Honestly, he had entertained the idea of becoming a manga artist himself at some point in his youth. But after learning enough about what the industry actually looked like from the inside, that thought had never resurfaced. He didn't enjoy suffering. He liked it even less when the suffering was self-inflicted. And more practically, he had never believed he had the raw ability to pull it off.
But things were different now. Becoming a manga artist had been the deepest wish of the original owner, the thing burning in Akira's chest right up until the moment he died. Helping carry that wish forward didn't feel impossible, not anymore.
While sorting through Akira's memories, he had also noticed something else worth paying attention to. He hadn't simply traveled back in time. He had crossed into a parallel world, one that resembled his previous life closely enough to feel familiar, but with enough differences to matter. Certain works and creators he knew well were simply absent from this world's history. Others that he had never heard of existed here instead.
And then there was the cheat ability he had stumbled across.
When people recall things from memory, the images are usually vague, fragmentary, details smeared and softened by time. That wasn't the case for him anymore. He could pull up any memory and see it with perfect clarity. Every frame, every line, every face down to the individual hairs if he chose to look that closely. On top of that, his recall had expanded backwards as well. Things from early childhood that had been buried for years were suddenly accessible, crisp and complete.
Some of those memories, he immediately wished he could re-bury.
The accidental glimpse at certain embarrassing moments from his early years left his expression flat for a full second before he shook it off.
Still.
"Not bad at all."
Confirming the ability brought a quiet smile to his face and a noticeable lift to his confidence.
Back to the matter at hand.
Setting his own preferences aside entirely, there was a more immediate question that needed answering before any decision about manga could be made. Had he inherited the original owner's drawing ability?
Unlike Akira, he had no natural talent for visual art. None whatsoever. If that skill hadn't transferred over with the body, then the question of becoming a manga artist was settled before it began.
He could, in theory, use his knowledge of future works to find a skilled artist and debut as a collaborator. But that felt like a significant departure from what Akira had actually wanted, and it wasn't particularly appealing to him on a personal level either.
If the plan was just to reproduce things that already existed, writing novels would be considerably simpler.
He needed to find out. He left the bathroom and stepped into the main room, which served as both living room and bedroom in a space too small to meaningfully separate the two.
The studio was twenty square meters in total. The furniture was packed in tight, every piece pressed close to the next out of necessity. Somehow, though, the bathroom and toilet had been kept separate, and there was even a proper soaking bathtub tucked in there, which genuinely surprised him.
The Japanese attachment to bath soaking was something he had always found difficult to fully explain, but he respected it.
Because of the cramped layout, the manga drawing desk was positioned almost flush against the side of the bed, with barely any gap between them. The desk surface was covered in manuscript paper, drawing tools, reference books, and various materials stacked without any particular order. The trash can underneath was packed full of crumpled rejected drafts, and the overflow had spilled out across the floor around it in scattered wads of paper.
As he approached the desk, one item immediately caught his eye. A very thick magazine sitting at the edge of the surface: Weekly Shonen Jump.
Golden Week had caused the editorial schedule to compress into a combined issue, so what sat in front of him was the latest release, Weekly Shonen Jump No. 21. The color cover featured a Yu-Gi-Oh! image, though he had never been particularly familiar with the characters from that series.
To give a sense of the scale: a standard single issue of Weekly Shonen Jump contained around twenty serialized manga, a handful of short stories, color pages, advertisements, reader questionnaire cards, and various supplementary content, bringing the total page count to roughly five hundred. The thing was practically a brick.
And it sold for two hundred and twenty yen.
For context, the legal minimum hourly wage in Tokyo at this point in time was six hundred and ninety-eight yen. One hour of work bought three copies of Weekly Shonen Jump.
"That's insane."
He said it out loud before he could stop himself.
In his previous life, he couldn't find pirated manga collections at that price, let alone legitimate magazines of this quality. Japan's total population was just over a hundred million, and yet Weekly Shonen Jump was selling several million copies per issue. He had always quietly found that figure a little hard to believe.
Standing here now, holding the actual magazine, the number suddenly felt almost conservative. At this price and this quality, it was genuinely difficult to imagine why anyone who liked manga wouldn't be buying it every week.
He picked it up. The weight was lighter than he expected, which made sense once he thought about it. Lower quality paper, kept cheap deliberately to hold the cover price down.
He flipped through it casually and, before long, landed on a manga he knew extremely well.
One Piece.
Serialization had begun at the end of 1997, barely a year and a half ago, and already it had established itself as the undisputed new pillar of the magazine. At this point in time, no one reading it could have imagined it would still be standing more than twenty years later, unbroken.
The series had reached Chapter 85. The story was in the East Blue Saga, currently in the stretch where Luffy was rallying his crew to storm Arlong Park for Nami's sake. Chapter 85 was titled "Three-Sword Style vs. Six-Sword Style," covering the clash between Zoro and Hatchan, and closing with the lead-in to Sanji's confrontation with another fishman.
Compared to Hatchan, who at least appeared again later in the story, Sanji's opponent Kuroobi was a complete background character. Without his cheat memory, he probably wouldn't have remembered the name at all.
Looking at One Piece in his hands, he felt a complicated mix of amusement and mild despair.
He had followed the series for over ten years in his previous life. He had been close, genuinely close, to finally seeing how it ended. And then he'd been dropped into 1999, where he now had to wait several more decades all over again. It was hard not to find that quietly painful.
On the other hand, in this life, he might actually have the chance to meet Oda in person. To offer thoughts on the problems that would develop in the story down the line. Maybe help shape an even better version of One Piece than the one he remembered.
And not just One Piece. The possibilities extended well beyond that.
Because beyond Yu-Gi-Oh! and One Piece, the current serialization lineup in Weekly Shonen Jump was stacked with titles that would go on to define a generation. Rurouni Kenshin. Hunter x Hunter. Hikaru no Go. Shaman King. JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind. Every one of them a landmark work, beloved by enormous audiences well into the future.
And if he remembered correctly, The Prince of Tennis and Naruto were both scheduled to begin serialization this very year.
"Another golden age..."
He exhaled slowly, and a thought began forming that he hadn't invited. If he could manage to serialize his own work in Jump, to compete on the same stage as all of these authors at once, that would be...
No. No, no, no. Think carefully. One thing at a time.
He gave his head a sharp shake, physically dislodging the thought before it could take root, and remembered what he had actually come over here to do.
He set the magazine aside, sat down at the desk, and reached through the mess on the surface to pull out a blank sheet of manuscript paper, the motion coming naturally from Akira's embedded memory. Then he turned his attention to the tools laid out in front of him.
Pencils for initial sketching. Blue gel pens for perspective lines and effect lines. G-pens for characters. Maru-pens for fine detail work. School pens for backgrounds. Brushes for inking. The knowledge was all there, surfacing cleanly and without effort. He considered for a moment and reached for the G-pen.
The moment his fingers closed around it, his grip settled into a natural, comfortable position without any thought. And with that contact came a strange sensation he hadn't anticipated. The pen didn't feel like an object he was holding. It felt like an extension of his hand, something that had always been there.
He wasn't sure how to put it into words. He hadn't drawn a single line yet, but somehow, it already felt decided.
Well. Only one way to confirm it.
He looked down at the blank manuscript paper and paused.
What should he draw?
A G-pen was best suited for characters, but the moment he framed the question, hundreds of images began cycling through his mind at once, a long procession of classic characters, and none of them seemed to settle.
Then one image, for no clear reason, simply stopped.
It held there in his mind, still and insistent.
His hand moved on its own. He dipped the pen and began to draw, the lines flowing out clean and steady. Within a few minutes, a figure had taken shape on the paper.
A young woman in armor, both hands resting on the hilt of a sword. Her lips were pressed into a firm line. Her brow was slightly furrowed. Her gaze was direct and cold, beautiful in a severe, restrained way. And then, contradicting all of it, a single ahoge curled up from the top of her head, giving her an involuntary softness completely at odds with the seriousness of everything else.
He stared at what he had drawn and let out a quiet, self-deprecating breath.
"Of all the characters to draw first."
The girl needed no introduction. More than twenty years after her creation, she was still one of the most recognized and beloved characters in the medium, known even to people with only a passing familiarity with the world she came from.
Artoria Pendragon. One of the central heroines of Fate/stay night, the visual novel developed by Type-Moon and first released on PC on January 30, 2004.
"Though really, Artoria?"
He was a little surprised at himself. If he was being honest, between the two main heroines of Fate/stay night, he had always preferred Tohsaka Rin. That was simply his taste.
And yet his hand had gone straight to Artoria without any deliberate decision. Which, in its own way, said everything about how deeply that character had embedded herself into the culture.
Beyond the subject of the drawing, though, something else had caught his attention entirely.
The style was Takeuchi Takashi's. Precisely and unmistakably. The proportions, the line weight, the specific quality of the inking. It looked as though Takeuchi had drawn it himself.
The whole thing had taken five minutes at most. Throughout the entire process, his hand had moved without a single correction, without a tremor, without a wasted line. Steady and exact from the first stroke to the last.
And more than that: the figure on the paper was identical to the image he had held in his mind. Not close. Identical.
He leaned back slightly and studied the drawing, rubbing his chin, something brightening quietly in his expression.
He had no way to measure the ceiling of Akira's raw talent. But the degree of control over line work he had just demonstrated was, by any reasonable standard, exceptional. And when that physical skill was paired with his cheat, the ability to recall any image with perfect clarity and reproduce it without distortion, the combination produced something he was having trouble finding the right word for.
A high-precision human printer was the closest he could get.
If that was really what this was...
"There might actually be a chance."