It will be remembered that just this Monday, publisher Shueisha announced that Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece is their best-selling manga title for 2019, with Koyoharu Gotouge’s Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba as a close second. Another bestseller list, however, says otherwise: it was Demon Slayer that was actually the highest-selling manga for 2019 (for the period of November 19, 2018 to November 17, 2019)!

This was the pronouncement from Oricon, a company that specializes in compiling sales data for the music and book industry in Japan. According to their just-released book rankings for 2019, Demon Slayer sold a total of 12, 057, 628, besting One Piece’s 10, 134, 232. That’s quite a huge difference from the sales numbers released by Shueisha early this week, which stated that Demon Slayer sold a total of 10.8 million copies and One Piece sold 12.7 million. (Note that Shueisha’s numbers were collected from November 19, 2018 to November 17, 2019.)

If we are to go by Oricon’s figures, then that means that Demon Slayer has just taken the number 1 position from One Piece, which held that ranking for 11 consecutive years since 2008. What an achievement!

On the other hand, last year’s second best-selling series, Kohei Horikoshi’s My Hero Academia plunged to sixth place, as its yearly sales went down from 6, 718, 185 in 2018 to 5, 047, 574 this 2019.

Top-seller Demon Slayer is a new entry in the top 10 list, along with Negi Haruba’s Quintessential Quintuplets which placed 5th and Aka Akasaka’s Kaguya-sama: Love is War which ranked 9th.

Here is the complete top ten list. Do you spot your favorites in the rankings?



1 (-). "Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba" - 12,057,628

2 (1). "One Piece" - 10,134,232 (8,113,317 in 2018)

3 (6). "Kingdom" - 7,661,361 (4,970,171)

4 (8). "The Promised Neverland" - 7,454,745 (4,246,955)

5 (-). "The Quintessential Quintuplets" - 5,895,000

6 (2). "My Hero Academia" - 5,047,574 (6,718,185)

7 (3). "Attack on Titan" - 4,704,234 (5,235,963)

8 (5). "Haikyu!!" - 4,514,838 (5,030,624)

9 (-). "Kaguya-sama: Love Is War" - 4,096,492

10 (9). "That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime" manga edition - 3,414,482 (3,460,066)

Source: Crunchyroll News