History of manga Shōjo Manga And Ladies' Comics From 1975 to Today (1) In the following decades (1975–present), shōjo manga continued to develop stylistically while simultaneously evolving different but overlapping subgenres. Major subgenres have included romance, superheroines, and "Ladies Comics" (in Japanese,redisu, redikomi, andjosei), whose boundaries are sometimes indistinguishable from each other and from shōnen manga. In modern shōjo manga romance, love is a major theme set into emotionally intense narratives of self-realization. Japanese manga/ animecritic Eri Izawa defines romance as symbolizing "the emotional, the grand, the epic; the taste of heroism, fantastic adventure, and the melancholy; passionate love, personal struggle, and eternal longing" set into imaginative, individualistic, and passionate narrative frameworks. These romances are sometimes long narratives that can deal with distinguishing between false and true love, coping with sexual intercourse, and growing up in a complex world, themes inherited by subsequent animated versions of the story. These "coming of age" or bildungs roman themes occur in both shōjo and shōnen manga. In the bildungs roman, the protagonist must deal with adversity and conflict, and examples inshōjo manga of romantic conflict are common. They include Miwa Ueda's Peach Girl, Fuyumi Soryo's Mars, and, for mature readers, Moyoco Anno's Happy Mania, Yayoi Ogawa's Tramps Like Us, and Ai Yazawa's Nana. In another shōjo manga bildungs roman narrative device, the young heroine is transported to an alien place or time where she meets strangers and must survive on her own (including Hagio Moto'sThey Were Eleven, Kyoko Hikawa's From Far Away, Yû Watase's Fushigi Yûgi: The Mysterious Play, and Chiho Saito'sThe World Exists For Me Yet another such device involves meeting unusual or strange people and beings, for example, Natsuki Takaya's Fruits Basket - one of the most popular shōjo manga in the United States - whose orphaned heroine Tohru must survive living in the woods in a house filled with people who can transform into the animals of the Chinese zodiac. In Harako Iida's Crescent Moon, heroine Mahiru meets a group of supernatural beings, finally to discover that she herself too has a supernatural ancestry when she and a young tengu demon fall in love.