The morning air hit Yu's face, the moment he stepped outside.
The neighborhood stretched out before him in a quiet grid of two-story houses with tiled roofs and modest gardens. Cherry blossom trees lined the narrow street. A few petals had already gathered along the edges of the sidewalk.
"Yu, you'll be late!" His mom called from the kitchen window.
"I'm going," he said, and started walking.
He had found the route to school written in a small notebook tucked inside Yu's schoolbag: a hand-drawn map with landmarks. The original Yu had apparently visited the school once during the entrance ceremony the previous week.
The neighborhood was quiet at this hour, but not empty. Other students were filtering out of houses and side streets, some in the same black gakuran, others in different uniforms heading to different schools. A group of middle school girls in sailor uniforms crossed the street ahead of him, laughing about something on one of their phones. An elderly man was watering his garden, and he nodded at Yu as he passed. Yu nodded back instinctively.
He reached the main road and turned right. The commercial street was already stirring to life—shutters rolling up in small shops, a bakery emitting warm, yeasty air through an open door.
'2005..'
The thought kept circling back. The cars on the road were older models. The phone he had found on Yu's desk that morning was a flip phone. There were three contacts: Mom and two names he didn't recognize.
The commercial street was busier now, and Yu slowed his pace as he passed the shops. An establishment caught his eye called "Kobayashi Library" a small independent place wedged between a pharmacy and a ramen shop. The door was propped open, and through it he could see shelves crammed floor to ceiling with manga, novels, and magazines. He glanced at his watch. He still had time.
Yu stepped inside.
The shop was narrow and deep. A middle-aged man behind the counter glanced up from a newspaper, nodded at him, and returned to reading.
Yu drifted toward the manga section. It occupied the entire left wall, organized roughly by publisher and genre.
Shonen Jump was there. The logo was slightly different. The font was the same, but the coloring seemed off, a slightly deeper red—but it was unmistakably Jump. He pulled a recent issue off the shelf and flipped it open. The table of contents listed series he had never heard of.
The Tea Master's Oni by Morimoto Kenji, Summer at Higanbana Station by Yukina Airi, Onmyoji: The Last Paper Shadow by Nishikawa Ren, and The 3am Kobini Cat by Yamashiro Kou.
He scanned every title. There were fourteen series running in this issue. He didn't recognize a single one.
No One Piece, no Naruto, no Bleach, no Death Note.
Yu's fingers tightened on the magazine. He flipped through the pages, his eyes darting across panels of unfamiliar characters in unfamiliar art styles.
Some of it was good; he could tell that instinctively.
He put the magazine back and pulled out another one, with the same result. Different series, different artists. His breathing had quickened.
'Calm down, think.'
He moved to the manga shelves. His eyes searched frantically for anything, any single title he may be able to recognize.
He scanned the section for Toriyama Akira. Nothing. The section for Oda Eiichiro is still nothing. He looked for Takahashi Rumiko and Tezuka Osamu.
He stopped.
Tezuka wasn't there either.
Yu stepped back from the shelf. He stood in the narrow aisle, staring at the rows of manga volumes—hundreds of them, maybe thousands—and realized that he was looking at an entire medium's worth of work created by people who didn't exist in his previous world.
He checked the film section. No mention of Pixar. He found references to an American animation studio called Pixlar Studios, which seemed to occupy a similar cultural space—acclaimed feature-length animated films, cutting-edge technology, and critical and commercial success—but the films listed were The Clockwork Garden, Starfall, and The Adventures of Finn and Sable; no Toy Story and no Finding Nemo.
Disney existed. The name appeared in an article about theme parks, and he felt a strange jolt of recognition at it—like spotting a friend's face in a foreign city. But even Disney's filmography was different. The article referenced classics he didn't know: The Snow Empress, The Voyage of the Silver Hare, and Prince of Tides.
No Lion King, No Aladdin, No Spirited Away.
Yu closed the magazine and stood very still in the back of the bookstore, surrounded by shelves of stories he had never heard of, created by people he would never recognize.
"I'm the only one who knows." He stood there for what felt like a long time.
The shopkeeper glanced up again. "You alright, kid? You've been standing there for a while."
Yu blinked. "I'm fine," he said. "Sorry, just browsing."
He walked out of the bookstore and back into the April morning. The cherry blossoms were still drifting down. The street was busier now—more students, more salarymen, and a delivery truck backing into an alley with its reverse alarm beeping steadily.
He started walking again, faster this time. His mind was churning.
'What does this mean? What am I supposed to do with this? '
He passed the park on his left—a small green space with a swing set and a pond where an old man was feeding koi—and turned onto the road that led to the school. He could see other students in the same black gakuran converging ahead, filing through a set of iron gates beneath a sign that read:
Saitama Prefectural Urawa High School
Yu slowed his pace. He joined the stream of students passing through the gates, keeping his head down. The schoolyard was wide and lined with cherry trees, their branches forming a canopy of pink and white over the main path leading to the entrance.
Students clustered in small groups, chatting, laughing, and comparing class assignments. A few teachers stood near the doors, directing traffic with practiced efficiency. He barely registered any of it.
His mind was still in the bookstore, standing in front of shelves full of manga that shouldn't exist, in a world missing the stories that did.
He thought about Evangelion, about Shinji Ikari sitting alone, about the weight of the world on a child's shoulders, and about a show that had reached into the darkest parts of its audience and said, I see you.
He thought about all of it—every panel, every frame, every line of dialogue that had burned itself into his memory—and the weight of what he was carrying hit him fully for the first time. These stories existed nowhere in this world except inside his head.
And he was a manga artist. Or he had been. A twenty-three-year-old who had filled notebooks with storyboards that no editor wanted, who had cried alone at a desk in a dark apartment because the only thing he had ever wanted to do—tell stories through pictures—had turned out to be something the world didn't need from him.
But this world was different.
This world had never seen those stories.
He stopped walking. He was standing in the schoolyard, cherry blossoms falling around him, other students flowing past like water around a stone. Someone bumped his shoulder and muttered an apology. He didn't notice.
He took a breath, adjusted his bag on his shoulder, and walked into the school.