Nananan is famous for her realistic josei work featuring understated artwork with a sense of detachment.
Three of her works have been made into live-action movies: Blue (2001), Strawberry Shortcakes (2006), and Pumpkin and Mayonnaise (2017).
She uses the spaces in the panels/the backgrounds, as characters to suggest feelings such as hope or emptiness.
She draws each panel so that it can be isolated, like a picture on a poster or T-shirt, rather than drawing/thinking of her manga as a series of boxes.
When she draws each panel, she says she sometimes will take even four hours on just one, repeating the same picture dozens of times.