5 Shoujo Manga to Tide You Over Until the Return of Fruits Basket

Orange, by Ichigo Takano
Orange is a time-travel story with a twist: 16-year-old Takamiya Naho gets a letter from her future self, asking her to do specific things to avoid having regrets in the future. Takano avoids the usual traps of time-travel stories by bending the rules a bit and tossing in some twists. What makes this story particularly enjoyable is Naho’s group of friends, who act surprisingly natural for shoujo manga teenagers, supporting each other despite feuds and misunderstandings. Naho is a tad too naïve, but the people around her make up for it. This is a real page-turner and it’s complete in two omnibus volumes, with the second due out at the end of May.

The Demon Prince of Momochi House, by Aya Shuouto
Himari Momochi is an orphan who inherits a house in the woods on her 16th birthday, but when she arrives, she finds it is already occupied—by three strange guys. It turns out the house is a portal to the spirit world, and she was supposed to be trapped there to guard it. It didn’t work out that way: Aoi, who was a child at the time, stumbled in and became the guardian, and now he can’t leave. He can, however, transform himself into an awesome spirit form whenever danger threatens, which it does often. The other two guys are his ayakashi (spirit) bodyguards. Although the three of them tell Himari to get lost and forget about the whole thing, she’s determined to stay on and somehow liberate Aoi from the curse. This story has a lot of the same elements as Fruits Basket, but with a much smaller cast. While that means it lacks some of the richness of the characters, it is also beautifully drawn, especially the scenes that juxtapose the supernatural with the real.

Yukarism, by Chika Shiomi
Yukari, a modern-day high school student, was born without losing his memories of his previous life, which was spent in a pleasure district in the Edo period. That gives Shiomi plenty of opportunities for costume drama in this story, which shifts back and forth between the two eras. It turns out that several people in Yukaru’s current life were also part of his life in the past, and the story revolves around figuring who they were—and solving the mystery of his murder in his previous life. This very readable story is complete in four volumes.

QQ Sweeper, by Kyousuke Motomi
Like so many manga, this one starts with a new transfer student arriving at a high school. But Fumi Nishioka is different—she’s homeless and an orphan, although her feckless relatives did pay her tuition before they left town. With no family and nowhere to live, she camps out in an apparently unused room and starts working on finding a Prince Charming to marry her and lift her out of poverty. All that gets tossed out the window, though, when she meets her mysterious classmate Kyutaro Horikita, known to everyone as Q, who devotes himself to cleaning the school. He’s not just a clean freak, though: He sweeps away evil spirits as well as dust bunnies, and instead of becoming a princess, Fumi winds up sweeping alongside him. Motomi is also the creator of Dengeki Daisy.

Inu x Boku SS, by Cocoa Fujiwara
This is actually a shonen manga, but there’s a lot in it for shoujo fans to enjoy. Ririchiyo Shirakiin moves into a special apartment building, the Maison de Ayakashi, whose residents are all humans with some yokai (spirit) ancestry—a trait that makes them tend to be successful and wealthy but also attracts evil spirits. Therefore, most of the wealthier residents have bodyguards. Ririchiyo is an independent-minded young woman and doesn’t want one, but the bodyguard she was assigned, Soushi, basically bullies her into accepting her by being submissive to a ridiculous degree. The relationship between the two starts out weird and gets weirder before normalizing a bit, but much of the enjoyment of this book comes from the side characters, each one of whom is associated with a specific yokai and can change back and forth from yokai to human form at will. The first four volumes are a prologue and can be read on their own; they alternate between serious fighting-the-bad-ayakashi stuff and goofy humor. After that the tone changes a bit. The full series is 12 volumes long, and volume 11 is due out in May.