The winner of multiple Eisner Awards, author Taiyo Matsumoto explores the relationships between a manga editor, manga creators, art, and the rhythm of life these days. After 30 years as a manga editor, Kazuo Shiozawa suddenly quits. Although he feels early retirement is the only way to atone for his failures as an editor, the manga world isn’t done with him. On his last day as an editor, Shiozawa takes a train he’s ridden hundreds of times before to impart some last advice to a manga creator whose work he used to edit. Some time after, he is drawn to return to a bookshop at the request of a junior editor who wants Shiozawa’s help dealing with an incorrigible manga creator who refuses to work with any editor but him. For this manga editor, Tokyo these days is full of memory and is cocooned in the inescapable bonds between manga creators, their editors, art, and life itself.

The winner of multiple Eisner Awards, author Taiyo Matsumoto explores the relationships between a manga editor, manga creators, art, and the rhythm of life these days. After 30 years as a manga editor, Kazuo Shiozawa suddenly quits. Although he feels early retirement is the only way to atone for his failures as an editor, the manga world isn’t done with him. Shiozawa forges ahead with an independently published manga project. But the manga creators around him are crumbling into chaos—Chosaku drinks himself into ever less productivity over worries about his career and family, a longtime creator can’t discern the difference between fiction and fantasy, and Aoki disappears rather than face the deadlines for his new hit series. Sometimes, the simple pleasure of an apple is worth more than all the fame and toil of making manga.

The winner of multiple Eisner Awards, author Taiyo Matsumoto explores the relationships between a manga editor, manga creators, art, and the rhythm of life these days. After 30 years as a manga editor, Kazuo Shiozawa suddenly quits. Although he feels early retirement is the only way to atone for his failures as an editor, the manga world isn’t done with him. Believing in the future of manga while never forgetting its past, Shiozawa accompanies manga creators once again through their agony to create an ultimate manga project. Is there ever joy in creation?