Magazine Rundown: Harta, November 2023

I’ve been reading Harta (ハルタ) magazine for two and half years now, and ever since I got fully caught up on every story currently serialized, I’ve been wanting to make a primer on what’s in it! Manga magazines aren’t translated as a package into English and series only ever maybe get officially released in English once they’re a few volumes deep or so, and as a Japanese reader but English speaker… it makes me often pine for sharing what I read fresh from the magazine with friends. So, to that end, this is an English language introduction to everything currently running in Harta!

Harta is a Kadokawa manga magazine that releases 10 times a year (monthly but skipping January and July). It’s nominally ‘seinen’ but what I probably love most about it is that I really detect no gender skew at all in its contents. Harta’s tagline is “Never Seen Never Before” which… doesn’t quite mean anything, but well encapsulates what the magazine is about: everything in it is at least a little new and interesting, which even in my limited manga magazine explorations seems like a major accomplishment. A Harta-ish series I would say is… perhaps a slice of life period piece involving a craft or interesting hobby, with platonic gay undertones but little explicit romance. But every aspect of that is contradicted by plenty of series, so it may well just be me projecting the kind of thing I’d like to read onto the series that stand out the most to me. I also have to say that I’ve found Harta’s production around the series themselves to be exceptional – they do a wonderful job at making you feel like you’re reading a treasure trove of literary stories, and letting you easily keep track of what’s running and what to expect to see next issue.

The series that I started reading Harta for, Dungeon Meshi / Delicious in Dungeon, concluded recently! I think that series is absolutely wonderful and you should absolutely check it out if you’d like to read a western fantasy RPG-inflected gourmet manga that builds seamlessly from fun food-based comedy to its own unique world and adventure, with special attention paid throughout to dungeon ecology… but perhaps it’s appropriate that I’m getting around to writing this post after that series has finished! That means that 100% of these series are discoveries I made specifically through reading Harta (barring arguably Hakumei and Mikochi which I’d read a volume of before). I hope you can find something to discover here as well. That said, I’m writing this as of the November 2023 issue, #109, purely because that’s when I happened to catch up again after falling behind earlier in the year due to travel.

I read Harta via Bookwalker. I find it incredibly convenient and far more accessible than I would have assumed (no need for a Japanese credit card or anything like that). Obviously… it’s in Japanese… but just for what it’s worth, even that may be less of a barrier than one might think – in the grand scheme of things I’m still surprised that it took me only three years to quite comfortably read my first issue of Harta, and that I could have struggled through a lot earlier than that. If at all interested, here’s a post I made talking about my own experience learning to read the language.

One thing NOT covered by this primer is the 読切, the one-shots in the magazine! I just wanted to mention that every issue has around 1-3 of these (not including the ones from the 八咫烏杯 Yatagarasu-Hai manga contest winners), and they’re just as varied as the main series. Particularly when first coming to the magazine, these can be as much of a draw as the main series. This primer also does not cover series that have concluded – even ones that finished in the November issue. I do have a store of my favorites in both of these categories that I would like to share someday, so maybe in future posts… but limiting myself to currently running series was mainly a way to make it into a manageable task.

About groups: Harta series are divided into groups: the は group publishes a chapter every issue (10 times a year), while る and た publish 6 times a year, in a particular alternating-ish pattern. There’s a lovely ‘Harta Navi’ graph in the back of each issue to let you keep track of this. I have also included in this post the series running on the Harta Alternative site which relatively recently started up. Harta side-content has gone through a few iterations (I still kind of miss the one-shot-only Terang they published on Harta’s off-months one year) but this site may be the one that sticks. It’s free! … but they do take down middle chapters of running series after some time has passed. These series aren’t in the main magazine, only that site.

NOTE: To avoid spoilers, and to hopefully stay on Kadokawa’s good side with this, all images below are taken from the first chapter of the given series (even when the series is long running enough that it hurts to leave better later examples of how the series evolved on the table). These chapters can usually already be read for free in the 試し読み sample pages on Bookwalker, or on Harta’s website. I went with 2 cool screenshots per series. The plot summaries below are by me and I’ll confess that I don’t always maintain the most precise memory of what’s going on reading so many series in serialization (and also I’m reading in a non-native language to me) so they might not be completely correct.

I decided to order the series by the number of chapters published so far. This doesn’t necessarily correlate 100% with longest-running by date, or length in terms of pages. It seems like they vary a lot by chapter, and ordering in the magazine is different each week.

Title: ハクメイとミコチ (Hakumei and Mikochi) Author: 樫木祐人 (Takuto Kashiki) Title gloss: n/a Group: は (every issue) Chapters so far: 108 Volumes so far: 11 Adaptations: There’s a 12 episode anime. Official English edition: yes! From Yen Press Summary: Two tiny women, one an avid home chef and the other an artisan, live in the woods and interact with a variety of characters and craftspeople in their bustling miniature world. My opinion: Hakumei and Mikochi is fantastic! It’s a slice of life filled to the brim with the joire de vivre of making and tasting good food, exploring cities, becoming a regular at a local bar or cafe, shopping for souvenirs, making something exceptional, etc., all while the miniaturized setting keeps the art and designs fresh and expressive and fun. As the series goes on, an impressive array of warm side characters are introduced and each one can carry their own side episode or two, like the shy bone necromancer, or the librarian, or the hairdresser, and so on. It’s difficult to picture a slice of life so decadently and artfully prepared each month, and I hope it goes on forever.

Title: ふしぎの国のバード (Fushigi no Kuni no Bird) Author: 佐々大河 (Taiga Sassa) Title gloss (theirs): Isabella Bird in Wonderland / Unbeaten Tracks in Japan Group: た (6 issues per year group 2) Chapters so far: about 53 (doesn’t provide a number for the new chapters and I didn’t go back and count up from the last volume which ends at 49) Volumes so far: 10 Adaptations: it’s already an adaptation of Unbeaten Tracks in Japan by Isabella Bird Official English edition: not really as far as I know, but there was a bilingual edition of volume 1 where the English spoken by the characters was in English instead of Japanese like in the regular series. Summary: Adapted from her real account, Isabella Bird travels Japan shortly after the Meiji Restoration in the late 1800s, with her goal being to trek from Yokohama to Ainu settlements in Hokkaido. Along the way she experiences Japanese culture of the time with the help of her interpreter, Ito. My opinion: This series is conceptually neat and also very interesting and a lot of fun! It’s presented with English rendered in Japanese, and Japanese rendered illegible, so as to follow Bird’s experience and narration of what she encounters, and generally each chapter focuses on her learning about some interesting part of life in the specific historic setting covered. The dynamic between her and Ito as they acclimate to each other as trustworthy travel partners forms a great core of the series, and while I have no idea how faithful the book’s adaptation of them is to reality, the portrayal here is endearing while still at times touching on the prejudices and cultural disconnects involved.