Josei, literally "woman," is the demographic category for manga and anime aimed at adult women. It is the adult counterpart to shojo, and its stories typically follow adult characters through work, relationships, and family life.
Josei magazines such as Feel Young, Kiss, and Cocohana publish for readers in their twenties and beyond. Where shojo romance often ends at a confession or a first kiss, josei tends to start there and follow what adult relationships actually require: jobs, money, distance, compromise, and the long work of building a life with someone.
The shelf is broader than romance. Josei includes workplace drama, family stories, historical fiction, and comedies about adult friendship. Its visual language is usually more restrained than shojo's, with grounded character designs and realistic settings, though the category is defined by its magazines, not by a fixed style.
Josei anime adaptations are rarer than shojo or shonen ones, which makes the shelf easy to overlook from outside Japan. The works that do cross over, often stories about adults balancing creative careers and relationships, tend to become quiet international favourites precisely because so little anime is aimed at grown women at all. The word itself doubles as an ordinary term for women in Japanese, and the category name simply borrows it, the way seinen borrows the word for youth.
In use"A manga about two adult neighbours slowly falling in love between shifts is josei territory."