The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

Back before such an awfully high percentage of Manga offerings were so social-agenda, woke-gender pandering that it became tantamount to a scavenger hunt to find really good decent stories, it was easier to find wonderful and memorable ones, like The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. It too was turned into an excellent anime, one worthy of Ghibli. If you haven’t seen it, I suggest you do.

For those who have seen the endearing film, reading the manga is nostalgic and bittersweet. Makoto Kona is a high school girl who is always running late, even to class. She’s a bit of a tomboy, always playing catch with her two male friends, Chiaki Mamiya and Kousuke Tsuda. But that’s all they are — friends.

One day she enters the lab, because she show more heard someone in there when there wasn’t supposed to be. She finds no one, but in typical fashion for her — manages to topple to the floor and make a mess. Then she wakes up. Was it all a dream? What about that walnut-looking thing she found?

Next thing you know — because as usual, Makoto is running late — a bike ride down the steep hill in the city becomes a tragedy. The tragedy takes the form of a train and a railroad crossing, and a bicycle with bad brakes. In that instant, Makoto’s young life is over — except she finds herself back before the accident! What has happened?

Enter her Auntie Witch, Miss Yoshiyama, whom Makoto confides in about her strange experience. This is when Makoto discovers she has time leapt into the past. But does she really believe it? Could it have been a weird dream after all? Only testing the theory can confirm it. But once she does, it opens up a whole new world for young Makoto, leaping back and forth to “fix” things of minor consequence on the grander scale — such as being able to eat her pudding before it’s taken, and doing karaoke all day with her pals during faux summer break — but of great importance to her. Her pals Chiaki and Kousuke can’t understand how Makoto hardly studies, yet gets great grades!

But when a sweet girl asks out Kouske, and Chiaki startles Makoto by asking her out on a date, things get wild with the time leaping. While it’s humorous it is also very sweet. The reader can feel something more serious coming, and soon it does, when numbers begin appearing on Makoto’s arm, changing each time she time leaps. Trying to fix everything romantically for her friend, while sorting out her own young feelings, is making that number decrease significantly…

A mysterious painting, an unthinkable tragedy involving her borrowed bike, and a simple question from someone who should have no idea about time-leaping, or that she has being doing it, changes everything. Makoto learns her connection to her Auntie is much deeper than she realizes, and how important making memories are, so we no longer have the need to time leap, in the wistful, touching conclusion to this wonderful story.

Both a slice of life, coming of age story, and a light science fiction tale involving time, this manga is perfect. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, with Ranmaru Kotone adapting Yasutaka Tsutsui’s 1960s story for manga, with Yoshiyuki Sadamoto’s character designs is still one of the best things out there, and is highly recommended. If you’ve seen the film, however, know that you get more of an ending here than in the anime film, which is also quite fantastic. A real gem! show less

I'm just learning about manga so this might have colored my thoughts about this book. I read it through once very quickly and was left confused. I hardly knew what happened. I then read the synopsis of the characters on the back of the book and read it through the book a second time, more slowly. I understood it better, but parts of it remained confusing to me. I have no idea what happened in the epilogue or who those characters even were. Maybe the anime from which this book was taken would have made the story clearer? I'm not sure. I'm not a great fan of time travel stories so I think I'll look for other manga to explore and leave this story for others.