Ten Texts That Taught Me

Ten tales, ten endings. Start with the one that finds you.

by Michael “Wavey” Peña

before we start.

This isn’t a top 10 list. I’m not ranking anything. I’m a curator because I’m an interpreter—that’s not a job title, it’s the shape of my days. I translate dosages on a pharmacy floor. I translate between Spanish and English and Japanese with the people I love. I translate stories into the language of why they matter, onto the page or the feed.

These are the ten anime and manga that taught me what that work is for.

They’re not the ten best. They’re the ten that asked something of me. Each one said come closer, look harder, sit with this longer than feels comfortable. I did. They gave something back. That’s the deal good stories make with you. They ask, you answer, and what comes back is bigger than either of you. It stays. Call it call and response. Call it grace. Either way it’s the reason I do this.

Some are famous. Some aren’t. What they share is that they reward the time you give them. That’s what Wavey Culture is about. Not reviews, not rankings. The question of why these stories ask and what they give back when we say yes.

I write at ComicsBeat, Toonami Faithful, and Manga Mavericks, and at waveyculture.com. I write about anime and manga because they earned my reading. I write about music and theology because the same deal applies. If you’ve ever wanted criticism that brings the same rigor to a comic that people bring to a Toni Morrison novel, that’s what I’m trying to build.

This list is where I’d start. This is the bedrock. Everything I write sits on top of it.

—Wavey

01: Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinjū

A 10-volume manga by Haruko Kumota, serialized from 2010 to 2016. Studio DEEN adapted it across two anime seasons (25 episodes) and a pair of OVAs, directed by Shinichi Omata.

This show asks you to watch flawed men destroy themselves and each other in pursuit of an art form that’s dying with them. It asks you to sit with that. To not look away when the destruction is what makes the art possible. Rakugo is preaching, and the whole show is a sermon about whether beauty survives the people who make it—about inheritance. What you receive. What you ruin. What you pass on anyway. If you’ve ever sat in a pew and listened to someone preach a text older than the building, you already know this feeling. Everything I try to do with Wavey Culture starts here.

START HERE IF: you want to understand what this whole channel is about

02: Monster

Naoki Urasawa’s 18-volume seinen manga, serialized in Big Comic Original from 1994 to 2001. Madhouse adapted it into a faithful 74-episode anime in 2004, directed by Masayuki Kojima.

The question Monster asks is the one I grew up with in catechism class. Is evil a thing that happens to people, or a thing that lives inside them? Urasawa doesn’t answer it. He just follows a surgeon across Europe chasing a man who might be the devil or might just be what the world made him. Every person they meet along the way becomes a full human being in three chapters. The craft here is staggering. Nobody draws empathy like Urasawa. Nobody. Eighteen volumes of evidence and the question is still open at the end. You carry it out with you.

START HERE IF: you need proof that manga is literature

03: Ping Pong the Animation

Taiyou Matsumoto’s 5-volume manga, serialized in 1996 and 1997. Masaaki Yuasa directed the 11-episode anime adaptation at Tatsunoko Production in 2014.

Eleven episodes about two kids who play table tennis. That’s the premise. Underneath the premise is the quietest question. What if your best friend is better than you, and you both know it, and you love each other anyway. Yuasa’s animation is doing something unreasonable to deliver that question. The screen bends and fractures when the ball moves, like the interiority of the players is bleeding into the frame. You see what it feels like to play, not just what it looks like. I came to this show as someone who’s been second-best at things that mattered. It didn’t fix that. It made it livable.

START HERE IF: you’ve ever been the second-best at something you love

04: Dorohedoro

Q Hayashida’s 23-volume seinen manga, serialized from 2000 to 2018. MAPPA adapted it into two anime seasons and a 6-episode OVA series, directed by Yuichiro Hayashi.

A man with a lizard head bites sorcerers to find out which one cursed him. His best friend runs a gyoza shop in a neighborhood that looks like Kowloon Walled City had a baby with a punk show. It’s disgusting and funny and violent and deeply, weirdly tender about friendship. Hayashida builds a world so thick with grime and personality you can smell it. She asks you to find the tenderness inside the disgust. To recognize that the brutality and the care are the same gesture from different angles. This is the book that taught me a story doesn’t have to be polished to be alive.

START HERE IF: you want art that feels alive and doesn’t care if you’re comfortable

05: Legend of the Galactic Heroes

Adapted from Yoshiki Tanaka’s 10-volume novel series. The original anime ran from 1988 to 1997 across 110 main OVA episodes, 52 Gaiden side-story episodes, and 3 films, directed by Noboru Ishiguro at Artland and Kitty Films. Production I.G. is currently producing a modern remake, Die Neue These.

One hundred and ten episodes. A war between a democracy that doesn’t deserve itself and an autocracy run by a man who might actually be good at it. Yang Wen-li is the most compelling protagonist I’ve ever read. He believes in democracy so deeply he’ll defend it when it’s trying to kill him. Keeps showing up. Keeps doing the work. Keeps losing friends to a system he doesn’t fully believe in. Defends it anyway because the alternative is worse. It’s what I think about when I think about faith and politics. Not because the show handles religion well, it doesn’t really. Because it shows what faith in an institution looks like when the institution keeps failing. How the people who stay hold up. This show doesn’t have fight scenes. It has arguments. It reads like a novel. It is one.

START HERE IF: you want the anime equivalent of reading Tolstoy

06: Revolutionary Girl Utena

Created by the Be-Papas collective and directed by Kunihiko Ikuhara at J.C.Staff. The 39-episode anime aired in 1997, followed by Ikuhara’s reimagined film Adolescence of Utena in 1999. Chiho Saito wrote and illustrated the 5-volume manga, plus a 2017 sequel volume, After the Revolution.

Utena is a show about a girl who wants to be a prince and slowly discovers that the entire concept of princes is a cage. It’s the sharpest thing I’ve read about the stories we tell girls about rescue. Ikuhara directs it like a fever dream. Repeated sequences become incantations. Surrealist imagery and shadow puppet plays tell you more than the plot does. The structure itself turns into something sharp. Something that cuts. It asks you to read narrative as moral content. To notice that the repetition isn’t laziness and the surrealism isn’t decoration. Everything on screen is the argument. I came to it late. Some shows you watch. This one watches you back.

START HERE IF: you want to see narrative structure used as a weapon

07: Haikyuu!!

Haruichi Furudate’s 45-volume Weekly Shonen Jump manga, serialized from 2012 to 2020. Production I.G. adapted it into four anime seasons and multiple films, including The Dumpster Battle in 2024.

The greatest sports manga ever made is not about winning. It’s about meeting someone who makes you measure yourself, and discovering that being measured is what you needed. Furudate pulls something off I’ve never seen anyone else do. Every opponent is the protagonist of their own story. You feel it. You want both sides to win. You can’t have that. That’s the whole thing. You also realize, somewhere along the way, that the characters love this sport so much they’ve stopped being able to enjoy it simply. That love is still the most beautiful thing in the book. I read the final chapter and just sat there for a while.

START HERE IF: you’ve ever wanted something so badly you forgot it was supposed to be fun

08: In This Corner of the World

Fumiyo Kouno’s 3-volume manga, serialized from 2007 to 2009. Sunao Katabuchi directed the MAPPA film adaptation in 2016, then returned in 2019 with an extended cut, In This Corner (and Other Corners) of the World, the longest theatrical animated film ever made.

A movie about a young woman who daydreams in watercolors and marries into a family in Kure. Then the war comes. It’s not just an anti-war film. It’s something quieter. It’s just a life. Dishes and rations and small jokes and then one day the sky changes color. Katabuchi trusted that the small things mattered enough to spend the screen time on them. You feel every minute of that trust. It asks you to love a life small enough to be erased. Only animation could hold something this fragile without breaking it.

START HERE IF: you want to understand what animation can do that live action can’t

09: Yona of the Dawn

Mizuho Kusanagi’s 48-volume Hana to Yume manga, serialized from 2009 to 2025. Studio Pierrot adapted the first arc into a 24-episode anime and three OVAs in 2014 and 2015. A second anime season has been confirmed.

Yona starts as a sheltered princess who loses everything. It would be so easy for this to be a standard revenge arc. Instead Kusanagi writes the most patient character transformation I’ve ever read. Yona doesn’t become strong because the plot needs her to. She becomes strong because she keeps choosing to look at the world honestly even when it hurts. Not once. Not as a turning point. Over and over for years on the page. It asks you to recognize transformation as a daily practice instead of a narrative event. That there is no turning point, only the choosing. The politics are sharp. The action is earned. I’m still here because she is.

START HERE IF: you believe transformation is a choice you make every single day

10: Shirobako

An original 24-episode anime by Tsutomu Mizushima at P.A. Works, aired in 2014 and 2015, followed by two OVAs and a sequel film, Shirobako: The Movie, in 2020.

An original anime about making anime. Five friends from a high school animation club scatter into the industry and discover that the thing they love is also a job, and jobs are brutal, and deadlines don’t care about your artistic vision. I watched this right when I was trying to figure out if writing about the things I love could actually be a career. It cracked something open. The show asks you to keep loving creative work while seeing its actual conditions. To refuse the romance and refuse the cynicism and keep showing up anyway. Most shows about art are either romantic or cynical. This one is both and neither. It reminded me why I started.

START HERE IF: you make things for a living and sometimes forget why

what comes next.

If any of these texts asked something of you while you read about them, then we’re already in conversation. That’s the only qualification.

I publish weekly when possible at waveyculture.com. That’s the floor. The project extends into video essays, podcasts, and whatever other form lets me sit with a story the way it deserves to be sat with. Sometimes that means a 6,000-word close reading. Sometimes that means watching something for the first time with someone I love and letting the conversation be the criticism. The form changes. The deal doesn’t. A story asks, I answer, what comes back gets written down.

I also publish at ComicsBeat, Toonami Faithful, and Manga Mavericks. Wherever you find me, the work is the same. Take the things we love seriously enough to translate them. Interpret them. Give them back to the people who needed someone to say yes, this matters, and here’s why.

If you’re the person who needed someone to say that, you’re the person Wavey Culture is for.

RIDE THE WAVE

Canto Puro, por Wavey.

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