But Mr. Turin, what is seinen?
Little kid, totally not taken from a stock photo, I’m glad you made that question!
You see, in Japan there are of course genres. Action, drama, comedy, romance… but there are known terms for demographics, for specific market sectors. So you can say so and so work is intended for, I don’t know, mature women. They are:
Shonen, or ‘for boys’. Examples: Dragon Ball, Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, Gintama, Slam Dunk.
Shojo, or ‘for girls’. Examples : Sailor Moon, Fruit Basket, Yona Of The Dawn, Vampire Knight, Ouran Host Club.
Seinen, for ‘young men / men’. Examples : Ghost in the Shell, Akira, Berserk, Adolf, Monster, Devilman.
Josei, for ‘young women / women’. Examples : Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu, Princess Jellyfish, Nana, Chihayafuru, Gokusen.
There are some other terms, like Gekiga, which was a bit in between a style focused on dramatic realism and more indie flair, for a older demographics sector, and in any case fell in disuse in the 80s, now using Seinen as a catch-all term.
To complicate things, you have to learn how mangas are published in Japan, they are (mostly? or all? I never heard of a manga being published directly) published first in manga magazines, which are big monthly or weekly magazines where series are… well, serialized. These magazines are the ones people are usually referred as shonen, seinen, etc, with the implication that shonen magazines publish shonen stories, shojo magazines publish shojo stories, etc. Because well, if you are the editor of a shojo magazine, you aren’t going to publish a gore horror story right? They know their audience.
In fact, several shonen magazines have ‘Shonen’ in their title, to clearly indicate they are for a shonen audience. Except… not all magazines are the same, not even the same for shonen magazines, some are a bit more for youngish, others for a bit more adult kids.
Because this relation between comic and magazine is a generalized simplification, that works ok most of the time yeah, but there are some exceptions from time to time, comic A in magazine B that is published even if the style is out of the norm for them, and apart from that, you have the fact that the whole categorization system is like any other categorization system, and you will have both works and magazines that happen to be a bit in between two categories, instead of squarely falling into one cleanly.
I remember years ago how an admin of a manga site said to me that Gunslinger Girl (a hard seinen imo, both in plot, themes and violence) was a shonen manga because it published on shonen magazine.
Shonen, surprise surprise, is the most popular market. Yes, even if in Japan more people read comics than in Europe or USA, and it’s less strange for an adult to read a comic, the majority of comics are still directed to younger audiences.
It’s full of titles with action and adventure, with an extra focus on the action, the fights, as you may know if you have read or watched Dragon Ball or Naruto or whatever ‘battle manga’. Some of them are essentially a sequence of fights, one after another. Which doesn’t means action is the exclusive genre, others like comedy or sports are usual for shonen, and from time to time a shonen romance can get popular.
While technically it’s ‘for boys’, because it contains the more popular/mainstream manga, many of its stories are also read and enjoyed by girls*, or by older people that in theory they are written for. Not that different from superhero market! :P
*: in fact one of the latest hits of the decade, Demon Slayer, has been super popular with the girls.
Shojo, on the other hand, can be considered as more ‘exclusive’ to the girls. Not that it can’t be enjoyed by boys, too. The stereotype (which may not be fair for all shojo, but we want to generalize) is that 85-90% of it is romance, and more specifically it’s romance written by women and for girls, so it’s all very rosy (sometimes literally, with flower or bubbles motives drawn at the side of some panels) and saccharine.
I feel that with Seinen and Josei, this difference by genre of the reader is decreased. The audience is more mature, and they just want to enjoy a good story. I liked lots of josei, and I guess lots of women enjoyed seinen too. I have a lady friend who is super fan of Mushishi (a seinen), for example.
I read sometimes that seinen is “for men 18 to 25 years old”, but in practical terms, it’s 18 and above. I read works that can be enjoyed by 25 years old, and 35, and 45 years old… it’s the equivalent imo to any normal adult film. In that sense, while it may use some themes more than others (college years stories, crime stories, science fiction) because it’s more oriented to males, but as I said, I think there is less difference between women stories and men stories once you reach to this age bracket. Seinen can be incredibly varied, covering basically every existing genre, and well, it’s the category where I personally ‘thrive’. As you will see 90% of what I’m going to post is going to be seinen.
One more thing, imo there is seinen and ‘seinen’. Adult comics and ‘adult’ comics. There is a sub-cateogry of seinen that I think they feel more like shonen, with lots of elements that feel similar but just the ‘adult’ version, with a more edgy protagonist, with more blood in the fights, and with tits. This is why I call them ‘seinen’ in quotes, because to me it’s so clear that the target audience is the edgy 15 years male old audience.
Josei manga is perhaps the less known category but it actually have some hidden gems. As shojo, it has perhaps a majority of love stories, but other genres like horror, comedy or slice of life as very much present. The difference of course, it’s the most realistic approach to the stories, with deeper characters, sometimes focusing on real, mundane issues. Still, there is some variety, from almost-shojo with college girls (instead of highschool girls), to more harsh stories about drug abuse.
There is a joke about how secretly it has the best smut manga, because here unlike in shojo, people fuck, and women authors write hotter smut than men.
Again, always remember that all this is, in the end, just labels people apply after the fact. Some works will be 35% in one place, 65% in others, or 50/50% and you can’t exactly decided what it is, or it will be subjective, or just will be hard to classify.
