Mayu likes to read romance and to draw manga. Just like the protagonists in her favourite romance shōjō manga, she would like to have a boyfriend (かれし). So she just starts drawing him.
Author and Illustrator: ふくどめマリア
Publisher: NPO多言語多読 NPO Tagengo Tadoku
Length: 16 pages
This short manga is written and drawn especially for Japanese language learners, but is read right to left and vertically in the typical manga style. It contains largely textbook sentences with the usual です/ます-verb endings and furigana on all kanji. For some of the speech bubbles you will also encounter in parts the colloquial grammar typical of manga, such as the simple verb form and onomatopoeia.
However, the story is told in a way that you will not need to understand the precise grammar rules to grasp the meaning behind the expressions. If you want to get a feeling for how manga reads in Japanese, this free graded reader is the right book for you to try it out and the drawings are also really beautiful.
彼氏がほしい！was written and illustrated by ふくどめマリア for the NPO Tagengo Tadoku’s free graded readers. You can read it for free here. There are also downloadable PDF and mp3 files for this story as well as a read-along on YouTube.
dokushoclub.com 