暁のヨナ | Volume 1 | Free to read through April 1st, 2026 (JST)

[GolyBidoof]

Welcome to the 暁のヨナ Speed Run Book Club Volume 1!

Part of the Speed Run Book Club series!

This one might be the most spontaneous and the fastest Speed Run Book Club we’ve had yet, the goal of this book club is to read as much of the five volumes made available for free on manga platforms until April 1, 2026.

Volume 1:

• Bookwalker
• ebookjapan
• cmoa

Currently, the manga is not free (or on Kindle Unlimited) on Amazon.

Vocabulary list for Volume 1 on Manga Kotoba

暁のヨナ 1 | L27

JP summary

高華王国の姫・ヨナは一人娘のため、優しい父王と幼なじみで護衛のハク達に囲まれ、大切に育てられていた。そして時はヨナ・16歳の誕生日、ヨナは想いを寄せていた従兄のスウォンから簪を贈られ、父へ自分の気持ちを伝えに行く。が、そこには思いも寄らぬ過酷な運命が!?

EN summary

As the only daughter of the Kingdom of Gohwa, Yona was carefully raised by her kind father, the king, and her childhood friend and guard, Hak. On Yona’s 16th birthday, she receives a hairpin from her cousin Suwon, whom she has been in love with, and goes to her father to express her feelings. However, she meets an unexpectedly harsh fate!

It is on the more difficult sides of the mangas we’ve has in the speed run book club and the first volume seems to be the easiest one, feel free to give it a shot!

Hint! If you’re having difficulties reading at difficulty levels as high as this one, the best way to make your life easier is by scraping your manga with a script, such as this for Bookwalker, and then running manga through a script such as Mokuro in order to enable lookups of the more specific terminology.

Since this is a speed run book club, the formal end of this book club will occur on 2026-04-01T14:59:00Z, but feel free to continue with us afterwards, and if you’d be interested in continuing with a spin-off book club for the remaining volumes, let us know and the threads can be created!

Still with us on the book club?

• I’ll be joining together with the book club!
• Joining after the book club has finished!
• I’ve read the manga in the past already!
• I’m reading the manga in other languages, but I still want to discuss!
• Just lurking/discussing the plot!

Please use this thread for volume 1. All spoilers should go behind blurred spoiler tags or in the a hide details drop down.

Thread Navigation

Volume 2 | Volume 3 | Volume 4 | Volume 5

[GolyBidoof]

第１話

man… black and white manga… i’ll just have to use my imagination then ^^

I genuinely enjoy the weird hiragana you can’t find with Yomitan dictionaries ^^

And I swear but her hair is the goals

ITS SO PRETTYTYYYY

This one:

Reminds me of the hand meme, like:

N-NOW THAT’S ONE WAY OF BRINGING UP THE TENSION XDDDD

第２話

oho, fun expression C:

第３話

she’s like so clearly done it’s like life went out of her eyes

mmm, a true protector C:

第４話

kingdom hearts…
SORA, RIKU, KAIRIIII

Also, the post-readathon brain mush is fun because i looked at this and i was like “i’ve never seen this grammar before… or did i? i don’t remember” xddd

第５話

Damn he’s so professional and helpful and not even エッチ, you know it’s a shoujo manga because of how he reacts xddd

NAME OF THE MANGA MENTIONED :DDD

Ahhh it was more fun than I expected C:

Compared to 平家物語, where some of the vocab yesterday is carrying over, reading today felt significantly easier, even if some of the vocab was being used as well

Also, as a bonus, I have ten volumes of the manga in Polish! I… just never got around to them

But seeing the end of the first chapter and how abrupt it was, I might finally give it a shot one day?

I most likely wrap for today and won’t be reading tomorrow, as I have friends over, but I intend on continuing this book club!

[Doumori]

I’m in! The first volume at least. It was on my list for a while.

[shitsurei]

@GolyBidoof

I genuinely enjoy the weird hiragana you can’t find with Yomitan dictionaries

I think pretty much everyone will know that from 赤毛のアン which is weirdly huge in Japan.

[hotdogsuplex]

Watching and hoping you’ll all become as obsessed as I am

[RebBlue]

Fuck it why not.

ch1

Is the red hair suggesting she’s illegitimate? It can happen though.
スウォン confuses me, why ウ and small ぉ together? Why not just お? What is this implying about the pronunciation?
sigh cousins. semi normal for royalty and it’s free, we can at least finish the chapter. (but later I got things to do)

[shitsurei]

@RebBlue

What is this implying about the pronunciation?

I was kinda just thinking “foreign”.. I see a lot of katakana weirdness like that in, for example, fantasy names. Although I’m assuming this is supposed to be a China-like setting based on clothes and buildings .. so maybe it’s something about that?

[polv]

@RebBlue

What is this implying about the pronunciation?

It’s extended Katakana. This might give some ideas about the pronunciation, but I am not sure about ウォ specifically (Romaji shortcut to type is who )

About the series, I have read it a year or two ago, bought to Vol.5 (promotion perhaps), but stopped at maybe Vol.3. I might continue later with the club.

[lattepatatte]

I would have thought it might be something like Swon, but I looked it up and the character’s name is localized as Soo-Won or Suwon in English

[akatsukinoluna]

I’ve been needing to start my reread of my favorite manga - I guess now’s finally the time

[akatsukinoluna]

@shitsurei

@GolyBidoof

I genuinely enjoy the weird hiragana you can’t find with Yomitan dictionaries

I think pretty much everyone will know that from 赤毛のアン which is weirdly huge in Japan

Comes up in my dictionary app… Unless you mean くせっ毛? Tho that comes up too: 癖っ毛 frizzy, kinky, curly, unruly

Re: ch1

@RebBlue

Is the red hair suggesting she’s illegitimate? It can happen though.

Nothing of the sort. She’s fully legitimate. There is a special meaning to the red hair beyond just being a rare color, but that’s spoilers

@RebBlue

スウォン confuses me, why ウ and small ぉ together? Why not just お? What is this implying about the pronunciation?

All the names are Korean. Soo-won is the official romanization

@shitsurei

Although I’m assuming this is supposed to be a China-like setting based on clothes and buildings .. so maybe it’s something about that?

Loosely based on Korean 3 kingdoms period, but the aesthetics are Chinese-derived like you said

[GolyBidoof]

@akatsukinoluna

Comes up in my dictionary app… Unless you mean くせっ毛? Tho that comes up too: 癖っ毛 frizzy, kinky, curly, unruly

I meant the brains, 脳みそ, or rather, のーみそ written as the 頭 kanji ^^

[akatsukinoluna]

Ohhh that makes more sense. Yeah that sorta thing can drive a girl crazy lol! Glad you liked volume 1, and thanks so much for doing this

[Kelsyy]

Okay so I accidently read the first volume and like it was okay. I wasn’t sure what to expect going in. I saw that it was a 27-28 on Natively and I’d never read anything that high, but I was suprised to realize it really wasn’t that bad?? I really thought the recent BBC 骨dragon manga was harder. The grammar for this felt old-timey, but I’ve heard a lot of it in anime before. I really like political stories so maybe I shouldn’t be suprised lol. Maybe I’ll accidently read volume 2.

I still really don’t like the pretty boys

If Yona becomes a passive shoujo protagonist I will drop the manga so fast!! I need you to have a personality pls.

Also wow that was a lot of flashbacks. I just want to see current time, not when they were still happy lol.

[Doumori]

Btw there was a club for this manga with some vocab sheets:

暁のヨナ (Akatsuki no Yona) Book Club Home Thread

[anyv1] Where to Purchase physical: amazon japan | cdjapan digital: bookwalker | ebookjapan Above links will direct you to the first volume. Schedule start date volume discussion status mar 15 第1巻 finished apr 26 第2巻 finished jun 7 第3巻 finished jun 27 第4～current巻 ongoing Misc poll Vocab Sheet

[RebBlue]

the rest of ch1

Read the author’s note. I, am glad manga are written with computer font . But I got that they were introducing that this is a fantasy and that they’d always dreamed of trying to write a fantasy with a female main character, and such. … completely took me out of the story though
「私がヨナの母上になります」 ew yuck no
I like that rather than just admiring the archery, she wants to join in
Why did you tell your cousin crush that you might be getting engaged to the guy who’s been insulting you
Oh no the dad’s saying no, now it’s even more forbidden love now it’s ~rebellious~ to marry your cousin
He’s his older brother’s son? … the succession laws here much be working differently than I’m used to.
If the mother died to a thief, that’s all the more reason to teach Yona how to defend herself.
oh that is an eyeball.
The author can draw some creepy shots, yay!
Only skimmed the next author’s note. Why is it there? There’s stuff happening!
ah. she’s not handling this too well, is she? Did she really imagine the whole thing? Or is everyone just going to assume she did.
It’s sweet of him to offer to take her to Haku since she doesn’t seem okay with him
Oh shit, he’s rejecting her!
… maybe not?
Ugh, fine you can be cute with your compliments and everything
Haku jumpscare XD
Taking a moment to appreciate the author really knows what they’re doing with how they lay out the panels (I noticed on an earlier page that even though the text switched to horizontal I didn’t have a problem because it flowed into it well), and now the building up the dread here? Her foot in the crack of the door? It’s good.
Yep. That’s bad!
oh shit, and here he was buying me over. (I don’t have to like the cousin relationship anymore! Hooray!)

ch2

… Calling you Mince. Like mincemeat, like the ちぎれた in the ch title.
Oh no she’s in shock
So, the previous emperor got to choose which of his sons would inherit, that explains.
Suwon’s motive from his point of view makes sense, but what doesn’t make sense is Yona’s dad killing his dad. I think his vengeance has been misdirected.
oh no, he’s gonna kill her. Welp, that was a short manga. (does not matter if the character is actually in danger of dying, matters that the character thinks they are, behold her fear!)
Haku has full on sliced that guy right open (death count: 2)
Oh he’s talking all polite now, that must mean things are serious
Mince was given a name so I’m sure he’ll survive holding them off
I’m trying to figure out if the guy with the arrow in his back is Mince or a guy that Mince shot. Mince has black around his wristwrap, but the arms pulling the shot do not. I think he might have just died. But. I cannot actually tell for certain.
(lack of comments towards the end is because i did just get caught up in the reading of it. Which is a Good Thing!)

[MaraVos]

chapter 1 spoilers

seriously, don't click if you haven't read it yet

B E T R A Y A L !!!

Ok, I need to know what happens next.

[Doumori]

The first volume is finished, moving on to the second one
It’s quite above my level, especially with formal language, but all vocab sheets are helpful, so I’m persevering.
So far the first volume feels like a first chapter, as we have some action but no idea what’s going on.

[Doumori]

@shitsurei

Although I’m assuming this is supposed to be a China-like setting based on clothes and buildings .. so maybe it’s something about that?

Looks Korean to me.
Funny, because I realised what’s with their strange katakana names after I saw テジュん (or some similar name, I don’t remember exactly) and then I realized that ヨナ is Yo Na (I guess 여나), and now I’m reading it a bit differently in my mind (and maybe still incorrectly )

[shitsurei]

Yeah @akatsukinoluna mentioned it’s based off of the Korean 3 Kingdoms period.