Japan sells. Italy reads. Critics look away.

We wanted to open this article with a debate. Then we looked, and the debate wasn't there, at least not where it should be: literary journals, cultural supplements, universities. It was in comic shops, Reddit threads, Goodreads reviews written by twenty-year-olds at two in the morning. Readers have been discussing this for years. Criticism has not shown up yet.

Italy is one of the major manga markets in Europe. Not an opinion: a fact published by AIE, the Italian Publishers Association. Before the pandemic, manga sales in traditional bookstores stood at 1.3 million copies per year. By 2022, that figure had reached 7.4 million. A 161.8% increase compared to 2019, in a publishing market that is otherwise struggling. Manga pulled Italian comics forward in a way that Italian literary fiction simply has not.

And yet: open an Italian literary review. Search "Urasawa" in a serious cultural magazine. See how many times "Monster" or "20th Century Boys" have been discussed in the same spaces where Carrère or Knausgård get analyzed.

You won't find them.

For Manga the problem is not the market. It's the frame.

Manga's perception problem in Italy has nothing to do with the quality of the work. It has to do with how Italian culture categorizes things.

"Comics" go in one box. "Literature" goes in another. Mainstream criticism does not cross that border, or crosses it only when implicit authorization arrives from abroad: Art Spiegelman wins the Pulitzer in 1992, and "Maus" becomes teachable. Alan Moore earns Anglo-American academic recognition, and "Watchmen" enters university syllabi.

Manga has not received that credential yet. Not because it doesn't deserve it. Because no one in the Italian cultural system has decided to give it one.

Il manga non ha ancora ottenuto quella patente. Non perché non la meriti. Perché nessuno nel sistema culturale ha ancora deciso di dargliela.

The Urasawa case: an author the market loves and criticism ignores

Naoki Urasawa has won the Shogakukan Manga Award three times. He won best comic at the Angoulême International Comics Festival, the most prestigious in Europe.

He won the Will Eisner Award in the USA for best Asian work. He won best series at Lucca Comics. His works have sold over 140 million copies worldwide.

"Monster" is a psychological thriller about guilt and identity, set in a post-reunification Germany reconstructed with near-documentary precision. "20th Century Boys" is a generational novel about collective memory, mass manipulation, and the weight of choices not made. If published as prose novels, these works would have been reviewed by every major Italian cultural supplement.

They were not. They are manga. And so criticism doesn't know where to put them.

Junji Ito and the body question

Junji Ito's case is different, but equally telling. Ito has built an aesthetic of horror that has no equivalent in contemporary Italian literature, neither in comics nor in fiction. Works like "Uzumaki" or "Tomie" operate at a symbolic level that is not decorative: obsession, bodily transformation, the loss of control over one's own physicality are themes that run through philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the critique of the posthuman. Ito is read, bought, collected. His Italian translations sell well. He is invited to conventions.

Junji Ito

Junji Ito

Junji Ito

But he is not analyzed. Not cited in an essay. Not placed in relation to Kafka, to Lovecraft, to the European grotesque tradition he is clearly indebted to, and from which he departs just as clearly.

This is a missed opportunity, not an editorial eccentricity.

One Piece and the length problem

One Piece is the best-selling manga of all time: over 600 million copies worldwide (as of March 2026). In Italy it is a constant presence in sales charts. It has built generations of readers. Its narrative structure, developed over 1,150+ chapters, is an exercise in world-building and internal consistency that few contemporary novels can match.

But "One Piece" runs 1,100 chapters. And this, for Italian cultural criticism, seems to be the problem. As if length were an indicator of superficiality, rather than a specific form of narrative construction requiring different, not lesser, skills.

Serialized television, meanwhile, has undergone a complete critical revaluation over the past decade. "The Wire" is considered literature. "Breaking Bad" is analyzed structurally in universities. Japanese serialized comics are still waiting.

What Italian criticism is missing

This is not just a question of fairness toward manga readers, who read without expecting validation from a literary journal. It is a question of cultural comprehension.

Manga is how Japan tells itself to the rest of the world. It is a cultural vehicle before it is a publishing product. To ignore it critically is to ignore a significant part of how contemporary global storytelling works: how audiences are built, how complex themes are handled in accessible formats.

Italian literary criticism has decided manga is not its concern. Italian readers have decided otherwise. And on this, the readers are right.