Using nonbinary low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes with random-coset mapping, Bennatan and Burshtein constructed bandwidth-efficient modulation codes with remarkable performance under belief propagation (BP) decoding. However, due to the random nature of LDPC codes, most of the good LDPC codes found in the literature do not have a simple encoding structure. Thus, the encoding complexity of those LDPC codes can be as high as O ( N 2 ), where N is the codeword length. To reduce the encoding complexity, in this paper, nonbinary irregular repeat-accumulate (IRA) codes with time-varying characteristic and random-coset mapping are proposed for bandwidth-efficient modulation schemes. The time-varying characteristic and random-coset mapping result in both permutation-invariance and symmetry properties, respectively, in the densities of decoder messages. The permutation-invariance and symmetry properties of the proposed codes enable the approximations of densities of decoder messages using Gaussian distributions. Under the Gaussian approximation, extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) charts for nonbinary IRA codes are developed and several codes of different spectral efficiencies are designed based on EXIT charts. In addition, by proper selection of nonuniform signal constellations, the constructed codes are inherently capable of obtaining shaping gains, even without separate shaping codes. Simulation results indicate that the proposed codes not only have simple encoding schemes, but also have remarkable performance that is even better than that constructed using nonbinary LDPC codes.