By: Katherine Cañeba | @kcserinlee

It’s a New Year, and it’s the perfect time to start a new manga! I would love to introduce you all to my newest favorite manga series: Girl Crush by Midori Tayama. It is a fresh coming-of-age story about female K-pop idol trainees supporting (and competing with) each other on their way to the top. In addition to the beautiful artwork (including immersively detailed backgrounds of the streets of Seoul) and the top-tier street fashion sported by every character, I feel that this story is special and engaging because of the unexpected ways it resonated with me, and I’ll attempt to explain why.

I can’t quite remember where I first heard about this manga, but it has apparently been making waves in Japan since its original digital serialization started in November 2020. There are currently four print volumes released in English; I discovered the series when only the first two volumes had been released, and they were enough to truly make a strong impression on me.

We follow our protagonist Tenka, a gorgeous 17-year-old Tokyo high school girl (and captain of her school’s dance team), who is perfectionistic to a fault. It is to the point that it stifles any spontaneity. Despite being a fast learner and superior imitator in both singing and dance, she struggles with freestyle and with putting her authentic self into her performance. She soon has a chance meeting with Erian, her earnest, optimistic younger schoolmate with big K-pop idol dreams. Tenka sees her as a threat to her romantic chances with a male childhood friend who openly admires Erian for qualities that Tenka feels she lacks: targeted ambition, authenticity, and–most important of all–heart!

Erian’s natural friendliness and go-getter attitude continually open up new opportunities and chance connections, both for herself and for Tenka, as the latter begins tagging along for entertainment agency auditions and adjacent shenanigans in Seoul. I found their time of exploration in Seoul to be so inspiring and true to my own life. Sometimes, one’s whole life trajectory can change from coming across the right opportunity at the right time—and taking the initiative to seize that opportunity. For example, I ended up writing and copy editing for TAV from meeting Peggy at Anime Expo 2023! She had just given a panel and I waited around afterward to ask her a question and share some relevant thoughts on her presentation content. The rest is history.

For me, Girl Crush is a novel experience with a familiar story in a new medium. Reality TV-esque documentaries of a K-pop group or K-pop idol trainee survival shows I have seen will generally present the real-life stories of trainees in video format: a combination of interviews and behind-the-scenes footage of their daily life, from dance and vocal classes to brief glimpses of their days off. A fictional story of this journey told through manga featuring foreign trainees as the protagonists feels fresh. 

It shows us a unique perspective of the experiences of Japanese (or really, any non-Korean) K-pop idol trainees, including the extra hours of late-night Korean language studying once the native speakers are already in bed, and even cultural differences in communication styles: the sometimes-jarring directness (the unfiltered truths, one could say) of their Korean evaluators versus the polite indirectness that Tenka thinks she would have gotten from a Japanese evaluator.

Similar to my fondness for KPop Demon Hunters fictionalizing the triumphs and trials of a K-pop girl group, having the fictional lens of Girl Crush through which to experience this high-stakes artistic and athletic marathon competition that is the K-pop idol trainee system crystallizes this journey into a timeless tale, relatable through any of the multiple generations of K-pop idol groups in recent history that rise, mature, and inevitably retire in the cycling of the entertainment industry. Anyone who has been brave enough to move far away from home (especially abroad) to chase their dream, or anyone who has ever had ambitions to work in a creative industry, can find something relatable with this manga and its characters.

On a more personal note regarding this manga, a few months ago I happened to meet a teenage aspiring K-pop trainee who had an upcoming audition with a Korean entertainment agency that had produced her favorite K-pop girl group. She was dutifully learning Korean, taking dance and vocal lessons, and attending Korean cultural seminars in the SoCal community (like the one I met her at). She said that she was fully dedicated to the prospect of moving to South Korea to pursue her dream. I had Girl Crush Vol. 1 with me at the time, so I showed it to her and strongly recommended it! She was interested and ended up taking a picture of the cover to snag her own copy later. 

I felt very proud and thankful that I was able to help connect someone with a story they could relate to in such a specific way, and hopefully learn from on a pre-professional as well as personal level. All I can do for her now is hope that she is able to achieve her dream. Maybe in several years, I’ll see a familiar face debuting in a new K-pop girl group! Until then, I’ll be reading Girl Crush—and keeping up with K-pop in real life.

Girl Crush Vols. 1 through 4 are available in English via Kinokuniya, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and other major booksellers. Vol. 5 will be released on 10 February 2026 and is available for preorder. If you are interested in sampling the story, you can read a free preview of Girl Crush Vol. 1 from Viz Media here.

It was also recently announced that an anime is in production! No release date has been announced yet, but I am ecstatic anyway at the opportunity for this story and these characters to reach a wider audience!

Let me know if you’re also following this series (or if this post inspired you to start). I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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Developmental edits by: Peggy Sue Wood | @pswediting