Josei

Josei is an editorial category of Japanese comics that emerged in the 1980s, marketed to an audience of adult women in contrast to shojo manga, which targets girls and young adult women, though the line between the two is often tenuous. It is traditionally printed in dedicated magazines that specialize in a particular subgenre, most often drama, romance or pornography, with dramas tending toward realistic depictions of ordinary women lives and romances resembling soap-opera-style melodrama. The category grew out of the rise of the more adult gekiga style in the 1950s and 1960s and the increasingly complex shojo manga of the 1970s, was initially stigmatized, and gained greater artistic legitimacy in the 1990s, with anime adaptations of josei works appearing since the 2000s.