What Is The Best Onmyouji Manga Adaptation To Start?

I still get a little giddy whenever onmyōji pop up on the screen, and when folks ask which studios handled straight-up onmyōji TV series, two names immediately come to mind. The most direct ones are Toei Animation, which produced the TV anime 'Shōnen Onmyōji' in the mid-2000s, and Sunrise, which made the more action-leaning 'Onmyou Taisenki' earlier in the 2000s. Those two are the clearest cases of studios adapting stories that openly brand themselves as onmyōji shows. That said, if you mean the classic literary work 'Onmyoji' by Baku Yumemakura, that particular series of novels surprisingly wasn’t turned into a TV anime. Instead, it spawned live-action films and TV dramas (and stage plays), so if you were hoping for a TV anime of that exact property, it isn’t something we actually got. Fans often conflate the novel franchise with the broader onmyōji subgenre, which is why it's easy to mix things up. Beyond those studio-name highlights, many other studios have explored onmyōji-ish themes without using the label — shows with exorcists, yōkai, and spirit-binding tech appear from places like Brain’s Base or Production I.G in different flavors. So if you’re hunting for onmyōji vibes, you can go direct (Toei, Sunrise) or follow the vibe through other studios’ supernatural catalogs.

I got hooked on 'Onmyoji' after stumbling into a midnight thread about Abe no Seimei — and the best way I've found to read the novels is pretty simple: follow publication order, then dip into short-story collections and adaptations. The original novels were written as a mix of short stories and longer pieces, and the author intentionally shuffled episodes, so reading them in release order preserves the unfolding of character details, surprises, and how the worldbuilding was revealed to readers over time. Start with the earliest volumes that carry the 'Onmyoji' name — these introduce Seimei, Abe no Masahiro, and the cast of familiar spirits and court intrigue. After the core novels, I move to the various short-story collections and later sequels; those often expand on side characters and plug gaps, but they assume you already know the basics. If you care about experiencing the mystery reveals as intended, publication order is friendlier than strict in-universe chronology, because some later-written prequels rely on your existing knowledge of characters to land their emotional beats. If you don’t read Japanese, translations and collected editions vary a lot, so I usually follow translator release lists or fan-compiled reading orders on sites like Goodreads and Wikipedia. Also, the manga and live-action films are great companions — they adapt different parts of the novels, so I treat them like tasty side quests. Honestly, reading the books this way felt like finding small lanterns in a foggy Kyoto night: gradual, atmospheric, and totally worth it.