Interview: The Massive Manga Subgenre You've Probably Never Heard Of
There is a huge subset of manga of which English translations have barely scratched the surface. English speakers have an enormous blind spot when it comes to the sheer scope of a certain existing manga genre: mahjong.
Now, the fittingly titled Mahjong Pros has branched into publishing with the intent to change that. Their new manga imprint has already announced eight books focused around the tile-based deception game—and they're not about to run out of titles anytime soon.
“The Western market treats mahjong manga as a subject, whereas Japan treats it more as a structure of storytelling,” said Harrison Doan, founder of Mahjong Pros. “So you have horror mahjong manga. You have political satire. You have comedy. You have BL and yuri mahjong.”
To Western fans, mahjong feels like it would be a niche subject, on par with any other manga about Japanese hobbies and games like karuta or rakugo. But mahjong is different. In Mahjong Manga: 50 Years Of History, author V Hayashida observes that at the niche magazine publishing peak in the '70s and '80s, Japan had ten competing magazines dedicated solely to mahjong manga. Some of the mahjong manga that got their start in these magazines boast impressive cumulative sales numbers. Nobuyuki Fukumoto's Akagi, which ran in Kindai Mahjong from 1987 to 2006, has exceeded 12 million copies in circulation. Its contemporary, Ten, exceeded 7 million.
Because such a large number of mahjong manga were published, Mahjong Pros had a wide variety of titles to choose from. This is why Mahjong Pros' lineup is deceptively varied. Though each of the 8 titles in their lineup features a mahjong tile on the cover, they span from high school comedy to political satire to heartfelt biography to bone-chilling horror.
“Mahjong is a unique genre because it's both really large, in terms of publication numbers if not in sales, and diverse in its genres—and it's invisible in English,” said Doan.
A love letter to mahjong
Mahjong is a four-player rummy-like tile game. Three main ways to play it are defined by region: American, Chinese, and Japanese (also called Richii) mahjong. All three versions share several similarities: players always draw a tile, discard a tile, and refine their hands to build a winning combination of tiles. When I asked Doan why he built a career and a company around mahjong, he replied, “Pure love.”
“There are so many facets to mahjong,” said Doan. “Delayed gratification. Deception, bluffing, probability. Games with incomplete information allow people to endlessly ponder.”
Doan said he got hooked on the game the same way he's trying to get readers interested: through mahjong manga. In high school, he read Reform with No Wasted Draws - The Legend of Koizumi and began to teach himself Japanese mahjong. He later picked up the Chinese version through an ex-girlfriend, and American mahjong “because Texas,” referencing how his home state has become the unofficial capital of the American mahjong craze.
Once Doan began playing mahjong, he saw it everywhere. He read Akagi and Kaiji. He picked up references to the game in Higurashi: When They Cry – GOU (episode 15), Shirobako (episode 12), and many others. He played the Yakuza/Like A Dragon games, which feature Riichii achievements. He initially launched Mahjong Pros in 2022 as a passion project dedicated to teaching mahjong to anime and manga fans like him who'd had their curiosity piqued.
It was a matter of “right place, right time” for the venture, as a nation of people who'd taught themselves the tile game during the pandemic began to emerge for in-person meetups, craving community and the satisfying clack of the tiles. In the four years since, people of all ages have been playing the centuries-old game in community centers, restaurants, bars, fan conventions, and online at sites like Mahjong Soul and Richii City. (Mahjong Pros has a business partnership with Richii City.)
Fueled by this growing movement, Mahjong Pros expanded into an e-commerce company that sold tiles as well as guides. The team now employs roughly 30 people. Their Persona and Hololive limited edition sets sell for $399.99 each. Now, the company's expansion into manga is a full-circle moment, particularly since one of the first licenses Mahjong Pros acquired is Reform with No Wasted Draws, the very series that inspired Doan to begin playing mahjong.
“I'm just getting people into mahjong the same way I did,” Doan said.
Chicken and egg
If there's so much mahjong manga out there, you might be thinking, why have I never heard of it? In short, how come more of it doesn't get translated globally?
Doan explained that most mahjong manga has never been brought over because “it was such a hard-to-market premise. The cost of localizing manga is expensive. You pay in upfront royalties. You need to pay translators, localizers, and proofreaders. And for a complex subject like mahjong, they'll charge you the technical translation fee.”
“There you go,” Doan summarized. “No audience because no books, no books because no audience, chicken egg? You see the situation there?”
Still, Doan doesn't want readers to think they need to know how to play to read Mahjong Pros' inaugural titles. From Vermillion Stella, the biography of a female mahjong player akin to Queen's Gambit, to the action-packed Getter Robo High that treats mahjong games as battles, to the crossdressing story Golden Sakura, the deceptively diverse selection of titles relies not on the granular turn-by-turn mechanics of mahjong, but on the tension built into the gameplay.
“The appeal comes from the high stakes. The thought process. The mastery. It's not really about the rule fluency,” Doan explained. “That's our translation philosophy, too: that if you pick it up, you should be able to read it.”
For a company bent on broadening English readers' horizons, nothing less would suffice.
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