I"s (アイズ) is a teenage romance manga by Masakazu Katsura. The story's main character is 16-year old high school student Ichitaka Seto (瀬戸 一貴 Seto Ichitaka) who is in love with his classmate Iori Yoshizuki (葦月 伊織 Yoshizuki Iori), but too shy to tell her. Again and again he plans to tell her his true feelings, but each time something (usually a misunderstanding of some kind) comes in the way. Things get even more complicated when Itsuki Akiba (秋葉 いつき Akiba Itsuki), a girl Ichitaka was friends with in their childhood before she moved to the United States and who had a huge crush on him, returns to Japan.

Originally serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump in Japan from 1997 to 1999, the series was collected into 15 volumes, the first of which was released in English by Viz, LLC in March 2005.

Some of the covers of the magazines in which it is serialized feature its lead female character Iori, and are done in water-color to a quality that approaches airbrushed art.

Meaning of title

The name of this series nominally comes from the fact that three of its main characters have names which begin with the letter I. However, the slightly different set of characters I's are apparently common in the peculiar adaptations that the Japanese make of words in the English language, a use which they call wasei eigo, which in English-speaking countries is often called Japlish. There's a trivial volume of shōjo manga called I's , which simply features beautiful boys, its name apparently coming from a solecism meaning *of I, hence implying private. But a female manga artist, Youko Shouji , made a more renowned story which she also named I's , which told of a teenage girl abused by her stepfather. In her work, the name refers to the fragmentation of her personality into many selves (I's here not being a solecism) brought out by such abuse. As this preceded Masakazu's work, it appears that he named it such, but with two apostophes in the title to differentiate it, to excite the male readership with premonitions of teenage sex, which to date has not occurred in his manga.

Editing in the English version

One minor occurred in the English version of the first volume; a pair of breasts had stars placed over the nipples. Manga fans who dislike any and all editing became angry because of the edits.