Harta (ハルタ) is a manga magazine published in Japan by Kadokawa which I’ve been reading for a number of years now, and has consistently been a favorite of mine. The name comes from the Indonesian word for “treasure” and I admire how much the magazine lives up to the name, with a large quantity (around 800-1000 pages) of varied and interesting manga published 10 times a year (monthly, but skipping January and July). I haven’t liked every single thing in the magazine, but I’ve loved a lot of them, and they’re always at least interesting, which goes a long way for me.
It’s hard to describe what a Harta series is typically like, because I would say that there’s ultimately no hard restrictions as far as I can tell, but I would say roughly that the quintessential Harta manga might be enjoyable by adults of any age or gender, might prominently feature a craft or hobby or discipline, might be set abroad or in a historical time period or fantasy world, might be on the cozy and quiet side, might feature light romance, might be literary but not avant-garde, and might be a little gay. I can think of examples that avoid one or all of those criteria, but that’s more or less the sort of vibe to expect.
I get a lot out of reading it! And this post is meant as a way of sharing some of that, particularly with non-Japanese-readers or fellow learners.
If anything here sounds at all interesting to you, I’d encourage you to check it out yourself! Harta can be bought digitally or ordered wherever Japanese books are sold. I personally recommend Bookwalker, as it is easy to sign up for and use from outside Japan, and Harta back issues going back to June 2020 along with collected editions of Harta series can all be found there, often at a discount. Harta also has a companion website of additional free comics (that rotate) called Harta Alternative. And it’s also worth noting that you can often find the first chapter for any given series on Harta’s website (best found by googling the title - I honestly don’t know if these are listed anywhere on the site itself).
Finally, if you can’t read Japanese but are interested in all this, I can’t help but recommend learning to read the language as a hobby, as I have found doing so to be extremely fun and fulfilling, and I wouldn’t have expected reading this magazine to be nearly as attainable as it ended up turning out to be. I talked some about my experience with Learning to Read 2 in this WaniKani forum post. And you can also find other posts etc. from me elsewhere on this notion site, navigable from the top left corner or this landing page.
NOTE: I’ll try to hide direct spoilers under a dropdown, but screenshots or summaries may inadvertently indirectly spoil small things.
Issue #117 is the September 2024 issue, and features series from teams は and た.
… You might notice I’m posting this in January 2025 and not September 2024! That’s because I fell a bit behind… I got suddenly extremely motivated to focus on reading my backlog of physical books and neglected things I own digitally like Harta, and I also knew I wanted to reorganize how I’ve done notes for the magazine in the past into some kind of slightly more formal blog format, that maybe I could reuse for other magazines down the line! So I procrastinated on doing that, but now here we are! Fingers crossed this format works out!
I will say that even when I’m focusing on other things - or probably especially then - the days when I make time to curl up and read Harta sure do make me feel good.
This issue has a 新連載 (debuting ongoing series): 狼よ、震えて眠れ (roughly “Wolf, Sleep Uneasily”) by 犬童千絵 (Chie Inudou). A close friend was interested in this one because it’s an undercover drama set in 1980s India with a potential rival/love interest type of dynamic between the two female lead characters, so I read it quickly and shared my thoughts with them before dawdling for a long time before reading the rest of the magazine, so I’m having to refresh my memory a bit, but I said at the time:
It's definitely got potential. Gets you to like the two of them and their chemistry before revealing at the end the one is undercover to catch the other (who's a bandit queen). So it seems clear you're meant to root for them and the undercover stuff will cause plenty of drama in the future. Obviously I'm no expert on 1980s India so I don't know exactly how well the setting is handled, but there's a lot of stuff like caste terms used, and a story related to the Ramayana is a big part of the chapter, so it's at least not half-assed. Out of curiosity I looked for another source of the specific story used and I think it's probably roughly a real story but with part of it changed for the story. Interestingly, it sounds like the topic (roughly whether the composer of the Ramayana was a bandit before becoming pious or not) might be touchy among certain populations so the use would maybe be controversial in India, I dunno, those are just my hazy impressions from googling around. (but the context makes sense for a character retelling a story to try to ingratiate herself to a bandit)
The author’s previous work is a series set in ancient Egypt that ran for a pretty long time (and ended right as I was starting with the magazine so I still haven’t caught up with it) called 碧いホルスの瞳 (Blue Eye of Horus), which I’m definitely going to read someday from associating it with when I was starting in Harta, it’ll just… have to be someday. So anyway I would say this new series seems worthy of plenty of interest, at least, and we’ll see where it goes.
瑠璃の宝石 (Introduction to Mineralogy) by 渋谷圭一郎 (Keiichirou Shibuya) has an anime adaptation announced in this issue (exciting! Not a series I would have guessed but now the pangs of jealousy I frequently feel from this at the Japanese comics industry supporting works on such breadth of topics even in the relative mainstream can extend to animated TV as well!) and perhaps not coincidentally has a particularly good chapter for character development and conveying the majesty of what studying rocks can let you imagine about the past.