Miss Ruki

CHOSEN BY THE WASHINGTON POST AS ONE OF THE BEST COMICS OF 2025

A young woman rejects the fast-paced consumer culture of 1980s Japan in favor of a slower, more carefree lifestyle in this tenderhearted, sweetly funny classic of slice-of-life manga.

A classic of Japanese manga, Miss Ruki is a warm and vivid portrait of the lives of two young women in Tokyo during Japan’s 1980s bubble economy. The titular Miss Ruki spurns the fast-paced consumer culture of the era in favor of a lighthearted life dedicated to her hobbies, her books, and spending time with her anxious but far more pragmatic friend, Ecchan.

Takano’s art moves with all the warmth, grace, and clarity of the everyday moments it depicts. Sweet and funny, these vignettes of a long-gone time still resonate today with readers and authors in Japan, with famed contemporary manga artist Keigo Shinzo noting, “To read it is to grasp something of the essence of Japan.... This is the kind of manga I want to draw.”

Miss Ruki is a vertical comic strip meant to be read right to left; each story begins in the top right panel and continues down the column before moving leftward.

Fumiko Takano is a Japanese manga artist. Influential among the “New Wave” manga artists in the late 70s and early 80s, Takano was one of the first women manga artists to publish in outlets not explicitly aimed at a female readership. She won the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize in 2003, and in 2015 she was the second-ever manga artist to win the Iwaya Sazanami Literary Award. She lives in Tokyo.

Alexa Frank is an editor and translator of Japanese. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Fulbright program, she has translated over twenty volumes of manga, most recently Nazuna Saito’s Offshore Lightning (nominated for the 2024 Ignatz Awards), Kyoko Okazaki’s River’s Edge (nominated for the 2024 Eisner Awards), and Shirakawa Gin’s A Story of Seven Lives. She lives in New York.