Manga Lover

Edition excerpt from Manga Lover 1 (2027): **Life is short! Draw what you want! Yanai, a manga editor researching the lives of street kids in Shinjuku, encounters a strange girl named Misumi—just Misumi—who turns his life upside down when she shows him her comics. Taciturn, almost feral, she has no notion of manners or social norms, but when Yanai asks her to try her hand at professional manga, she's thrust into a world she knows nothing about. Everything changes for Misumi overnight, but she might not be the only one... Combining quiet meditations on loneliness with fish-out-of-water humor, this compulsively readable slice-of-life drama might just teach all of us something about art, human connection, and what it means to be part of something.** Yanai, a successful manga editor, is in Shinjuku to research the lives of youth who hang out around Kabukicho, when a girl suddenly grabs him by the shirt. Misumi lives in a manga cafe, cleans a love hotel for what little cash she has, and spends all her time devouring manga—but now she's started writing it, and wants Yanai to take a look. He's dismissive at first, until he finally reads it and discovers she has real, if unpolished, talent. He offers to be her editor, but gets more than he bargained for when this almost feral girl suddenly takes up residence in his apartment! Her desperation and fixation are at total odds with the professional world he knows, jolting him out of his normal routine and opening his eyes to what manga is really about.