The temperature in early May in Tokyo was gradually warming up, though it still carried a lingering coolness. After the light rain that had fallen all night, the damp morning air held a faint chill.
But as the sun rose and burned off the last of the night's cold, golden light streamed through the window, casting slanted beams across a twenty-square-meter studio apartment.
Inside, a young man stood shirtless in front of the bathroom mirror. He stared at the unfamiliar face in the reflection and murmured in disbelief:
"Did I really transmigrate?"
He had picked up a decent-looking novel before bed and, without meaning to, stayed up reading until dawn before finally forcing himself to sleep. Was that really all it took?
One night of no sleep and now I'm in 1999 Japan? This is absurd.
He hadn't exercised in a long time, sure, but this was still a body under thirty. Surely pulling one all-nighter wasn't supposed to kill him, right?
And if the universe was going to go through the trouble of transmigrating him somewhere, why not a fantasy world with magic, hidden powers, or at least some kind of cheat ability? Wouldn't that have been more worthwhile?
Why me, of all people? A struggling writer whose life was neither great nor terrible. What was the point?
...
...
"Forget it."
He slapped both cheeks hard, forcing the spiral of thoughts to stop.
He was already here. Complaining wouldn't change that.
Better figure out the situation first.
He rubbed his chin, feeling the sharp line of his jaw. Looking at the face in the mirror, a flicker of surprise crossed his eyes.
He looked somewhat like Noctis from Final Fantasy XV. Was this body actually that handsome?
A shame it was on the thin side, and the face carried the haggard look of someone who had been burning the midnight oil for far too long. If he could get some rest and build a little muscle, it would be perfect.
That was a problem for later, though.
He set aside the noise in his head and began sorting through the memories that weren't his.
The original owner's name was Mochizuki Akira, a striking name to match a striking face.
"Mochizuki," written with the characters for "full moon," was a common enough surname in Japan, but in this case it was drawn from Mochizuki-machi, a town in Saku City, Nagano Prefecture, marking the family's roots there. The town had since been absorbed entirely into Saku City.
As for "Akira," it meant dawn, or daybreak. He had been given the name because he was born in the early hours of the morning.
Once he understood the story behind it, he couldn't help but feel a quiet amusement.
It sounded cool on the surface. The backstory was completely mundane.
Moving on.
Though the family name traced back to Saku City, Akira had grown up in Nagano City, Nagano Prefecture. His parents were fruit farmers, and the family apple orchard was the household's only reliable income.
Despite that modest background, Akira had shown an unexpected talent for art as early as kindergarten, and from that point on, drawing became the center of his world.
His parents supported him without hesitation, buying him art textbooks, sketching tools, coloring supplies, whatever he needed. Through elementary school, he taught himself the fundamentals: sketching, coloring, and compositional speed. After entering middle school, he joined the art club, where the faculty advisor recognized his ability and helped cultivate it.
Under the advisor's guidance, he entered prefectural and national exhibitions and competitions, racking up an impressive list of results. By high school, he was still steadily progressing, his path in art seemingly clear.
Then, in his second year of high school, everything shifted.
He noticed several classmates passing around an issue of Weekly Shonen Jump between classes, huddled over it and arguing loudly about the contents with unmistakable passion. Their enthusiasm caught his attention.
On his way home that afternoon, he passed a bookstore and saw the magazine displayed front and center. On an impulse he couldn't quite explain, he bought a copy and brought it home.
He didn't sleep until he'd finished it.
The draftsmanship in most of the serialized manga wasn't technically refined, not by the standards he'd grown up learning. But what the artists had built with their words and images, the sheer worlds contained between those pages, hit him somewhere much deeper than technical skill could reach.
He was a reader from that point on, and there was no going back.
His sense of what he wanted to do with his life quietly began to change.
By the end of his third year of high school, Akira sat down with his parents and told them plainly: he was going to become a manga artist. He wasn't going to university. He was moving to Tokyo after graduation to chase it.
His parents pushed back. They reasoned with him, pleaded with him. It didn't matter. He'd already made up his mind.
He winced reading through the memory.
"Couldn't you have at least finished a degree first?"
In his previous life, academics had never been his strong suit. He had ground through school with sheer stubbornness and barely scraped into a mid-ranked university. Not glamorous, but he had gotten there.
In this life, he was a high school graduate who had walked away from higher education entirely.
But the irritation passed quickly, replaced by something more measured. Because once he sat with it, he understood that the original owner's decision hadn't come from nowhere. It was shaped, in part, by the world around him.
Japan had officially entered an aging society back in 1970. As the decades passed, the trend only accelerated. Birth rates kept falling, the working-age population shrank, and young workers became increasingly valuable. Companies competed for them.
On top of that, Japanese firms had long operated on an OJT model, on-the-job training, where formal degrees weren't always the deciding factor. A motivated high school graduate could be trained up through practical experience just as effectively.
Many high schools had even built direct pipelines into specific companies, letting graduates walk straight from school into employment on the strength of a school recommendation.
In short, a high school graduate heading into the workforce in late-nineties Japan wasn't an outlier or a cautionary tale. It was, in many circles, simply a normal path.
At its peak, the proportion of Japanese high school graduates entering the workforce directly had once reached sixty percent.
Even after the economic bubble burst in the nineties and companies pulled back on hiring, the trend hadn't vanished entirely. By 1999, roughly a quarter of all high school graduates were still going straight into employment. That was not a fringe statistic.
Plenty of anime reflected this reality. In Clannad, originally a visual novel before its anime adaptation, the male protagonist Okazaki Tomoya went straight from high school into the workforce, eventually marrying the female lead and building a family.
In recent years, some online commentators had taken to criticizing Tomoya as a delinquent who couldn't even get into a vocational school. That criticism said more about their ignorance of Japanese society than anything else. Tomoya's path was a perfectly ordinary one for his era.
Setting Japan's broader social conditions aside, even within the manga industry specifically, there was no single correct route. Among the manga artists he could recall, all three paths were well represented.
Those who completed university: Gosho Aoyama, author of Detective Conan; Rumiko Takahashi, author of Inuyasha.
Those who dropped out partway through: Eiichiro Oda, author of One Piece; Kishimoto Masashi, author of Naruto.
Those who never attended at all: Toriyama Akira, author of Dragon Ball; Nobuhiro Watsuki, author of Rurouni Kenshin.
With genuine success stories spread across all three categories, it was genuinely difficult to argue that a university degree had any decisive impact on a person's ability to make great manga.
"But even so..."
He let out a long sigh despite himself. It still stung a little.
Maybe that was simply the difference in temperament between an ordinary person and someone with real conviction. If it had been him, even if he'd dreamed of becoming a manga artist, he would have gone to university first and chased the dream in his spare time. That way, if it didn't work out, he wouldn't have lost much. He could have simply returned to a normal life.
But looking at it from the other side, Akira's approach, deciding on a goal and committing to it completely without hedging, was objectively more likely to produce results than the cautious "I'll try it as long as it doesn't cost me too much" mindset.
The price of failure was steeper. But so was the ceiling.
Either way, what was done was done. He composed himself and kept reading through the memories.
After graduating high school, Akira had come to Tokyo alone. After some initial scrambling, he'd rented this studio apartment and taken a part-time job at a bookstore in Akihabara to cover his expenses, working while quietly preparing his first manga.
That was when the first real obstacle appeared.
Drawing manga was not what Akira had imagined it to be.
He had genuine talent with a pencil, no question about that. Given time, he might have become a truly exceptional artist. But creating manga wasn't just about drawing well. Storytelling was equally essential, and the moment Akira sat down to seriously develop his first work, he discovered that constructing a compelling narrative was something he had no natural feel for.
In fairness, this wasn't an uncommon problem. The manga world had seen plenty of artists who could draw brilliantly but struggled to write. The standard solution was to find a writing partner, someone strong in story but weak in art, and debut as a duo. Famous examples included Obata Takeshi and Tsugumi Ohba, or ONE and Yusuke Murata. Combining complementary strengths, those partnerships had produced some of the most celebrated works in the industry.
But Akira hadn't taken that route. Instead of looking for a collaborator, he'd doubled down, drawing more, studying harder, hoping sheer volume of work would close the gap on its own.
That was how his days had passed, right up through Golden Week at the end of April.
Golden Week is a cluster of consecutive national holidays compressed into one stretch, lasting anywhere from seven to ten days depending on the year. It is one of the few extended breaks in the Japanese calendar and, predictably, one of the busiest periods for most businesses.
The sudden surge in workload at the bookstore, stacked on top of the late nights Akira was already keeping to push his manga forward, finally caught up with him. The night before, somewhere in the middle of a long drawing session, his vision had simply gone dark. He collapsed and never got up.
Dead from overwork at twenty-something, before he had ever formally entered the industry he'd upended his life to reach.
"Sigh."
He finished sorting through Akira's memories and exhaled slowly.
It was a bleak end. But in a grim, fitting way, it was also a very manga-artist kind of death.
The profession carried real risks that the outside world rarely acknowledged. On the surface, manga artists were celebrated, their work beloved by millions. Behind that image, weekly serialization deadlines kept authors chained to their desks year-round, grinding through all-nighters with no real end in sight. On top of the physical toll, there was the constant mental weight of declining numbers, creative exhaustion, and the fear of being cancelled.
Add it all together, and the reality was that most serialized manga artists, particularly those sustaining popular long-running works, were quietly living with some form of physical or mental deterioration. Deaths from conditions worsened by chronic overwork were not unheard of. Sudden deaths from outright exhaustion were documented.
"So is becoming a manga artist actually something I have to do?"
He thought of the conviction that had burned in Akira's chest right up until the moment his vision went dark.
The current Akira rubbed his temples and felt a headache coming on.