Title: Drawing From Your Memory Vol. 1
Author: Shiki Kawabata
Publisher: Kodansha
Language: English
Format: Paperback
Pages: 192
Genre: Slice-of-Life, Sci-Fi
Publication April 14, 2026
The Story
Haruta is an award-winning manga artist; however, when her series ends, her editor wants her to make a brand-new series from scratch, but there’s a problem… the manga she just finished wasn’t hers. We learn that she used to be in the manga club in high school. There, she met an upperclassman named Yukishima who was determined to become a mangaka. He worked hard and submitted his work to a popular magazine, winning the debut award, but at the start of winter break, he passed away from a known heart condition. He left Haruta a notebook filled with his ideas, and she adapted it into a hit manga series. She carried that guilt with her ever since.
While she was brainstorming to come up with a brand-new series on her own, she dropped the idea notebook and fell. When she comes to, she’s transported ten years into the past! She’s back inside the manga club room, but now she has a purpose… to take the next four months and help Yukishima live out his dream before the end comes to claim him again; however, the more she pushes, the more she begins to realize that things are changing around her.
One of the biggest changes she makes is when the Vice President of the Student Council, Arashi, dumps a sign-making project on them for the school fair. She remembered that happening the first time around, but she also remembered that it was just her and Yukishima making the signs. This time, she enlists the remaining club members, forcing them to do their part to help… much to Yukishima’s chagrin. They make it, but another big change happens that puts all of their efforts in jeopardy.
With one change after another, did Haruta inadvertently screw up her second chance?
Characters
On the surface, Haruta seems like a plain vanilla teenage girl, but to be fair, she was… at least during her flashback. She wanted to draw manga, but only drew one scene at a time. She didn’t know how to connect anything, and her artwork wasn’t exactly at a professional level. Still, she loved manga and wanted to make it, but Yukishima was leaps and bounds ahead of her in talent, and that caused her to throw a bit of a teenage tantrum and practically give up. She regretted that decision, but her personality was that of a typical high school girl who had yet to reach full maturity.
On her second trip, she brought with her ten years’ worth of experience. After dealing with harsh deadlines, an editor constantly pushing her, and feeling the weight of success in the manga world, she is more determined and disciplined, but that younger, more naïve version of herself is still there inside her somewhere, and it shines through from time to time. What has changed the most is that she went from “I don’t know if I can” to “I know I can” with her thinking, and all of that was thanks to Yukishima pushing her the first time around. Because of those ten years of life lessons, she became a character that broke out of the vanilla mold and gained a few enjoyable quirks!
Yukishima is your typical disciplined wannabe mangaka. In fact, he didn’t even know Haruta’s name for the longest time. To him, she was just some girl who showed up at the club while he worked on his series. When he finally put down the pen and started to pay attention to her, you could tell that he saw something in her and wanted to nourish it… Even if he was a bit direct and cold, that was something that she admired. On the second trip through, even he changed to be a bit warmer and more accepting of her because she brought the discipline out from the very beginning. While he didn’t change who he was, he was definitely a bit warmer to her when she wowed him with all of the changes to her drawing and art quality.
Then, we have Yukishima’s sister, Sayaka. We’ve only briefly met her in the original timeline at Yukishima’s funeral, but she seemed a bit too calm for someone who just lost a brother. Even still, she seemed friendly enough… that is, until the second time around. She still seemed warm and bubbly, but there was a moment when everything became clear. There’s a resentful side to her regarding Yukishima wanting to become a mangaka, and that one scene near the end of the volume couldn’t have been spoken any louder. It didn’t need dialogue for you to understand how she truly felt about her brother’s passion.
Final Thoughts
I’m a sucker for time travel stories, and I’m a bigger sucker for stories about making manga. When you mesh them together, then that’s a series you know I’m going to check out. Now that I have, I can say that I made a great decision in picking this one up. While the series did have a bit more slice-of-life in it than one would expect, there were constant reminders from Haruta that she had traveled back in time, and this is the part that I loved the most.
Far too often, when you get a second-chance story like this, the characters often just ignore the fact that they leapt through time. Maybe once in a while, they would remark how they remembered something that happened, but the story continues on without any consequences. It’s like the time travel was just an excuse to tell a basic slice-of-life story that could have happened without the time travel hook.
That’s not the case here. There are constant comparisons to the first time around. You see real-world changes to the decisions being made and the consequences that can come from those changes. On top of that, there is a really interesting dynamic here. I want to talk about it, but it would give away too much, so the best I can do is thinly veil my thoughts by saying that this is the first time I’ve seen in a time travel series where the main character may or may not have complete control over certain aspects of things. This blows the door wide open into a realm of unpredictability and very compelling plot moments that could ruin things. Plus, with the reveal that there may be multiple angles that could affect things… I can’t even begin to fathom how this could change the story going forward.
That in and of itself made this series extremely interesting, and one that I need to keep reading! Plus, there is a certain element to it that reminds me of Steins;Gate… and that alone makes me wonder if there is going to be a nod to a certain character in the way these events affect them!
Don’t sleep on this one if you like a good time travel story. So far, it’s doing a lot of things right!
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