How to Read Manga
- ellery34
- Jul 22
- 3 min read
Updated: Jul 24
There are thousands of amazing stories that people will never read because they were written in a different language than any they know. Thankfully, many stories have been translated—a premier example of this being manga books you can find in libraries or bookstores.
Even so, there are still problems with reading these books. You open a manga and... it says on the first page that this is actually the back of the book? What??
In reality, this is not a very unique thing. The vast majority of manga are formatted wildly differently than graphic novels from English-speaking countries.
How are they formatted?
Manga, or Japanese comics, are read in the opposite direction from familiar books. That is, the first page of a manga is located where the last page of a normal books would be and vice-versa; in order to flip to the next page, you have to turn the left page over, rather than the right one.
The little message one can find on the last page (such as the image on the left) is to help clue in someone who is new to manga, and not alienate them from the genre.
While that alone isn't too difficult to get used to, it gets more complicated. This is because in order to read manga, you must also read each panel and text box in reverse order. This is typically also shown at the back of each manga, with little numbers on both the panels and the text boxes to show the order of reading.
To put the style of writing into words, you read each panel/text box from right to left, prioritizing horizontal movement over vertical movement—you only go down to the next level of panels once you've exhausted the current level.
Sometimes, such as in the picture below, instead of having one large panel in the horizontal level, there can instead be several smaller panels stacked on top of each other. Should this occur, then you have to identify where the grouping of smaller panels is, then read that group as if it were it's own, smaller page.
Text boxes work on a similar principle. However, they usually aren't all the exact same distance from the bottom of the page, so one can read text boxes while more loosely following the rules.
Additionally, if two series of text boxes are close enough to each other (such as in the example to the left), you have to read both series, alternating which series you read from, until they both end. This is because these typically represent conversations that are slightly removed from the rest of the page, and read better if they are not interrupted by other text boxes nearby which are unconnected to the conversation.
The image below is a good example of the most complicated a manga page is likely to become, while showing how one would read text boxes that aren't in a dialogue with each other.
Why are manga written like this?
Traditionally, Japanese is written from top to bottom, then from right to left, almost completely opposite to how most Indo-European languages are written.
An example of this is the image on the right. It is written vertically, so the first line is read "これは日本語です", rather than "こ昔右" or "右昔こ". This idea continues, with the second line being "昔から右縦書きも", and the third being "右横書きも良いです".
Manga are written this way, as are a great deal of Japanese literature.
When the manga industry was first gaining a foothold in the Western world, manga panels were flipped as part of the localization process to not confuse the Western reader—every page was edited to be read from left to right. There are still some manga written this way—such as "Chi's sweet home".
As manga grew more popular in the West, people started asking for unflipped manga, in order to read it as it was intended, while also reducing the costs and time required to translate manga.
Today, almost all manga titles are written in a right-to-left style, including "Snow White with the red hair", "My hero academia", and "The promised Neverland", some of the more popular manga series for a Western Audience.
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