Shueisha was one of the largest comprehensive publishing houses in Japan, its catalogue spanning manga magazines aimed at younger readers alongside literary fiction, novels, and general interest publications.
Its flagship title, Weekly Shonen Jump, was the most widely read and highest-circulation serialized manga magazine in the country.
The Shonen Jump editorial department was housed within the Shueisha headquarters building at 5-10 Hitotsubashi 2-chome, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo.
From Nakano Station, the route was straightforward: the Tozai Line toward Toyocho or Nishi-Funabashi, off at Takebashi Station, out through Exit 4, and then roughly eight to ten minutes on foot.
Not having mobile navigation while using the subway was a stranger feeling than he had anticipated. In practice it wasn't a problem. His cheat memory had the entire Tokyo subway map stored with perfect clarity, so getting lost wasn't a realistic concern.
But the absence of something to look at during the ride was more noticeable than expected.
Mobile phones existed, of course. Penetration rates had reportedly crossed thirty percent by now, and on the train he could see evidence of it. Middle-aged men talking loudly into flip phones despite the looks they attracted.
The occasional younger person with their head down, tapping out an email or running through a round of Snake on a two-centimeter screen.
Even the flip phone looked appealing to him right now. He had grown up with button phones before touch screens took over, and there was something unexpectedly pleasant about seeing them again.
His father's Nokia had survived in daily use until around 2015, outlasting every expectation, before finally giving out and forcing an upgrade to a smartphone. By that point nobody had missed it.
He genuinely wanted a phone of his own. Setting aside entertainment, even basic call functionality would be more practical than the landline in the apartment.
The problem was cost. Entry-level models ran between twenty and thirty thousand yen for the hardware alone, with a five thousand yen network registration fee on top, a monthly base charge of at least three thousand yen, and per-minute call rates of twenty to thirty yen. For his current budget, that calculation didn't work.
The landline would do for now.
There was also the matter of today specifically. He had taken the day off from the bookstore to make this appointment, which meant eight thousand yen out of this month's earnings. His chest tightened slightly every time he thought about it.
With no phone to occupy him on the subway, he did what most people around him were doing and read. The current issue of Shonen Jump was open in his hands.
Shaman King had been running since issue 31 of the previous year and was now at chapter 42, titled "Provoking the Doctor," covering the battle between protagonist Yoh Asakura and Faust VIII.
The anime adaptation had been part of his childhood viewing, though his memory of it was defined largely by its notoriously economical animation style. Reading the original manga for the first time was a different experience.
The artwork was considerably stronger than he had expected, even if the battle storyboards ran a little chaotic at times and the background perspective had some inconsistencies. As a reading experience it was enjoyable.
The train arrived at Takebashi Station. He exited through Exit 4, oriented himself using the directions he had been given during the appointment call, and walked for about ten minutes before arriving in front of the Shueisha headquarters building.
It looked like a standard commercial office building. The three characters of the company name were set into the upper left corner of the exterior, and the ground floor lobby visible through the entrance showed almost no trace of the manga empire housed above it.
He had half-expected something more visually dramatic, some acknowledgment in the building's appearance of what went on inside. What he found was a building that looked like it could have been an insurance company.
He found the reception desk in the lobby and approached.
"Welcome. How can I help you?"
"My name is Mochizuki Akira. I have a two o'clock appointment with Mr. Sasaki from the Shonen Jump editorial department."
"One moment please."
The receptionist confirmed the details against the records in front of her, then handed him a visitor registration form while she picked up the phone. The call was brief. When she hung up she turned back to him with a practiced smile.
"Mr. Sasaki will be with you shortly. Please make your way to Meeting Room 2 just through there."
Meeting Room 2 was one of several small partitioned rooms set off from the lobby, the standard space where editors received new manga artists for in-person reviews.
"Of course. Thank you."
He signed the registration form, gave a brief nod to the receptionist, and made his way to the designated room.
As the country's highest-circulation manga magazine, Shonen Jump was not short of aspiring new artists showing up for in-person reviews on any given day.
The two rooms adjacent to his own had conversations going on behind their partitions, voices audible but too muffled by the dividers to make out the content. Other newcomers, most likely, sitting across from editors and waiting to hear what those editors thought of their work.
How many of them would walk out with something to show for it was impossible to know.
He settled into his seat and waited.
"Sorry to keep you waiting, sorry for the delay."
The man who entered the room pulled him out of his thoughts. He looked up and took stock.
Middle-aged, with the kind of face that projected immediate warmth. The hair situation on top was not favorable, reduced to a thin covering over a predominantly bare scalp. Glasses. A neat mustache on the upper lip. A smile that appeared to be his default expression.
There was something familiar about the face that he couldn't immediately place.
"You're Mochizuki Akira-kun, yes? I'm Sasaki Hisashi, an editor here at Shonen Jump. Good to meet you."
The man crossed the room with an easy manner, settled into the chair opposite, and extended the introduction with a cheerful nod. Akira returned it.
"Good to meet you as well."
Sasaki Hisashi.
The name unlocked the memory.
Bakuman was a manga produced by the same Ohba Tsugumi and Obata Takeshi collaboration that had created Death Note, its subject matter being the manga industry itself.
The story followed two protagonists, Mashiro Moritaka and Takagi Akito, based loosely on the two authors, as they formed a creative duo and worked their way through the industry from newcomers to established serialization.
Within that story, Sasaki Hisashi had appeared as editor-in-chief of the Shonen Jump editorial department, one of the more prominent supporting figures in the latter half of the manga.
In reality, Sasaki Hisashi had indeed held that position, though his tenure as the ninth editor-in-chief hadn't begun until 2008.
The current editor-in-chief was someone considerably more famous in manga history: Torishima Kazuhiko, the legendary editor whose most celebrated achievement was discovering and nurturing Toriyama Akira at the beginning of his career.
He looked at the man again with that context in mind and found that Obata Takeshi's rendering of him in the manga had been a mild improvement over the original. Not unfair, simply generous.
Sasaki Hisashi, for his part, was looking at Akira with an expression that suggested he was recalibrating something.
"I'll be honest with you," he said, still smiling but with a note of genuine surprise underneath it. "When I saw you in the lobby just now, my first thought was that some idol had walked into the wrong building. I had to look twice."
It was not flattery for its own sake. Exceptionally good-looking men in the manga industry were genuinely rare. Araki Hirohiko, the author behind JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, was perhaps the most well-known example, and he had built something of a reputation for it.
But Akira's appearance was in a different category, the kind of face that would have been a professional asset in almost any other field.
Akira smiled.
"It's too late for that now. And honestly, even if Johnny's were willing to take me at this point, I wouldn't dare go near the place."
Sasaki Hisashi's expression shifted for just a moment, the corner of his mouth pulling sideways.
They shared a look. No further words were needed on that topic.
Apparently editors at Shonen Jump followed entertainment news as attentively as anyone else.
Jokes aside, how Akira looked was irrelevant to what happened next. The manga industry was one of the fields that cared least about appearance. The only currency that mattered here was the work itself.
"Then let me see what you've brought."
"Of course."
Akira slid the manuscript out of the folder and placed it on the table. Sasaki Hisashi received it with both hands and a slight formality that suggested he took the gesture seriously regardless of what the manuscript might contain.
The smile didn't fully leave his face, but something in his eyes shifted as he opened the stack of pages. He began moving through them quickly, the motion looking almost careless to an outside observer.
It wasn't careless. This initial pass was a check of the fundamentals: storyboarding and artwork. Both were foundational. Artwork didn't need to be technically brilliant by any objective measure, but if it fell below a certain threshold it would end the review immediately.
ONE's famously rough and minimal line work would have been turned away at this stage without hesitation. Storyboarding was the method through which a manga artist communicated their story to a reader. If that method was severely flawed, even genuinely good story material couldn't survive it.
He flipped through to the end.
Then he set the manuscript down, straightened in his chair, and his posture became slightly more deliberate.
Something was not adding up.
The storyboarding wasn't exceptional in any single moment, but across the three chapters it was consistently above the average he saw from newcomers. The panel flow read naturally and moved the eye without confusion. More pressingly, the artwork was a significant step above what he typically encountered in first submissions.
He looked at Akira again with an expression that had become noticeably more careful.
"Before we go further, I'd like to confirm something. How many completed manga have you made before this one?"
Akira considered the question for a moment.
"If I'm counting properly, this would be the second."
The original owner had poured himself into the craft but had never finished a complete manga before everything ended. That left only "Emiya Kiritsugu" and the manuscript now sitting on the table between them.
"I see."
Sasaki Hisashi took a slow, quiet breath.
A pure newcomer. Second ever completed work.
He looked down at the manuscript again.
Perhaps, this time he had really struck gold.