Nana Reading Order: Where to Start Ai Yazawa's Manga and Where It Stops
Nana is read in publication order, volume one to volume twenty-one, and there is one thing you should know before you open it: it does not end. Ai Yazawa fell ill in 2009 and the series has been on hiatus ever since, stopping mid-story at volume twenty-one with its central questions unanswered. That is not a reason to avoid it — it is one of the most loved manga ever published and the writing about friendship, ambition and self-destruction is the reason — but it is a reason to start with your eyes open rather than discovering it at the end of two thousand pages. Two things to know before buying: our catalogue reaches only the first twelve volumes — 13 to 21 have no usable record, so this path stops mid-story and is not the ending — and several of the volumes it does hold are catalogued as the Japanese edition rather than the VIZ English one, so check the language before you order.
Start Here: Two Women Called Nana
BeginnerMeet both Nanas, understand the double narration, and get past the volume that sets everything up.
▸ Study plan for this stage
Pace: About a week for three volumes — Vol. 2 runs 173 pages and Vols. 1 and 3 are comparable. Vol. 1 alternates the two women's backstories before the present-day story starts, which some readers find slow; push through it in one sitting rather than in pieces, then read Vols. 2 and 3 straight on as a sin
- The double structure: two women with the same name, met on a train, whose lives the series will run in parallel and then in opposition
- Nana Osaki and Nana Komatsu as opposed temperaments — the punk singer who will not need anyone and the girl who attaches herself to whoever will have her
- The retrospective narration, which tells you from the first pages that this is being remembered rather than lived
- Yazawa's fashion drawing as characterisation: clothes carry information the dialogue does not supply
- Blast and Trapnest as the two bands the plot is organised around, with Trapnest entering properly in Vol. 3
- The comic surface and what is under it — the register that makes the later volumes land
- Apartment 707 as the series' fixed point, and the domestic scale against which everything else is measured
- What does each Nana want when she arrives in Tokyo, and how does each describe it to herself?
- Who is narrating, and from when? What does the retrospective frame tell you before the plot does?
- What is Blast, who is in it, and what is its relationship to Trapnest?
- What does the Vol. 1 backstory structure establish that could not have been established by starting in the present?
- Where does the tone shift in Vol. 2 — find the specific scene where the comedy stops being the point.
- Read Vol. 1's two backstories separately — all of Nana Osaki's pages, then all of Hachi's — before reading them interleaved as printed. The comparison is the series' whole design and it is easier to see when the sections are pulled apart.
- Note what each Nana is wearing in her first three appearances and what the clothes are telling you. Yazawa trained in fashion and uses it as dialogue throughout.
- Mark every panel across the three volumes where the narration speaks from the future. There are not many yet; the count will grow and the growth is the structure.
- Write down what you expect to happen to each Nana, in one sentence each, before opening Vol. 4. Keep it.
Next up: The two Nanas and the two bands are now in place, so the next stage can assemble the ensemble around them and start pulling the two ambitions apart.
The only place to begin. Two women with the same name meet on a train to Tokyo and become flatmates — one a punk singer, one a girl who follows her boyfriends. The volume alternates their backstories before the present-day story starts, which some readers find slow; it is doing necessary work.
The flat, the band and the shape of the friendship. This is where the series' real register arrives — comic on the surface, and increasingly not underneath.
Blast begins to matter as a band rather than a hobby, and Trapnest enters properly. Read straight on; volumes two and three are one movement.
The Band and the Flat
BeginnerFollow the ensemble as it assembles, and watch the two Nanas' ambitions start to pull against each other.
▸ Study plan for this stage
Pace: About a week for roughly 570 pages: Vol. 4 (188 pages), Vol. 5 (188 pages) and Vol. 6 (192 pages). Vol. 6 is a hinge — Blast's first real success and the point where the two Nanas' lives stop being compatible — so leave a day after it rather than rolling straight into the next stage. Vols. 4 and 5 i
- The ensemble filling in — the supporting cast becomes load-bearing rather than decorative
- The Blast and Trapnest rivalry turning personal rather than professional, and the histories that make it so
- Hachi's pattern of attaching herself to whoever will have her, which stops being a running joke in Vol. 5
- Damage as the series' actual subject, stated openly for the first time
- Success as a threat rather than a reward: what Blast's first break costs the flat
- Yazawa's use of silent panels and fashion detail to do characterisation the dialogue leaves unsaid
- The point at which the two women's ambitions become mutually exclusive, which is the hinge Vol. 6 turns on
- What is the history between Blast and Trapnest, and why does it make the rivalry personal?
- Describe Hachi's pattern precisely. Where does Vol. 5 stop treating it as comic, and what replaces the joke?
- What does Blast's success in Vol. 6 change materially — money, time, where people live, who has claim on whom?
- Which supporting characters became necessary in this stage, and what does each supply that the two Nanas cannot?
- What is the first thing in the series that cannot be taken back? You may not be able to answer this until Vol. 7.
- Draw the relationship map at the end of Vol. 6 — every character, every romantic and professional tie, every prior history. Redraw it after Vol. 9 and again after Vol. 12; the three versions are the plot.
- Take one page from Vol. 5 with no dialogue and write out everything it communicates. Yazawa's silent pages are where the damage is usually shown rather than said.
- Compare Hachi's narration in Vol. 1 with her narration in Vol. 5 on the same subject — what she wants from a relationship. The vocabulary changes before the behaviour does.
- Stop at the end of Vol. 6 and decide, in writing, whether you are continuing. It is the volume the series itself treats as the decision point, and the second half is a different book.
Next up: The lives are now incompatible and the first irreversible choices are in place, which is exactly the material the next stage detonates.
The supporting cast fills in and the rivalry with Trapnest becomes personal rather than professional. Yazawa's fashion drawing is doing characterisation work here that the dialogue leaves unsaid.
Hachi's pattern of attaching herself to whoever will have her stops being a running joke. The first volume where the series is openly about damage.
Blast's first real success, and the point at which the two Nanas' lives stop being compatible. A hinge volume — read it before deciding whether to continue.
Where It Turns
IntermediateRead the stretch where the comedy stops and the consequences of the first six volumes land.
▸ Study plan for this stage
Pace: About a week and a half for roughly 680 pages: Vol. 7 (208 pages), Vol. 8 (208 pages) and Vol. 9 (266 pages). Slow down here — Vol. 7 contains the decision that reorganises the series and Vol. 8 introduces the flash-forward narration that tells you the future is worse than the present. From this sta
- The Vol. 7 decision as the series' structural pivot — everything afterwards is about living with a choice that cannot be reversed
- Flash-forward narration as a device: Yazawa begins telling you the outcome while withholding the cause
- Deliberate withholding as the second-half technique, and the effect of knowing something is coming without knowing what
- The parallel-track structure — professional ascent on one line, personal collapse on the other — fully established by the end of Vol. 9
- Consequence rather than incident: after Vol. 7 the series stops generating new events and starts metabolising old ones
- How the two Nanas' narration voices diverge as their situations do
- The reframing of Vols. 1–6 that Vol. 8 forces, since the retrospective frame turns out to have been pointed at something specific
- What is the decision in Vol. 7, who makes it, and what does the series treat as its cost?
- What does the flash-forward narration in Vol. 8 tell you, and how much does it deliberately not tell you?
- How does the parallel structure work by the end of Vol. 9 — what rises while what falls, and in whose chapters?
- Reread the opening pages of Vol. 1 after Vol. 8. What is the retrospective narration actually looking back at?
- Which relationships in your Vol. 6 map have changed function rather than merely status?
- Reread the first ten pages of Vol. 1 immediately after finishing Vol. 8. The frame was pointed at a specific future the whole time and this is the moment it becomes legible.
- Keep a list of every flash-forward panel from Vol. 8 onward, with what it reveals and what it withholds. Yazawa is running a controlled disclosure and the list makes the control visible.
- Chart Vol. 9's two tracks in parallel — band events on one line, personal events on the other, in page order. The structural trick of the second half is a layout decision and it looks like one on paper.
- Compare the two Nanas' narrated interior voice in Vol. 9 against your notes from Vol. 1. They started closer than you probably remember.
Next up: With the parallel structure established and the future partly disclosed, the last stage follows both tracks into fame, addiction and the point where this catalogue stops.
The decision that reorganises the whole series. Everything after this volume is about what people do with a choice that cannot be taken back.
The fallout, and the introduction of the flash-forward narration that tells you the future is worse than the present. Yazawa starts withholding deliberately from here on.
The band's rise and the personal cost of it, told in parallel. The structural trick of the second half — success on one track, collapse on the other — is fully established by the end of this volume.
The Second Half
IntermediateFollow the series into its darkest material, where fame and addiction take over from romance.
▸ Study plan for this stage
Pace: About a week and a half. Vol. 10 runs 192 pages and Vol. 11 runs 248; Vol. 12 is comparable. Read them in order and do not expect resolution — this is where the path stops and it is not where the story does. Two things to know before you start: the catalogue holds only the first twelve volumes, and
- Celebrity and the tabloid press as an external force acting on private lives — the scope widens from a flat to a career
- The industry that owns both bands, and what ownership means for people who signed contracts at twenty
- The flash-forwards becoming harder to ignore as the gap between present and disclosed future closes
- Ren and Nana's relationship losing its aspirational function, which is Vol. 11's subject
- Consequences accumulating faster than the characters can absorb them, which is the pacing Vol. 12 adopts
- Yazawa's refusal to recap: the later volumes assume everything and explain nothing
- Reading an unfinished work deliberately — the series stops rather than ends, and going in aware of that is different from discovering it after two thousand pages
- What does fame change materially for Blast, and what does it change for the flat?
- What happens to Ren and Nana's relationship in Vol. 11, and why is that volume the one readers name?
- How close has the flash-forward future come by the end of Vol. 12? What do you now know is coming?
- Redraw your relationship map: what has changed since Vol. 6, and which ties have inverted rather than broken?
- What questions does the series pose that it has not answered by Vol. 12 — and, given the hiatus, may never?
- Redraw the relationship map a third time at the end of Vol. 12 and set all three versions side by side. Volumes 6, 9 and 12 give you the whole trajectory in three pictures.
- Reread your two predictions from stage one — what you thought would happen to each Nana — and mark what the series actually did. Yazawa's interest is in the gap between the two.
- Complete the flash-forward list through Vol. 12 and write out the future it collectively describes. That reconstructed future is as much of an ending as this reading gives you.
- Before starting, write down for yourself that this path covers Vols. 1–12 and that the series itself halts at Vol. 21 unfinished. Knowing the shape of the stopping point in advance is the single most useful thing a guide to this series can do.
Next up: This is where the path ends and not where the story does: the published series continues to Vol. 21 in the same numbering and has been on hiatus since 2009, so what follows is more of the same story and no conclusion to it.
Celebrity, tabloids and the industry that owns both bands. The scope widens from a flat to a career, and the flash-forwards get harder to ignore.
Ren and Nana's relationship stops being aspirational. The most quietly devastating volume of the run and the one most readers name when asked why the series matters.
The consequences accumulate faster than the characters can absorb them. Keep reading in order from here — the remaining volumes assume everything, and Yazawa never recaps.