Start with Nana Vol. 1. Nana is one continuous story told in publication sequence, so the sequence is not the interesting question. The interesting question is whether volume one will put you off, because it very often does.
Volume one contains almost none of the punk band. It is Nana Komatsu's history — small-town crushes, a run of bad relationships, and the decision to follow a boyfriend to Tokyo. Readers who arrive for Nana Osaki, the singer on most of the covers, frequently stall here and conclude the series is a light shoujo romance. Nana Vol. 2 is the corrective: the same years told from Osaki's side, the band Blast, her relationship with Ren, and the reason she is on that train. From Nana, Vol. 3 the two women share apartment 707 and the series becomes the thing it is remembered as. If volume one is not working, read volume two before you decide.
How the story is built
Ai Yazawa began serialising Nana in Cookie in 2000. The narration is retrospective: a much later Hachi, which is Osaki's nickname for Komatsu, addresses the reader from a point after everything has gone wrong, and drops warnings into scenes that have not gone wrong yet. That framing is the engine of the whole book. The apparent lightness of the early volumes is staged — you are being shown a happiness the narrator has already told you does not survive. Read the asides. They are not decoration.
Volumes three to eight: the flatshare
Nana, Vol. 3, Nana Vol. 4 and Nana Vol. 5 establish the apartment, Blast's rebuilding in Tokyo, and Hachi's drift between a day job and other people's ambitions. Nana Vol. 6, Nana Vol. 7 and Nana Vol. 8 bring the rival band Trapnest into the foreground, which is where the series stops being about two friends and starts being about celebrity, money and the way both distort private life. This is the strongest stretch and the reason people recommend the book.
Volumes nine to twelve: the cost
Nana Vol. 9, Nana Vol. 10, Nana Vol. 11 and Nana, Vol. 12 deal with success arriving and the private arrangements underneath it failing. The tonal shift is sharp, and the retrospective narration finally starts collecting on the warnings it has been issuing since volume one.
The edition problem — check the language before buying
Six of the twelve records on this path are the Japanese-language edition: volumes 1, 4, 5, 9, 10 and 11. The other six are English. That is a fact about our catalogue records, not about what is in print — VIZ published the whole run in English — but it means you should check the language field on every volume on this list before you order it. Buying volume four in Japanese by accident is the single most likely way to go wrong here.
Where it stops, and it does stop
This path runs to volume twelve. VIZ published twenty-one volumes in English, so this is a little over half the available material. More importantly, the manga itself stops: serialisation went on indefinite hiatus in 2009 and has never resumed. Nana has no ending. Volume twenty-one leaves the story mid-arc, with the frame narration's biggest question unanswered. The 2006 anime adaptation runs forty-seven episodes and also stops well short of the manga's final volume, so it is not a workaround.
Know that going in. Most readers still think it is worth it, and the retrospective framing means the incompleteness stings less than it would in a conventionally plotted series — but nobody should start this expecting a conclusion.
Content notes
Heavy smoking and drinking throughout, an unplanned pregnancy and the decisions around it, an emotionally coercive relationship presented from inside, drug use, and self-destructive behaviour that the book declines to judge. Yazawa's method is to withhold verdicts, which is a large part of why the series is admired and also why some readers find the later volumes hard going. More reading paths live on Discover.
Follow the full ordered path here: Nana Reading Order: Where to Start Ai Yazawa's Manga and Where It Stops.
