Best Yakuza Romance Manga

Summary

• Love can blossom in unexpected places, even in the dangerous world of the Yakuza, where strict rules govern relationships.
• Anime like Gokudou Juliet explore the complexities of falling for someone from a different background, adding drama to romance.
• Yakuza romance manga like Yakuza Fiancé, offer a grounded take on love amidst arranged marriages and dark family secrets.

Love comes in many forms, and it can bloom anywhere. Even romantic love can form in the grimmest places, and the world of organized crime is very grim. Particularly in the Gokudo or, as they’re better known, the Yakuza. Aside from crime, they’re also known for their strict hierarchy and moral code.

People know their place in the group, and if they go against the rules, they could end up losing more than a finger or two. Nevertheless, they’re a good source of creative inspiration for crime dramas, action stories, and more. Some mangaka have even used them and their different families to create the best yakuza romance manga.

Updated on December 17, 2024, by David Heath: Yakuza romances can offer all sorts of dangerous obstacles to love, from trouble with the law, to fates worse than death. Even so, things usually work out for its lovebirds, if only by the skin of their teeth sometimes. Many of its manga are largely BL stories, as noted in this list’s previous update highlighting the best ones. This time, it’s received a more general update focusing on the topic’s rising stars, from slow-burn romcoms to intense dramas that hit the ground running.

20 Boss Bride Days

MyAnimeList Score: 6.56

• Written & Illustrated by Narumi Hasegaki.
• 15 Volumes, 41 Chapters.
• Available in English via Kodansha USA.

Boss Bride Days is about what happens when one’s fantasies become real. Self-proclaimed nerd Sakura would rather spend her days indoors playing her yakuza-themed dating game than head outside. But when she does go outside, she saves the life of an old man who just happens to be the head of the Amo-gumi, a yakuza family. Moved by her courage, he ends up putting her into his succession plans.

If any of his three grandsons manage to win Sakura’s hand in marriage, they’ll become the family’s new boss, too. Now she’s got the sweet Shusuke, the brusque Reo, and the calculating Ryusei trying to win her over. Sakura thinks they’re just trying to use her and, to make matters worse, not everyone is happy to see her in the family. With her life on the line, they may prove their love to be genuine.

19 I Won’t Fall for the Infatuated Yakuza’s Affections!

MyAnimeList Score: 6.59

• Written & Illustrated by Runa Hirai.
• 3 Volumes, 18 Chapters.
• Available in English digitally via Frontier Works on Mangaplaza.

Sometimes, stories about a romance gone wrong can be just as satisfying as seeing a loving couple get together. For example, I Won’t Fall for the Infatuated Yakuza’s Affections sees Riko, the granddaughter of a yakuza family, fall for her overprotective caretaker, Iori. He always spoiled her rotten, making her the center of his world. So, she couldn’t help but feel special and loved by him.

But then she discovers Iori already has a girlfriend. Sad, she tries to distance herself from Iori in order to get over him. But he won’t allow that. Each time she tries to do more things on her own, Iori makes his presence known, unconvinced she can do everything by herself. The manga is early in its run but has already struck a chord with readers keen on male yandere stories.

18 Arrested Love

MyAnimeList Score: 6.71

• Written & Illustrated by Natsumegu Seiju.
• 3+ Volumes, 64+ Chapters.
• Available in English via Irodori Comics.

What happens when two people from opposite sides fall in love? It’s been a popular trope in romance since Romeo & Juliet, and it’s abundant in anime and manga through series like Basilisk and Love After World Domination, among others. Arrested Love takes the concept and puts it into a romcom, where a detective and a yakuza boss love and hate each other at the same time.

It’s almost like a straight version of Like the Beast, except the Tsuchigumo underboss Todoroki and 4th Police Division Detective Arigaya have reputations to uphold. When they’re together, they’re at each other’s throats, and when they’re apart, they’re over the moon about each other. Between the sting operations and stakeouts they have to avoid/conduct, they have to deal with their complicated feelings, which can be just as dicey.

17 Boss Wife

MyAnimeList Score: 6.76

• Written & Illustrated by Mayu Sakurai.
• 9+ Volumes, 37+ Chapters.
• Available in English via Kodansha Comics USA.

It doesn’t pay to deal with the yakuza. One loan taken out with the wrong people can end up landing people in some serious hot water, or some cold ocean water as they take a seabed view via some concrete shoes. However, as Hasumi in Boss Wife discovers, debt relief can come with some hefty conditions too. On the run from debt collectors, she has a chance meeting with her high school crush, Yamato.

Feeling things can’t get worse, she spends a night of passion with her long-lost love. Which is also when she discovers he’s since become part of the yakuza. She heads for the hills, only to be tracked down by Yamato again, who offers her an interesting proposition: he’ll buy her debt if she marries him. Hasumi could live the high life for a change, but being the wife of a mobster comes with complications she wasn’t expecting.

16 Tie Me, Unravel Me, Kiss Me

MyAnimeList Score: 6.76

• Written & Illustrated by Emi Mitsuki.
• 1 Volume, 6 Chapters.
• Available in English via TappyToon, Renta, and Digital Manga Publishing’s June imprint.

Tie Me, Unravel Me, Kiss Me is more than a tantalizing hint of things to come. It’s also a reference to Itabashi’s tailor shop, which he runs in a shopping district downtown. When he reunites with his old childhood friend Shinagawa, he seems happy at first. Then Shinagawa reveals he’s part of a redevelopment scheme that threatens to run Itabashi’s shop out of business.

Things only get worse when Adachi, another old-school friend, gets involved. He’s now part of the yakuza, who have a keen interest in seeing the scheme succeed. Caught between keeping his family’s tailor business alive, trying to convince Adachi to leave him be, and dealing with his old feelings for Shinagawa, Itabashi has a lot to fight against in one volume.

15 Yakuza Lover

MyAnimeList Score: 6.88

• Written & Illustrated by Nozomi Mino.
• 12 Volumes, 44 Chapters.
• Available in English via Viz Media’s Shojo Beat.

Yakuza romance stories have all sorts of twists and turns, whether they go into its hierarchy, its etiquette, or the complicated politics between one family and another. Yakuza Lover keeps it simple by boiling the appeal of the genre to its basic elements, featuring one bad boy from the rough side of the tracks and the prim & proper girl who secretly has a thing for them. It’s perhaps a little trite, but it has a solid audience.

The manga sees Yuri, a feisty college girl, get accosted by drug dealers at a party, where she’s saved by Oya, the young boss of a yakuza syndicate. Yuri knows he’s bad news, yet she still goes to visit him afterward to give her thanks. But no matter how much Yuri tells herself she’s not in the market for a bad boy, she can’t deny she’s drawn to his handsome looks and manners. No matter how much she tries to pull away, Yuri ends up in a steamy, dangerous love affair.

14 Be My Buddy

MyAnimeList Score: 6.98

• Written & Illustrated by Nayuta Nago.
• 1 Volume, 6 Chapters.
• Available in English via Manga Planet.

Be My Buddy offers a tale of uncertainty and the fear of change. Takanari has been friends with Ayano since they were kids, doing nearly everything together, and even living together where Ayano acts as his ‘chaperon’. All he wants is a normal life with him, as he can’t imagine living without Ayano being there to have his back.

Unfortunately, things aren’t as simple as that. Takanari is the heir to a yakuza family and will be expected to take over as its boss soon enough. It leaves him in a dilemma: would Ayano stick around if he became a mob boss? Would he leave if he didn’t take the family’s reins? It’s a short story, though one still packed with drama.

13 Nezumi’s First Love

MyAnimeList Score: 7.09

• Written & Illustrated by Riku Oseto.
• 3+ Volumes, 39+ Chapters.
• Fan Translations only. The official translation is due out in 2025 by Kodansha Comics USA.

Nezumi’s First Love is relatively new, having started running in Weekly Young Magazine in October 2023. Nonetheless, it caught on by offering a starker take on romance within the underworld of organized crime. The titular Nezumi was raised within the yakuza to be an emotionless killing machine, their own personal assassin who could take out targets without remorse or hesitation. As such, it’s a brutal and bloody strip, but one tempered by tender emotions, as Nezumi comes across a young man called Ao.

Together, Nezumi begins to have feelings she never felt before, as she starts falling for Ao and lives together with him. Even so, first loves rarely work out perfectly, and with Nezumi’s day job, her love for Ao may have been doomed from the very start. Currently, the manga is only available via fan translations, but Kodansha Comics USA announced at New York Comic Con ’24 that they’ll be officially translating the strip into English, with its first volume due to be out in Q4 of 2025.

12 Kuroha To Nijisuke

MyAnimeList Score: 7.14

• Written by Ryogo Narita.
• Illustrated by Nazuma Shiraume.
• 1 Volume, 4 Chapters.
• Fan Translations only. Available in Spanish via Editorial Kamite.

Kuroha to Nijisuke is a rather unassuming start to the tale of a girl with perfect luck meeting a boy with the worst luck. It’s much shorter than its sequel, Kuroha to Nijisuke: Black Witch’s Divertimento, which also got a slightly higher MAL rating at 7.44. But Divertimento is more of an action story where the two leads have already got together. The first story goes into how these two opposites attracted each other in the first place.

Kuroha has had great luck for as long as she could remember, yet it always came at a cost to those around her. Her guardians, the Hibauchi yakuza group, used this to their advantage to get one-up over their rivals. Frustrated at being used like a weapon, she throws herself out of a window, only to be saved by Nijisuke, a man who’s suffered misfortune all his life but refuses to believe in luck one way or the other. He and his friend Hokuto help her escape, and his confidence, despite his rough luck, inspires Kuroha to take her fate into her own hands.

11 W Change!!

MyAnimeList Score: 7.17

• Written & Illustrated by Hiro Matsuba.
• 6 Volumes, 31 Chapters.
• Fan Translations only.

The brutality of the criminal underworld doesn’t seem like the most fertile ground for fun and frolic. Yet even the grimmest settings can produce comedies or even romantic comedies like W Change!! It combines the political maneuvering of a yakuza thriller with a romance between a girl with a split personality and her unassuming childhood friend-turned-crush.

Maki is the heiress to the Kisaragi family, but she’d rather leave it behind to become a normal homemaker, preferably with her crush Fukama. The problem is that her repressed anger comes out as a second personality that loves cracking heads within the yakuza. To add extra wrinkles, Fukama is also a reluctant heir to a rival clan, and there’s a third family in the shadows willing to divide and conquer. Can Maki somehow get through all these knots to achieve her dream?

10 Sugar Code

MyAnimeList Score: 7.50

• Written & Illustrated by Isaku Natsume.
• 1 Volume, 5 Chapters.
• Fan Translations only.

Sugar Code isn’t explicit with its lovers, though it’s certainly one of the more amorous entries on this list. Funnier too, as it’s a romcom with a twist. While out on the town, Akira witnesses a stylish, handsome young man take out a bunch of goons after they were threatening a stranger. After fainting from shock, he wakes to find the man offering to help him back to his apartment. He introduces himself as Oodoi and asks if he can stick around for a while.

Sooner than later, Oodoi ends up part of Akira’s life, loafing around in his apartment. However as soon as Akira thinks he isn’t as manly as he thought he was, he learns Oodoi is part of a prominent yakuza family, and he snaps back into business when mobs threaten Akira into selling his home. Though is he doing that because he cares about Akira? Or does he just want a place to laze around in?

9 My Bride Is A Mermaid

MyAnimeList Score: 7.50

• Written & Illustrated by Tahiko Kimura.
• 16 Volumes, 79 Chapters.
• Fan Translations only.

It might be easier for curious readers to find My Bride is a Mermaid‘s 2007 anime adaptation than the original manga. All 26 episodes of the anime are available right now on Crunchyroll, be it the regular service or the Amazon Prime channel. But its manga never got picked up by an English publisher, not even in the anime’s heyday. New fans had to make do with well-meaning but variable fan translations. That aside, what do mermaids have to do with the yakuza?

When Nagasumi goes swimming in the Seto Inland Sea, he’s saved from drowning by a mermaid called Sun. Unfortunately, mermaid society is run yakuza-style, where either revealing their existence or learning about it is punishable by death. But Sun’s father and Seto Clan head, Gozaburo, understandably doesn’t want his daughter to die. So, he offers Nagasumi a compromise: marry his daughter or be killed. He chooses the former and, as he learns more about his new bride and the submarine yakuza life, develops true feelings for Sun.

8 Wild Ones

MyAnimeList Score: 7.67

• Written & Illustrated by Kiyo Fujiwara.
• 10 Volumes, 57 Chapters.
• Available in English via Viz Media’s Shojo Beat.

Wild Ones takes its lead, Sachie, for an emotional ride. With her mother’s recent death in a car accident and her father long since deceased, she thought she had nowhere left to go. That is until her grandfather, Raizo, arrives on the scene and offers her a place to stay. Sachie had never met him before, but she soon found out why her mother never mentioned her side of the family.

Raizo is the head of his own yakuza clan, where each of its members looks up to him like a father rather than just a boss. Not only does Sachie have to move in with his entourage, but she’s also assigned a bodyguard – the handsome and heroic Rakuto. Sachie doesn’t like crime or deception, and Rakuto can be overprotective, but there’s more to Raizo’s family than that, and there’s more to Rakuto, too.

7 Mobsters in Love

Anime-Planet Score: 3.85/5 Stars

• Written & Illustrated by Chiyoko Origami.
• 3 Volumes, 20 Chapters.
• Available in English via Square-Enix.

After the complicated politics of Yakuza Fiancé and the forbidden romance of Gokudo Juliet, Mobsters in Love keeps things simple with a straightforward tale of emotions vs duty. Akihiro is the right-hand man of the Sawatari family, being the most trusted member of its boss, Shojiro Sawatari. But he’s got a secret he’s been holding in for years: he’s head over heels for Shojiro.

Practically everything about him attracts Akihiro, as Shojiro unintentionally works his charms on his subordinate. However, if his feelings were exposed, it could cost him his position in the family, if not more. Even so, the more he represses his feelings, the more likely it is that something’s going to give.

6 Nisekoi: False Love

MyAnimeList Score: 7.71

• Written & Illustrated by Naoshi Komi.
• 25 Volumes, 229 Chapters.
• Available in English via Viz Media.

In Nisekoi, Raku dreams of becoming a public servant and being with his crush, Kosaki. Unfortunately, as the heir to a large yakuza family, his father has other plans. After a long turf war with the American Bee Hive family, Raku’s father arranges a peace deal with them by pairing his son up with their daughter, Chitoge. She and Raku hate each other but must pretend to be in love to keep their families happy.

For an extra complication, when Raku was little, he promised to marry his childhood friend. He doesn’t remember what they looked like, but to prove their identity, they had a key that would unlock his heart-shaped pendant. So now, he must juggle his fake love with Chitoge, his crush on Kosaki, and several girls who may be his childhood sweethearts.

5 Gokudo Juliet

Anime Planet Score: 3.86/5 Stars

• Written & Illustrated by Kameno.
• 92 Chapters.
• Fan Translations only.

There are many ways to develop drama in romance and one of the more popular ones is to have people from opposite sides of the tracks fall for each other. It worked for Romeo & Juliet, so why not Gokudo Juliet, where Yamato, the daughter of a late police officer, gets into a little trouble on her first day at high school?

She’s helped by Jin, a handsome young man with a sweet side. Others tell her not to get close to him, as he’s part of the largest yakuza family in the area, but there’s something about him that appeals to her. Even when her mother reveals Jin played a part in her father’s death, she wants to get closer to him to find out what exactly happened to him. Is he still as sweet as he looks, or is he a devil in disguise?

4 Yakuza Fiancé: Raise Wa Tanin Ga Ii

MyAnimeList Score: 7.79

• Written & Illustrated by Asuka Konishi.
• 8+ Volumes, 38+ Chapters.
• Available in English via Seven Seas Entertainment.

If the other entries seem a little fanciful, Yakuza Fiancé: Raise Wa Tanin Ga Ii (A Future Fit for Others) goes for a more grounded take on yakuza romance – or at least one where things aren’t so rosy. Yoshino hoped that, despite being the granddaughter of the head of the Somei Group, Kansai’s largest yakuza organization, she could be an ordinary high schooler.

Instead, when the Somei merges with the Miyama Group, its equivalent in Kanto, she’s put in an arranged marriage with the Miyama Group leader’s grandson to seal the deal. Said grandson, Kirishima, is nice and polite enough around her, but he has a dark side that’s more brutal than any ordinary yakuza. Yoshino is no wilting flower, but with normality thrown out the window, she’ll have to steel herself for life within the Miyama.

3 Gokusen

MyAnimeList Score: 8.06

• Written & Illustrated by Kozueko Morimoto.
• 15 Volumes, 156 Chapters.
• Fan Translations only.

Gokusen is a “hot for teacher” story with a twist, as class 3D, the unruliest class at an all-boys school, gains a new math and homeroom teacher: Kumiko “Yankumi” Yamaguchi. Though they thrive on tormenting the school staff, Yankumi withstands their attempts to break her and brings the class to heel, gaining their respect.

One of her students, Shin, takes a particular interest in Yankumi as she doesn’t act like a typical teacher. Eventually, he discovers her secret: Yankumi is the heir to the Kuroda-Ikka yakuza clan, and they want her to come back as their boss. Even though she can hold her own, Shin does his best to back her up, even if he ends up being the one saved by her most of the time.

2 Tokyo Crazy Paradise

MyAnimeList Score: 8.28

• Written & Illustrated by Yoshiki Nakamura.
• 19 Volumes (111 Chapters).
• Fan Translations only.

Set in the far-off future year of 2020, Tokyo Crazy Paradise sees the city become a crime-riddled dystopia where murder and acts of violence against women are commonplace. As a result, Tsukasa’s parents raised their daughter as a boy. She wants to follow in her parent’s footsteps and become a cop, but when they’re killed in the line of duty, she’s left to look after herself and her siblings alone.

To pay off her parents’ debts and make ends meet, Tsukasa becomes the bodyguard for Ryuji, her classmate and leader of the biggest yakuza group in the area. At first, Ryuji ramps up her debts to keep her on his proverbial leash, but this only drives her to take side jobs that get her in trouble. Eventually, as the two save each other from different threats, the two form a bond beyond their contract.

1 Like The Beast

MyAnimeList Score: 8.46

• Written & Illustrated by Kotetsuko Yamamoto.
• 17+ Volumes, 39+ Chapters.
• Available in English via Futekiya.

As the previous entries showed, there’s no shortage of Yaoi/BL yakuza stories. In fact, there are a lot of them, and they often come with content warnings. However, one of the most highly-rated and extensive yakuza-themed BL stories is Like the Beast. It shows what happens when two guys from different sides of the law fall for each other.

Officer Ueda didn’t have this in mind when he became a cop; he just liked helping people, which endeared him to the community. It just so happened to charm Aki, heir to the Gotōda group, too. After the two took care of an underwear thief together, Aki confessed his love for Ueda. Flustered, Ueda gives him a chance, only to find out the hard way what kind of trouble dating a mobster as a cop can bring.