Summary
The best girls love manga have official English translations now, thanks to English licensors taking notice of fan demand. Yuri fans have a wide breadth of genres and art styles to choose from. Shoujo ai aficionados can also easily choose between one-shots, one to three volume hits, and longer works.
More importantly, officially licensed, English-translated girls love manga have stories beyond the school yard. Office ladies, older adults, and college-age gals find love and self-growth across worlds. Schoolgirl love also goes beyond the “will-they, won’t-they” and “I can’t like girls because I’m a girl”. Some even go the distance and follow the girls as they grow up and grow older.
Manga Volumes In English
Aya is your typical gal, full of energy, sociable, and fashion-loving. She’s also completely smitten with the cool guy who mans the record store she frequents. Problem is, that guy is Mitsuki Koga, her quiet, glasses-wearing classmate who’d much prefer to remain anonymous.
The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn’t A Guy At Allis immediately distinct thanks to its green-backed panels and strong lines. Aya and Kouga’s development’s made vibrant by its presentation and the artist’s strength in crafting expressions. In addition to these, the webcomic-turned-manga’s quick-and-punchy chapters make it easy to get hooked onAya and Kouga’s budding romance.
Shizuku Hoshikawa is not the most sociable person, nor has she recovered from her tragic writing past enough to love her own writing again. But when she goes out of her way to destroy her first and last novel, popular girl Kaori Asaka finds and reads it. The next day, Kaori tells Shizuku how much she loved it, and begs her to base her next novel on their love story.
Utterly confused, Shizukuspends the summerplaying a game of “pretend love”, as Kaori called it. Shizuku’s confusion and slow unfreezing is as sweet as Kaori’s true intentions are intriguing. Their chemistry hooks enough to keep readers’ attention and distract them fromThe SUmmer You Were There’s ominous title and intro.
Who hasn’t joked about dropping their job or school, apartment, and life to run away, much less with someone they love? For Haru and Hii-chan, it’s not a joke. Just as the start of their adult life after college threatens to change their life, the lovebirds run off to live together at Hii-chan’s aunt’s beach villa.
Haru and Hii-chan frolic under the sun, restore the villa, andlive as a lovey-dovey couple. But soon enough, the reality of living in a country where same-sex marriage isn’t recognized nationally, plus rigid gender norms, sink in. Although short,Throw Away The Suit Togetherpacks a punch.
4 (as of July 2024)
There are dozens of English-licensed mangas, and likely hundreds of Japanese-only titles, that have protagonists visit brothels. But not a lot of them have a female protagonist who drops trou at a lesbian brothel. Asumi is built different though, as she’s lured to one by the promise of finding a girl who looks like her childhood crush.
Asumi-chan is Interested in Lesbian Brothels!follows Asumi’s quest to find her childhood crush Mai by going through a brothel’s cast of cute girls. In-between non-explicit sex, Asumi finds out more about herself, her sexual preferences, and lesbian-only spaces.
3
Alice Keating is a prodigy of witchcraft and surrounded by faculty and fans excited about her potential. But Mari Muguruma, a seemingly mundane student, catches her eye after she performs a rare feat of resurrection magic. Under her tutelage, Mari learns more about a world that seeks revenge on humanity, while Alice’s love for her blooms.
A Witch’s Love at the End of the Worldrevolves around Alice and Mari, but itsworld and loreare deep enough to hold fascination. The art style is also fairly simple, which makes pages with detailed work a delight to come across. As a finished work, Alice and Mari’s story is also fairly paced and dotted with a unique canon about witchcraft.
6
Doctor Mel does something regularly that real doctors normally have to schedule: sex. But sex to Mel is release, and any kind of emotion doesn’t figure into her life. That is until she meets Lynn, a heart patient determined to live lively days despite being at death’s door.
Lynn’s refusal to sign papers for a heart transfer, her personality, and dogged energy makes Mel’s heart beat faster for the first time in years.Pulsefollows Mel and Lynn as theygrapple with Lynn’s decisionsand inevitable fate through a webcomic with simple and effective layouts. Art gets better with every ten chapters, and the writer’s capacity to carry tragedy definitely grows at every arc.
5
Bodyguard romanceRiddle Story of Devilstarts with Azuma Tokaku transferring to Myojo Academy for the sole purpose of killing Haru Ichinose. Azuma’s determined to kill Haru first as part of Class Black, a class formed for the sole purpose of pitting child assassins against each other.
But when Azuma gets to know Haru, who was raised to be a target for assassins, she decides to keep her safe instead. So goesAkuma no Riddle, a work that highlights the charm of its cast full of girls with simple and recognizable silhouettes. The cast full of lesbians also get their ship teases in, and the main couple ofAzuma and Haruhave notable progress outside of teasing.
Iori Tanaka has a complicated habit of hooking up with married men and drowning her sorrows at a bar. She’s forced to reconsider her life when, after one drunken binge, she wakes up naked beside bar worker Minami Sendou.
Iori and Minami are just one ofAssorted Entanglement’s many lesbian couples wrapped up in complicated circumstances. Whether it’s their feelings for each other, family situation, past love lives, or current life state, these ladies cut through life’s many knots to find each other.
Assorted Entanglementsis worth reading for its assortment of love stories. Its couples are also diverse in terms of age, life situation, and complications. Soft curves and sweetness in character designs and an eye-pleasing palette also make it a breeze to read through.
Roll Over and Die: I Will Fight for an Ordinary Life with My Love and Cursed Sword!is a mouthful of a title for a manga adaptation, but it’s all thanks to its light novel roots. Either way, the title’s a concise summary for protagonist Flum Apricot’s life mission after her party sells her to slavery.
Flum uses hersecond chance at life, taken after awakening her secret power, to survive in spite of her corrupted world. Serving as her light, unknowingly at first, is her fellow ex-slave Milkit who catches on to their developing relationship way ahead of Flum.
As a series,Roll Over and Dieis grimdark and unabashed in how it explores the implications of a dark fantasy world. The setting highlights how precious Flum and Milkit’s connection is, and how important it is that their love keeps them sane.
Midori broke up with Maki in high school on graduation day after declaring they’re both too old to date girls. Flash forward ten years later, and Midori’s pregnant andengaged to a manlike a “proper” adult. Yet she couldn’t help but reconnect with Maki, who she meets at the clinic Maki works at.
Run Away With Me, Girlis a cute yet sober exploration of regrets, buried sexuality, and second chances. The manga doesn’t shy away from showing Maki’s vulnerability and inability to get over Midori. Midori Stepford smiling through her fiance’s abuse and misogyny is also taken seriously. Their way back to each other is tough, yet Maki never stops asking Midori to run away with her.
