As he waited for Aoi Kurokawa to finish reading the manuscript, Satoru Akiyama sat stiffly in his chair, his nerves steadily climbing.
He was worried she wouldn't understand it.
After all, Perfect Blue was originally an anime film packed with dense symbolism and heavy psychological elements.
After adapting it into manga form, Akiyama had streamlined many of the panels, but the core scenes—the foreshadowing, the metaphors, the blurred line between reality and illusion—were all preserved. This wasn't the kind of work someone could grasp with a casual skim.
Whether this piece of "hidden gold" would be recognized… depended entirely on whether Editor Kurokawa truly had an eye for quality.
Even so, Akiyama had to consider another issue—
This work was technically from three years in the future.
Would it even suit the aesthetic tastes of the current era?
---
Yes.
Akiyama Satoru didn't belong to this era at all.
He didn't even belong to this country.
His real name was James White, a manga major from a prestigious art academy in 2025.
He chose that field because, ever since his student days, he'd been a hardcore otaku. Watching anime wasn't enough—he devoured original manga and light novels as well.
In James's eyes, modern manga had been declining year after year. Compared to new releases, he preferred revisiting classics like Dragon Ball, Slam Dunk, and Detective Conan—masterpieces that began serialization in the 1980s and '90s.
Those works defined the golden age of Japanese manga—an era shaped by giants like Shueisha, Kodansha, and Shogakukan, when talent flourished and masterpieces were born one after another.
That era had always fascinated him.
And yet—
On a stormy night, accompanied by thunder and lightning, while he was in the middle of a ranked match online, Bai Jing blacked out…
…and woke up as Akiyama Satoru, living alone in Tokyo in 1994.
Even stranger, his arrival triggered a massive butterfly effect.
Creators like Akira Toriyama, Yoshihiro Togashi, and Takehiko Inoue still existed. The manga magazines were still dominated by familiar titles.
But the editors, publishers, and many creators were different.
Some artists who never became famous in his original timeline were now rising stars.
After careful observation, he realized that the timeline had diverged sometime around the early '90s. From that point onward, the world only overlapped with his memories by about 70%.
Different—but unmistakably still the same world.
...
Ironically, this was the era James had always dreamed of living in.
But now that he was actually here?
He couldn't be happier to leave.
Because the body he had reincarnated into—Akiyama Satoru—was a walking tragedy.
The original Akiyama dreamed of becoming a manga artist, but beyond that dream, he had nothing.
Before Japan's bubble economy collapsed, his family ran a small business and lived modestly well. After the crash, they were buried in debt.
The family fell apart.
His father fled overseas.
His mother vanished without a trace.
Akiyama cut ties with what little remained and moved out, taking work as an assistant in the studio of serialized mangaka Yudai Uesugi.
It was during this period that he began living with his college girlfriend, Yuki Matsuda.
Back then, the two of them shared a cramped apartment, dreaming about the future.
Akiyama vowed to become a manga artist.
Yuki, blushing, said she'd become an editor someday.
At the time, Akiyama truly believed life would get better.
But people change.
After graduation, crushed by reality and repeated job rejections during the economic downturn, Yuki's attitude slowly shifted.
And one day—she left.
Later, Akiyama learned the truth.
Yuki had become a trainee editor at Kodansha.
And because she looked down on his stagnant, hopeless life, she cut ties cleanly and decisively.
But the original Akiyama still clung to hope.
He believed that if he worked just a little harder, he could win her back.
So he threw himself into work, begging Uesugi for guidance, pleading for a chance to submit his own manuscript.
As for Yudai Uesugi—
Though technically a serialized mangaka, he was little more than a lucky late bloomer.
He spent twenty years in obscurity before finally landing a serialization in Young Magazine. Even then, his popularity never rose above the middle tier.
But that didn't stop him from acting like a veteran genius, constantly belittling others.
Especially Akiyama.
Whenever Akiyama dared to express ambition, Uesugi would laugh openly:
"You? Becoming a mangaka?"
"Do you think anyone can draw manga?"
"Garbage like you could draw for ten more years and still get nowhere."
"You should be grateful just to be my assistant for life."
Eventually, annoyed by Akiyama's persistence, Uesugi dumped an entire week's workload on him and said:
"Finish this in two days, and I'll teach you how to draw something submission-worthy."
What Akiyama didn't realize was—
If Uesugi actually knew how to make others successful, he wouldn't have taken twenty years to get serialized himself.
Still, desperate and clinging to hope, Akiyama worked like a madman.
Thirty-six hours without sleep.
And then—
He collapsed at his desk.
That's when James took over.
Strangely enough, James didn't feel much sympathy.
If you don't value your own life, don't expect anyone else to.
He didn't even consider it death from overwork—it was closer to suicide by obsession.
Still, there was one thing he agreed with.
Becoming a professional manga artist.
Because that meant money.
And money meant freedom.
In 1994 Tokyo, with the economy in recession, changing jobs was risky and expensive.
Rent alone was brutal.
Even in cheaper districts like Adachi or Edogawa, monthly rent still hovered around ¥56,000, and anything decent easily broke ¥100,000.
Add living expenses and downtime, and without at least 1–2 million yen in savings, walking away from Uesugi's studio would be suicide.
But fortunately—
Akiyama wasn't starting from zero.
He had manga.
In his previous life, Bai Jing was an art student. After reincarnating, he also inherited Akiyama's drawing skills.
Looking through the original drafts, he found the storytelling weak and the dialogue messy—but the fundamentals were solid. The art itself was decent, just lacking polish in paneling and backgrounds.
No wonder Uesugi kept him around.
As a laborer, he was useful.
What he lacked… was a good story.
And that—
He had in abundance.
Since reincarnating, Akiyama had been dreaming of fragments from his past life's works. Each time he woke up, he wrote them down.
Though he didn't understand why these memories surfaced, he knew one thing:
Because he had grown up immersed in this era's manga, even fragments were enough to reconstruct entire works.
And technically speaking—
Anything created after 1994 was fair game.
Like the film he'd dreamed of recently:
Perfect Blue.
Directed by Satoshi Kon in 1997, the film went on to win Best Asian Film and be screened at international festivals including Berlin.
With a box office of over $500,000, it became both a critical and commercial success.
More importantly—
It became a psychological masterpiece revered worldwide.
And here was the irony.
Satoshi Kon had debuted as a manga artist in Young Magazine—the very same place Akiyama was sitting right now.
Ten years earlier, in 1984, Kon published his first work Toriko here.
Now, three years before Perfect Blue would even exist—
Akiyama had brought it with him.
Just the manuscript paper alone had cost him half his savings.
Whether he could finally debut as a mangaka…
Depended entirely on whether the woman in front of him—
Editor Aoi Kurokawa—
had the eyes to recognize a masterpiece.