Kazuo Furuta watched the steady stream of people filing in and out with their submissions.
Ever since the economy collapsed, more and more people had set their sights on becoming manga artists. They'd lost their jobs and had nothing left but uncertainty about what came next.
Just a few years ago, working in civil engineering or real estate or advertising was enough to live a decent life. You could go golfing on the weekends, take ski trips in the winter.
Back then, submitting manga was a hobby for most people, a little game born out of genuine interest. Submitters were relaxed and easygoing, chatting with the editors like equals. If they got rejected, they shrugged it off and moved on with a smile.
Nobody was thinking about making money from manga.
Now, though, these people looked desperate and restless, and the ones who came back down after being rejected carried all their frustration right there on their faces.
Defeat. Despair. Tears. Dead silence.
The entire Shueisha lobby felt like a hospital ICU, thick with anxiety and dread, a quiet helplessness hanging in the air that never quite went away.
They wanted to win awards, become manga artists, cash in on the prize money, and drag their families out of the mess they were in.
Manga had become their last lifeline. The same people who coasted through the boom years without a care were now staring down the barrel of a whole new reality.
The thing was, the odds of actually making a living through manga were less than one in a hundred thousand. It was basically a lottery ticket.
After the bubble burst, everyone had turned into gamblers.
Furuta let out a sigh.
"It's been years since the collapse. The government keeps saying things are leveling out, but everybody's life is still a complete disaster."
That thought gave him, as a security guard, just enough standing to look down on all these dreamers.
Right as he was savoring that little bit of superiority, someone approached the entrance holding a parchment envelope. Looked like a new submitter.
Furuta hurried over to open the door and welcome them in.
...
Kai Fujin walked into the Shueisha building with the security guard leading the way.
His clothes had been washed so many times the color had faded out of them, and because he was wearing a mask, the only thing visible was a pair of bloodshot, irritated eyes.
He looked like a man whose life was not going well.
Furuta tensed up immediately, his hand drifting toward his waist, ready at any moment to deal with whatever threat this guy might turn out to be.
Kai, on the other hand, acted like nobody else existed. He pulled off his mask, tilted his head back, and let out an enormous sneeze.
"Ah... ACHOO! God, I hate spring in Tokyo. There's pollen absolutely everywhere."
He rubbed his nose, grumbling under his breath.
Furuta froze. It had been a long time since he'd seen a submitter act like this.
The man showed no trace of nervousness or hesitation. There was a casual, carefree energy in everything he did.
It was like looking at someone from the era when Japan's economy was still booming.
But he wasn't a threat. Just some poor guy suffering from hay fever. Furuta let out a breath of relief.
He took a closer look at the man's face and felt a jolt of recognition.
"Fujin... Kai Fujin! You're Kai Fujin from Aomori High School, right?!"
"That's me." Kai blinked his sore eyes and gave a curious nod. "And you are?"
"I'm Kazuo Furuta! Don't tell me you forgot your own classmate!"
He punched Kai in the shoulder with a look of mock outrage. "That's cold, man. You come all the way to Tokyo and you can't even recognize people anymore."
Kai searched through his memories, and images of Furuta slowly began to surface.
Furuta had been the class president of Year Three, Class One at Aomori High School. He studied hard and was full of hope for the future.
He'd gotten into a good university. He was the pride of the whole school and the glory of his parents.
And now he was working as a security guard at Shueisha.
"I remember now," Kai said with a grin. "You're 'Number One Furuta,' right? You got that nickname because you always topped the exams."
"Man, that takes me back." Furuta looked up at the ceiling, fighting the urge to cry.
Back then, he'd been full of ambition. He was going to join a major company, become a well-paid white-collar worker, and give his parents the good life they deserved.
Now, all he wanted was to keep things from getting any worse so they wouldn't worry.
"Damn it. How did this country end up like this?"
"What about you, Fujin? How've you been? I remember you were always drawing manga in high school, talking about how you were gonna be a manga artist."
"Me? I guess you could say things are pretty rough." Kai kept his voice level. "Working odd jobs every day, either at the supermarket or a restaurant. No savings, living in a cheap apartment, just kind of drifting through life in a daze."
It wasn't his fault. The original Kai had been a naive kid with mediocre talent, the type who left home for Tokyo convinced he was going to make it as a manga artist, then gave up after getting knocked down a few times and followed the national trend of lying flat and waiting to die.
Having transmigrated into this body and inherited the original Kai's whole identity, he was stuck dealing with this bleak excuse for a life.
In his previous life, he'd been a half-Japanese kid from a nowhere town in middle America.
His mom was Japanese, his dad was American, and money was tight for as long as he could remember. He never had tutors or summer camps, and his grades were nothing to write home about. He worked himself to the bone just to get into a state school, and after graduation, he clawed his way through the real world on stubbornness alone.
Then something flung him all the way back to Japan in 1997.
He became a man with nothing all over again. A cheap apartment that froze in winter and roasted in summer. No friends, no savings, completely broke.
Facing that brutal reality, Kai had no choice but to start from scratch. He gritted his teeth and went out job hunting, but every opening had hundreds of applicants fighting over it. Some of them were literally shouting about how they'd be willing to live at the workplace.
He tried the same approach and got turned away because his education was too low.
A construction site had education requirements. A construction site!
Kai was furious. The resentment inside him kept growing.
Right when he'd been on the verge of sawing off a water pipe to make a shotgun and storming a bank, he found a magazine someone had left behind on the subway. It was an issue of Weekly Shonen Jump, and inside was a short one-shot manga.
"I can draw something like this too."
That single thought pulled him back from the edge. Over the next six months, he reclaimed the original owner's drawing skills and, fueled by pure rage, plagiarized the Death Note one-shot and brought it straight to Shueisha.
...
Thinking back on the miserable life of "Kai Fujin," the current Kai couldn't help clenching his jaw.
"I want to submit to the Tezuka Award," he said. "If I get selected, I can turn my life around."
"Yeah, that's just how things are these days..." Furuta nodded with genuine sympathy.
Even a former top student from their hometown had ended up as a security guard. So what chance did "Manga Artist Fujin," the kid their classmates used to make fun of, ever really have?
"Wait." He suddenly caught on to what had been said. "Did you say the Tezuka Award? You're going for the Tezuka Award?"
"This is the Tezuka Award we're talking about. The newcomer prize that every aspiring artist in the country dreams of winning. You can't just walk in and grab it. Why not submit to the Monthly Award instead? That's way more realistic."
Kai turned his gaze toward the bulletin board beside the elevators in the Shueisha lobby. It held the most prominent spot in the building, covered with recruitment posters for the Tezuka Award.
"The Monthly Award runs every month, and the prize is only 500,000 yen. I need to aim higher and submit to the semi-annual Tezuka Award."
And to talk about the Tezuka Award, you had to talk about the God of Manga himself: Osamu Tezuka.
Before Tezuka, comics were treated as throwaway entertainment, shut out of the mainstream. After Tezuka, manga became Japan's calling card to the world. Children read it, housewives read it, and even the elderly read it.
Tezuka brought cinematic visual language and storyboarding techniques into the medium, giving manga an entirely new level of expressive power.
He drew across every genre imaginable, pushing the boundaries of what manga could be. Astro Boy, Black Jack, Phoenix: all of them were Tezuka's creations. These were timeless works of genuine artistic depth, the kind people could discuss and debate for generations.
He was the great reformer of manga, known universally as the Legend of Manga, and he stood as the undisputed number one manga artist in Japan's history.
The Tezuka Award, established to honor his extraordinary contributions, was naturally the most coveted prize for newcomers.
Tsukasa Hojo, the creator of Cat's Eye. Hirohiko Araki of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Eiichiro Oda of One Piece. These pillars of Jump had all been discovered through the Tezuka Award.
The Tezuka Award carried with it glittering prestige, a two-million-yen grand prize, and undeniable proof of a creator's strength.
Winning the number one newcomer award in Japanese shonen manga meant you were just one step away from landing a serialization.
Fame. Being sought after by editors. Never being a nobody again.
"But..." Furuta knew all of this perfectly well. He couldn't decide whether to laugh at his old classmate's wild ambitions or feel his chest tighten with something like admiration. The guy was just too strange, nothing at all like someone who'd been beaten down by failure.
"Are you really that confident you can pull it off?"
Kai held out his palm.
"Hm?" Furuta looked confused.
"Winning..." Kai smiled and flipped his hand over so the palm faced the ground. "Is as easy as turning over your hand."
But winning an award was only the beginning. What he really wanted was to harvest every last bit of success this world had to offer, this world that was so familiar and yet so different from the one he'd left behind.
Win first place in the Tezuka Award. Become a manga artist. Make piles and piles of money. Buy a massive villa. Buy luxury cars. Marry a beautiful, gentle woman.
Kai strode forward, his heart surging with fire. He was going to become the next God of Manga and spit in the face of this miserable world.
"No. To hell with all of it!"
_______________________
TL's Note: Shueisha is one of Japan's largest publishers and the home of Weekly Shonen Jump, the most influential shonen manga magazine in the industry