While josei dramas are in most cases realist stories about the lives of ordinary women, romance josei manga are typically soap opera-influenced melodramas, while pornographic josei manga shares many common traits with pornographic manga for a heterosexual male audience.
Josei manga is traditionally printed in dedicated manga magazines which often specialize in a specific subgenre, typically drama, romance, or pornography. This distinction is further complicated by a third manga editorial category, young ladies ( ヤングレディース), which emerged in the late 1980s as an intermediate category between shōjo and josei. In practice, the distinction between shōjo and josei is often tenuous while the two were initially divergent categories, many manga works exhibit narrative and stylistic traits associated with both shōjo and josei manga. In a strict sense, josei refers to manga marketed to an audience of adult women, contrasting shōjo manga, which is marketed to an audience of girls and young adult women. 'women's comics', pronounced ), also known as ladies' comics ( レディースコミック) and its abbreviation redikomi ( レディコミ, 'lady-comi'), is an editorial category of Japanese comics that emerged in the 1980s.
Cover illustration to the josei manga series Kōrei Shussan Don to Koi!! by Motoko Fujita, an autobiography chronicling the author's pregnancy at the age of 43.
