When her mother remarries into the Arpad dukedom, Ophelia finds herself uprooted into the Arpad nobility. However, due to a tragic carriage accident, Ophelia's mother and stepfather suddenly lose their lives. Alexander, her stepbrother, urges her to stay in the Arpad household for the next three years. One day, Ophelia hears devastating news from an investigator that changes everything. "The deaths of the Duke and Duchess of Arpad that took place this very day, three years ago... were not accidental deaths, but murders." (Source: POCKET COMICS)
When you're the infamous prodigy hitman known only as “Fable,” many things come easy. Being a normal person, however, isn't one of them. In fact, being told that he can't kill anyone for a while may just be the hardest job Fable’s ever taken... (Source: Kodansha USA) *Note: Won the 41st Kodansha Manga Awards in the general manga category in 2017.*
Set about one year after the ending to The Fable. Akira and Youko are forced to abort their latest mission due to the Covid-19 pandemic and return to Osaka to continue their quiet life as regular civilians but the peace is not to last.
Two doctors, the young, passionate and well-liked Osanai and the veteran, ambitious Tatsugaura, are both investigating the mysterious 'Monmow' disease, found only in one remote village, which causes bizarre bone deformation, making its victims take on a beastlike appearance before their deaths. Osanai is sent to the village by Tatsugaura to see if he can find a cause for the disease while also treating the victims to the best of his ability. But in reality, Tatsugaura is scheming against Osanai and intends to infect him with the disease in order to clear the way of any obstacles of presenting his own research, and thus gaining high prestige and rank in the medical world.
Deep into the twenty-first century, the line between man and machine has been inexorably blurred as humans rely on the enhancement of mechanical implants and robots are upgraded with human tissue. In this rapidly converging landscape, cyborg superagent Major Motoko Kusanagi is charged to track down the craftiest and most dangerous terrorists and cybercriminals, including "ghost hackers" who are capable of exploiting the human/machine interface and reprogramming humans to become puppets to carry out the hackers' criminal ends. When Major Kusanagi tracks the cybertrail of one such master hacker, the Puppeteer, her quest leads her into a world beyond information and technology where the very nature of consciousness and the human soul are turned upside down. (Source: Kodansha USA)
Sal Senba is going to be the head of the Senba clan-a family with a long and distinguished history teaching the art of ikebana, or Japanese flower arrangements. He's not sure he's up for this role, though, being born into it instead of "earning" it. Months before the ritualistic ikebana exhibition to symbolize the succession, he falls into his mirror and finds himself in another world... one with a beautiful garden of flowers and an even more beautiful man. At first, Sal thinks this Prince Shaal has nothing to do with him... but little by little, he sees that they mirror each other more than he thought. An otherworldly romance between a super hot prince and a hottie in a kimono!! (Source: Renta!)
*Mine has been a life of much shame.* *I can’t even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.* Plagued by a maddening anxiety, the terrible disconnect between his own concept of happiness and the joy of the rest of the world, Yozo Oba plays the clown in his dissolute life, holding up a mask for those around him as he spirals ever downward, locked arm-in-arm with death. Osamu Dazai’s immortal—and supposedly autobiographical—work of Japanese literature, is perfectly adapted here into a manga by Junji Itou. The imagery wrenches open the text of the novel one line at a time to sublimate Yozo’s mental landscape into something even more delicate and grotesque. This is the ultimate in art by Itou, proof that nothing can surpass the terror of the human psyche. (Source: VIZ Media)
Michio Yuki has it all: looks, intelligence, a pedigree as the scion of a famous Kabuki family, a promising career at a major bank, legions of female admirers. But underneath the sheen of perfection lurks a secret with the power to shake the world to its foundations. During a boyhood excursion to one of the southern archipelagos near Okinawa, Yuki barely survived exposure to a poison gas stored at a foreign military facility. The leakage annihilated all of the island’s inhabitants but was promptly covered up by the authorities, leaving Yuki as an unacknowledged witness—one whose sense of right and wrong, however, the potent nerve agent managed to obliterate. Now, fifteen years later, Yuki is a social climber of Balzacian proportions, infiltrating the worlds of finance and politics by day while brutally murdering children and women by night—perversely using his Kabuki-honed skills as a female impersonator to pass himself off as the women he’s killed. His drive, however, will not be satiated with a promotion here and a rape there. Michio Yuki has a far more ominous objective: obtaining MW, the ultimate weapon that spared his life but robbed him of all conscience. There are only two men with any hope of stopping him: one, a brilliant public prosecutor who struggles to build a case against the psychopath; the other, a tormented Catholic priest, Iwao Garai, who shares Yuki’s past—and frequently his bed. (Source: Vertical)
Opening a few years after the end of World War II and covering almost a quarter-century, here is comics master Osamu Tezuka’s most direct and sustained critique of Japan’s fate in the aftermath of total defeat. Unusually devoid of cartoon premises yet shot through with dark voyeuristic humor, Ayako looms as a pinnacle of Naturalist literature in Japan with few peers even in prose, the striking heroine a potent emblem of things left unseen following the war. The year is 1949. Crushed by the Allied Powers, occupied by General MacArthur’s armies, Japan has been experiencing massive change. Agricultural reform is dissolving large estates and redistributing plots to tenant farmers—terrible news, if you’re landowners like the archconservative Tenge family. For patriarch Sakuemon, the chagrin of one of his sons coming home alive from a P.O.W. camp instead of having died for the Emperor is topped only by the revelation that another of his is consorting with “the reds.” What solace does he have but his youngest Ayako, apple of his eye, at once daughter and granddaughter? (Source: Kodansha USA)
The apocalypse is not only near, but a certainty. Set before the event and the aftermath detailed by the hit manga, this stand-alone prequel light novel series chronicles the inexorable approach of the reign of vampires. Witness the trials of Guren Ichinose, who must hide his true strength even as he is trampled on at an academy for the insufferably privileged. (Source: Kodansha USA)
In *Muv-Luv Alternative*, Takeru wakes up three years after the end of *Muv-Luv Unlimited* to find himself back in his room. Although he first thinks that everything that had happened to him was a dream, he soon feels that something is wrong, and leaves the house to find that he has been sent back in time to the beginning of the events in *Unlimited*. Unwilling to accept something like *Alternative V*, he decides to help professor Kouzuki to complete *Alternative IV* and save mankind. (Source: Wikipedia)
Apollo’s Song follows the tragic journey of Shogo, a young man whose abusive childhood has instilled in him a loathing for love so profound he finds himself compelled to acts of violence when he is witness to any act of intimacy or affection whether by human or beast. His hate is such that the gods intervene, cursing Shogo to experience love throughout the ages ultimately to have it ripped from his heart every time. From the Nazi atrocities of World War II to a dystopian future of human cloning, Shogo loses his heart, in so doing, healing the psychological scars of his childhood hatred. (Source: Kodansha USA) *Note: The Japanese version of this manga includes the one-shot "Garakuta no Uta", however the English release does not contain this story.*

