15 Underrated Shonen Manga More People Need To Read

Taro Sakamoto was once a legendary hitman, but he left that life behind for something a lot more ordinary - love, marriage, and parenthood. But while he'd rather focus on running his shop and providing for his family, he can't walk away from his old life entirely. Working with Shin, a telepathic employee at his store, he does what must be done to protect his wife and child.

After losing his family in a car crash, Taiyo Asano's close friend Mutsumi Yozakura is the only person left in his life. But his chances of having an ordinary life with her fly out the window when he realizes that his teacher is not just her brother, but also a spy. In fact, the whole family is composed of spies! After Taiyo gets into a conflict with them, he realizes that the only way to keep Mutsumi safe is to marry her - but to do that, he's going to have to become a spy himself.

High school student Ageha Yoshina loves helping other people - especially if they pay him 10,000 yen to do it. One night, he answers a ringing public phone, and his whole helping people thing is taken to another level. A woman who knows way too much about him asks him if he wants to go somewhere called Psyren. Thinking that this might have something to do with his missing classmate Sakurako, he takes the offer. But once there, he can't leave until he wins a competition using his brand new psychic powers.

Momo Ayase and her classmate Okarun both have supernatural beliefs, but they're quite different from one another. While Momo believes in ghosts but not aliens, Okuran thinks that aliens are real, but can't get behind the whole ghost thing. In order to prove who is right and who is wrong, Momo goes to a place that Okuran says is associated with aliens, while Okuran heads off to a haunted location. It turns out that they're both right and wrong - both aliens and ghosts are real!

Fuuko Izumo has been living in isolation for about ten years. Why? Because she has the unfortunate ability to bring terrible luck to the people around her. This once resulted in a catastrophe that ended over 200 lives, including those of her own parents. When her favorite manga ends, she decides that she has nothing left to live for, and that she will take her own life. In the process, she meets a seemingly immortal man who is trying to end his life in the most satisfying way possible. They soon attract the attention of a group called the Union, which is trying to hunt them down. However, they soon learn that they can join the Union instead - giving them the opportunity to understand a lot more about what's going on with their own powers, and with the rest of the world. This series is supposed to get an anime adaptation in October 2023, so hopefully that will bring more attention to the manga, too.

Ragna is a low-ranking dragon hunter who ends up befriending the incredibly talented Leonica, who has slain more dragons than anyone else. Ragna is content to go along doing his thing with Leonica by his side, but a particularly vicious dragon attack changes both of their lives forever. Can Ragna pick up the pieces?

Akane has always admired her father, a talented rakugo performer - rakugo being a traditional form of Japanese storytelling. Whenever people criticized his pursuit of art and told him to get a real job, she'd be the first to defend him. But during a promotional exam, he's unexpectedly fired and has to give up on his dreams. Akane is determined to get involved in the business herself so that she can figure out what happened and take revenge for her father.

So far, this manga has only been released on the Shueisha MANGA Plus app, so it's understandable that it doesn't have as many readers as it deserves. Hopefully, when volumes start getting published in English at the end of 2023, it will pick up some steam. The series follows an alien named Nnu-Anu-Kf whose job is to spread happiness to humans. His first encounter is with a nine-year-old girl named Shizuka who is being relentlessly bullied at school and doesn't have a great home life, either. In fact, until Nnu-Anu-Kf - who she renames Takopi - arrives, the only good thing about her life is her dog Chappy. When her bully goads Chappy into biting her so that he'll be taken by animal control, Shizuka uses one of the gadgets that Takopi had hoped would improve her life to try and end it all. Takopi decides to travel back in time to see if he can improve Shizuka's miserable life before it's too late.

When the body of a Russian spy is found in Japan with a memory chip installed, teenager hacker Fujimaru Takagi is hired by the Public Security Intelligence Agency's Third-I section. It turns out that the chip contains footage from the Christmas Massacre, a viral epidemic that took thousands of lives in Russia. Things get much worse for Fujimaru after his father, a high-ranking member of Third-I, is accused of ending his supervisor's life while trying to investigate this phenomenon. In reality, what's behind it is something called Bloody Monday. It's up to Fujimaru to figure out what's going on - and one way he might be able to do it is through the terrorist spy posing as his high school teacher.

In the future, people no longer build skills on their own. Rather, they download “labels” from an app that give them the ability to do whatever they want. This works out great for some people, but for Heita it's kind of a nightmare. Why? Because he can't synchronize with any of the labels, so he's an outcast in society. But it turns out that he can synchronize with some of them - specifically, a special one that's illegal for ordinary citizens to possess. He's nearly arrested for this, but then he gets a deal - if he works with the special police to find other illegal labels, his “crime” will be forgiven. Thus begins his adventures finding strange labels and removing them from general society.

Hajime Kanou is a huge fan of Magic: The Gathering, and he spends most breaks at school playing it with an extremely rowdy group. Emi Sawatari, a classmate who is not only extremely popular but also Hajime's main rival for top grades, frequently gets on his case about being loud and bringing games like that to school. So they don't really get along. That changes when Hajime goes to a Magic shop and discovers that not only does Emi play the game, she's one of the best players there. The two end up growing closer through the game.

Saike Kuzushiro is a pessimistic, nihilistic middle school student with little motivation to do anything. One of the few bright spots in his life is his childhood friend, Mikan Karatachi. When Mikan is suddenly hit by a truck, he realizes that he can rewind time and save her life. After saving Mikan, he decides that he needs to change his own outlook on life and start making meaning of it.

Tama Youko and Jinka Yamato are a pair of demonic siblings who travel across the country trying to protect humankind from an organization called the Dangaishuu that seeks to transform humans into demons - even though Jinka doesn't really like humans all that much. They team up with Hyoudou Shinsuke, a swordsman who is trying to improve his skills in order to protect himself.

After the members of the Ichinose family get into a near-fatal car accident, none of them remember much about themselves prior to it. They decide to just go home and try to resume life as normal while waiting for their memories to come back. They soon find out that their former lives were anything but ordinary - and that it may soon be coming back to haunt them.

Most sports manga feature characters who love their chosen sport right out of the gate. Rookies is different. The baseball team in Rookies is composed of players who were kicked out of previous games for fighting. They don't have any real interest in baseball - instead, they're more concerned with smoking, hooking up, and various forms of delinquency. It takes their new Japanese teacher and coach, Koichi Kawato, to motivate them to put their all into baseball and participate in the national high school finals at Koshien.