Ao comes home from school and finds her father dead. Standing over the body is the family dog, a pit bull named Taika. Ao, whom the Korean edition's blurb describes as a girl who gets angry at everything, is not ready to lose her beloved pet on top of her father. So when her mother has Taika humanized, Ao accepts the new dogman.
In this world pets are being turned into humanoid members of society because of the declining birth rate; a dog who has become human is a dogman. VIZ's line on the premise asks who really owns whom in a world where pet dogs and cats are humanized. The editor's comment in the magazine that ran chapter 1 told anyone wondering what on earth a dogman is to just read the manga.
Ao even brings Taika to school. There he meets a German shepherd, an elite police dogman, and starts unlearning canine habits in favour of human customs. The two dogmen compete to be first to track down the source of the traces of blood in Ao's locker. In volume 2, out in English on 15 September, Taika tries out for the basketball team without grasping the rules of the human game, while Anna, a mysterious catperson, blackmails him and attacks a classmate.
Paru Itagaki began her career in 2016 with the first volume of the short story collection Beast Complex, which led to her first serial, BEASTARS, winner of the 2018 Manga Taisho. Taika's Reason started in issue 7 of Weekly Shonen Champion, on sale 16 January 2025, with the cover and the opening colour pages.
New chapters also go up every Saturday on Akita Shoten's web site Champion Cross, and Japan is at volume 7. Somy Media published the Korean volume 1 on 25 March 2026 as ํ์ด์นด์ ์ด์ฑ, and the Japanese e-book of volume 8 is scheduled for 7 October.
