After 30 years as a manga editor, Kazuo Shiozawa suddenly quits. Although he feels early retirement is the only way to atone for his failures as an editor, the manga world isn't done with him.
Shiozawa forges ahead with an independently published manga project. But the manga creators around him are crumbling into chaos--Chosaku drinks himself into ever less productivity over worries about his career and family, a longtime creator can't discern the difference between fiction and fantasy, and Aoki disappears rather than face the deadlines for his new hit series. Sometimes, the simple pleasure of an apple is worth more than all the fame and toil of making manga.
Taiyo Matsumoto is best known to English-reading audiences as the creator of the Eisner Award-winning Tekkonkinkreet, which in 2006 was made into an animated feature film of the same name directed by Michael Arias. In 2007, Matsumoto was awarded a Japan Media Arts Festival Excellence Award, and in 2020 he won his second Eisner Award for the English publication of Cats of the Louvre.