Kodansha is turning one of its English-language one-shots into a full series. The November issue of Monthly Young Magazine, out this week, announced that Rin Shimokawa’s Godmother will start serialization in the magazine’s next issue on November 18.
The one-shot ran in the special Young Magazine US English issue in August 2025, and it has been readable on YanMaga Web since then. November 18 is when it stops being a sample and becomes a running series.
The setup
Kinryu is a college student whose life gets rearranged without her consent. She is pulled out of university and sent overseas to Japan to look after a 114-year-old grandmother she did not know she had. She arrives in Yokohama angry and uninterested, and finds the old woman living behind a mahjong parlor. Whatever the grandmother has been keeping is not ordinary: there is a supernatural secret that runs down the female side of the family, and Kinryu is now part of it.
YanMaga’s own blurb frames the book around Yokohama’s Chinatown, described as a place that has become a den of vice, and credits Shimokawa as a newcomer from China. That background shows in the material. The one-shot’s Yokohama is not a tourist postcard; the mahjong parlor, the grandmother’s age, and the family curse all sit inside a Chinese-Japanese community that the story treats as its own world.
Why this series exists at all
Godmother came out of Kodansha’s Young Magazine US English issue, a project built to find new talent outside Japan. The top five entries in that initiative were guaranteed serialization on the K MANGA app, plus a run in Japan in Monthly Young Magazine and YanMaga Web, published at the same time on K MANGA.
The other winners were Still You, To Dusk and Twilight, Boys Run the Riot -In Transition-, Protocol Ryugu, and The Last Terran. Three of those are already running. The Last Terran is the most recent to launch, in Monthly Young Magazine on August 20. Earlier winners took a similar path: Daisuke Itabashi’s The Journey of a Dark Elf with Fading Powers began in the January 2026 issue in December 2025, Ray Kindo’s The Knight of Blasphemy started in the August issue on July 16, and Seven Seas has already licensed the dark elf series for print in March 2027.
That pipeline is worth paying attention to. A contest win in an English-language issue now leads to a Japanese magazine slot and, in at least one case, a US print license within a year or so. It is a faster route than the traditional assistant-then-one-shot-then-serialization track.
What November 18 actually changes
The November 18 chapter is the start of an ongoing run, not another one-off, so readers should expect the story to expand past the family secret that the one-shot introduced. Monthly Young Magazine is a monthly, which means a slow release pace, roughly twelve chapters a year at best, with collected volumes following behind.
For English readers, the K MANGA side of the deal is the part that matters. The contest terms promise simultaneous publication on K MANGA, so Godmother should be readable in English at the same time as the Japanese chapter, in the app, without a separate license announcement.
Monthly Young Magazine’s next issue is a busy one. A-DO ends in the same issue that Godmother begins, which is a neat bit of scheduling turnover for the magazine.
Readers who follow new serializations in Kodansha’s line have had a steady supply of them lately, including a Cells at Work! dental spinoff launching October 26.
Source: Monthly Young Magazine November issue, via Anime News Network
Featured image: Promotional art for Rin Shimokawa’s Godmother, via Kodansha / YanMaga Web.
