Is Nana Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Overview

Nana is Ai Yazawa's landmark josei drama, one of the most beloved and emotionally raw comics ever made — and one of the most heartbreaking, for reasons both inside and outside the story. It begins with a chance meeting: two twenty-year-old women, both named Nana, sit beside each other on a train to Tokyo and later end up sharing an apartment. Nana Komatsu — nicknamed "Hachi" — is sweet, impulsive, and forever chasing love and belonging. Nana Osaki is guarded, magnetic, and fiercely ambitious, a punk vocalist determined to make her band famous on her own terms. From that odd-couple friendship, Yazawa spins a sprawling, intimate saga of love, music, fame, jealousy, and the bittersweet ache of growing up. It ran in Cookie, is published in English by Viz, and stands at 21 volumes.

What it does well

Its characters are astonishingly real. Yazawa writes people — flawed, contradictory, achingly human — with a precision that makes Nana feel less like fiction than like eavesdropping on real lives. The two Nanas and the messy constellation of lovers, bandmates, and friends around them are so fully realized that their joys and heartbreaks land with overwhelming force. Few manga capture the emotional texture of your twenties this truthfully.

It's also gorgeously stylish. Yazawa came from fashion, and it shows — the clothes, the punk-rock aesthetic, the cool, expressive art give the series an unmistakable identity, and the music scene it depicts feels alive. It's a mood as much as a story.

And it's emotionally fearless. Nana digs into toxic relationships, ambition versus love, codependency, and self-destruction without flinching or moralizing, and the result is a drama of rare honesty and devastating power. When it hurts, it hurts because it's true.

Where it falls short

The enormous catch is that it's unfinished. Yazawa halted Nana in 2009 due to illness, and despite saying she hopes to complete it, no new chapters have come in over fifteen years. The story stops mid-stream, with major arcs unresolved — and because the series is built on a framing device hinting at heartbreak to come, that lack of an ending is genuinely painful. You will get deeply invested in a story that, for now, has no conclusion.

It's also heavy and mature, not a comfort read. The relationships can be toxic and the tone is often melancholy, with smoking, sex, drug use, and emotional damage throughout; readers wanting lightness or healthy romance should look elsewhere. This is raw, adult, sometimes harrowing drama.

Verdict

Nana is a masterpiece — a stylish, emotionally devastating, profoundly human drama that ranks among the best manga ever made, and essential reading for anyone who loves character-driven stories. The catch is enormous: it's been unfinished since 2009, and you'll invest everything in a story with no current ending. If you can accept that, the existing volumes are unforgettable and well worth your heart. Just go in knowing it may break it twice.