12 manga like Ban Dainagon Ekotoba

1. Emakimono: Picture Scrolls

by Various

Painted handscrolls from medieval Japan, read by unrolling with one hand and rolling up with the other. Scene runs into scene with no frame between them, which is a way of handling time that comics spent centuries rediscovering.

2. Hokusai Manga

by Katsushika Hokusai

Fifteen volumes of sketches — swordsmen, bathers, birds, ghosts, people pulling faces — printed from woodblocks. This is the book that put the word manga into circulation, a century before the form existed.

3. Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga

by Attributed to Toba Sōjō

• Comedy

Rabbits, frogs and monkeys wrestling, bathing and holding a funeral, brushed onto handscrolls in the twelfth century. Japan often calls it the oldest manga: no words, a running story, read right to left.

4. House of Five Leaves

by Natsume Ono

• Drama (shared)
• Mystery

A skilled but painfully shy ronin accepts work as a bodyguard from a charismatic stranger. The job brings him into the orbit of a kidnapping group with complicated motives and concealed histories. In Edo's quieter corners, trust develops slowly between people who have reasons to hide.

5. Emma

by Kaoru Mori

• Drama (shared)
• Romance
• Slice of Life

In Victorian London, a reserved maid and a young man from a wealthy family develop feelings that cross the boundaries of their social positions. Their growing attachment brings private hopes into conflict with public expectations. A carefully observed historical romance about class, duty and the possibility of choosing differently.

6. Asadora!

by Naoki Urasawa

• Drama (shared)
• Mystery
• Sci-Fi

In 1959 Nagoya, a young girl named Asa is caught in a kidnapping as a devastating storm approaches. What begins as an unlikely encounter grows into a story spanning decades, with aviation, family and a strange presence on the horizon drawing her life in unexpected directions.

7. Caran d'Ache: Collected Drawings

by Caran d'Ache

• Comedy

Wordless picture stories from Paris in the 1880s, told in strict panel sequence so the joke lands without a caption. He took his name from the Russian word for pencil, and he is the reason the story without words became a form.

8. Frederick Burr Opper: Collected Cartoons

by Frederick Burr Opper

• Comedy

Single-panel work from the man who drew Happy Hooligan — magazine cartoons, political drawings and book illustration, from the years when the newspaper comic was still being invented around him.

9. Wilhelm Busch: Picture Stories

by Wilhelm Busch

• Comedy

The rest of Busch — drunks, monks, cats, painters and children, most of them punished. Picture and verse locked together on the page thirty years before anyone thought to call the arrangement a comic.

10. My Happy Marriage

by Agitogi Akumi, Kousaka Rito

• Drama (shared)
• Romance

Born without the gift her family is known for, Miyo Saimori is treated as a servant by her father, her stepmother and her gifted half-sister. Then she is sent away as a bride candidate to Kiyoka Kudou, a soldier rumoured to be so cold that every candidate before her has fled. A slow, gentle romance with a supernatural edge, set in an alternate Meiji-era Japan.

11. Master Keaton

by Hokusei Katsushika, Takashi Nagasaki, Naoki Urasawa

• Adventure
• Drama (shared)
• Mystery

Taichi Hiraga-Keaton wants to pursue archaeology, but his work as an insurance investigator keeps sending him into other people's troubles. His unusual background equips him for mysteries across Europe and beyond, where historical knowledge and careful observation often matter more than force.

12. Toba-e

by Various

• Comedy

Eighteenth-century comic picture books of long-limbed figures falling over each other, named after the monk credited with the frolicking-animals scrolls. Cheap, printed in quantity, and sold to be laughed at rather than kept.