of Ren, Tetsuji Tamayama played Takumi, Hiroki Narimiya played Nobu, and Kenichi Matsuyama played Shin. The DVD arrived on the 3rd of March 2006. The film earned more than ¥4 billion at the Japanese box office and stayed in the top 10 for several weeks.

  A sequel, Nana 2, premiered on the 9th of December 2006. Three actors did not return. Yui Ichikawa replaced Miyazaki as Hachi, Nobuo Kyo replaced Matsuda as Ren, and Kanata Hongō replaced Matsuyama as Shin.

  The television anime ran for 47 episodes on Nippon TV, from the 5th of April 2006 to the 28th of March 2007. Madhouse produced it together with Nippon Television, VAP and Shueisha. Morio Asaka directed. Tomoko Konparu handled series composition, Kunihiko Hamada designed the characters, and Tomoki Hasegawa composed the music. The makers wanted the anime to stand level with the manga, so they adapted only up to the first chapter of volume 12 and avoided filler. In April 2007, Shueisha editor Junko Koseki and Madhouse managing director Masao Maruyama said they would wait for the manga's conclusion before making more.

  Two singers gave the bands their sound. Anna Tsuchiya, credited as Anna inspi' Nana, provided the singing voice of Nana Osaki. She performed the openings "Rose" and "Lucy" and the ending "Kuroi Namida". Olivia Lufkin, credited as Olivia inspi' Reira, sang for Reira Serizawa, including the opening "Wish" and the ending "Winter Sleep" for episodes 43 and 44. Tsuchiya also performed "Stand By Me" for episodes 45 and 46. VAP collected the episodes on 17 DVD volumes between the 7th of July 2006 and the 21st of November 2007.

  In 2003, the manga inspired two image albums. King Records released Punk Night: From Nana on the 26th of September, and Momo & Grapes released Nana's Song is My Song on the 6th of November. A tribute album, Love for Nana: Only 1 Tribute, followed from EMI Music Japan on the 16th of March 2005. Contributors included Glen Matlock of the Sex Pistols, the Canadian singer-songwriter Skye Sweetnam and various Japanese artists.

  Konami released a PlayStation 2 game on the 17th of March 2005. A PlayStation Portable game followed on the 6th of July 2006, and Konami issued a Nintendo DS game on the 21st of June 2007.

  Viz Media released both films in North America in 2008. It had licensed the anime in 2007 and put it out on four DVD box sets, with an English dub, between the 9th of September 2009 and the 13th of April 2010. The Funimation Channel began broadcasting that dub in 2009. After Viz lost the rights, Sentai Filmworks re-licensed the series in 2021 and premiered it on its Hidive service on the 22nd of April. A SteelBook Blu-ray came on the 22nd of February 2022, and a regular Blu-ray edition followed on the 17th of May 2022.

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• 8. Reception and Sales

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  In 2003, Nana shared the 48th Shogakukan Manga Award in the shōjo category with Kaze Hikaru. The manga had already been named a Jury Recommended Work in the Manga Division of the Japan Media Arts Festival Awards, at the sixth festival in 2002 and the eighth in 2004. Oricon Style named it the top favorite shōjo manga in 2005, and in 2006 it was nominated for the 10th Osamu Tezuka Cultural Award.

  In the United States, the Young Adult Library Services Association listed Nana among its Great Graphic Novels for Teens in 2007. Deb Aoki of About.com placed it fifth in her list of must-read shōjo manga. She called it "a beautifully-drawn series that is filled with heartfelt drama, big city glamor, fabulous fashion, rock and roll sass and many unexpected twists." She also included it among essential manga for libraries and pointed to its mature themes.

  A 2012 survey by Goo, covering 1,939 people, placed Nana among the favorite manga of women. The Independent argued that part of its appeal in Japan came from setting a rebellious character beside one who holds to traditional values.

  The sales numbers climbed steadily. By 2005, the first twelve volumes had sold more than 22 million copies. By 2008, the total passed 43.6 million. By 2019, more than 50 million copies were in circulation, which places Nana among the best-selling manga series of all time.

  Individual volumes did remarkably well. The 18th volume was the second highest-selling manga volume of 2007. In 2008, the 19th ranked third with 1,645,128 copies, and the 20th ranked fifth with 1,431,335. In the first half of 2009, the 21st ranked third, selling 1.4 million copies. By the end of 2009, Nana was the sixth best-selling manga series of the year in Japan, at 3,122,146 copies. In the United States, the 21st volume debuted ninth on the New York Times Graphic Books list for the week of the 10th of July.

  The anime reached a peak television rating of 6.3 percent in the Kanto region, unusually high for a late-night show. That mark fell in November 2008, when Nodame Cantabile reached 6.6 percent, yet the manga's volumes kept climbing the sales charts into 2009.

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