From Far Away Volumes 1-7 Manga Review

High school girl Noriko Tachiki is just walking home from school with her friends when a bomb goes off. The next thing she knows, she's waking up in a forest on a bed of golden moss – and based on the clothing, language she can't understand, and other unfamiliar elements, it seems very much like she's been blown into another world. Found by a young man named Izark, Noriko does her level best to adjust to her new reality, but there's something no one is telling her: she's The Awakening, and her arrival could have catastrophic consequences for Izark and everyone in her new world.

From Far Away is translated by Yuko Sawada with an adaptation by Trina Robbins and lettering by Walden Wong.

High school girl Noriko Tachiki is just walking home from school with her friends when a bomb goes off. The next thing she knows, she's waking up in a forest on a bed of golden moss – and based on the clothing, language she can't understand, and other unfamiliar elements, it seems very much like she's been blown into another world. Found by a young man named Izark, Noriko does her level best to adjust to her new reality, but there's something no one is telling her: she's The Awakening, and her arrival could have catastrophic consequences for Izark and everyone in her new world.

From Far Away is translated by Yuko Sawada with an adaptation by Trina Robbins and lettering by Walden Wong.

Once upon a time, in the distant days of 1991, girls sent to another world didn't land there with cheat abilities. Their new worlds weren't facsimiles of games they'd played or books they'd read. They couldn't speak the language. Before the ubiquity of isekai (and specifically the male power fantasy variant), stories of people dropped into other worlds were a bit more involved, and Kiyoko Hikawa's From Far Away is an excellent example.

That is, of course, a bit glib of me to say; even modern isekai is hardly a monolith, and there were certainly older series that were more in line with what the genre looks like today. (Fushigi Yûgi, for example, uses the book device.) But for modern readers, Hikawa's 1991-2002 series will still be striking, perhaps even more so than Chie Shinohara's Red River, published during From Far Away's serialization, because Noriko truly has no shortcuts available to her.

Most notably, Noriko has to learn the language of the fantasy world she's landed in. She spends most of these first seven books with an imperfect grasp of it, and even after achieving conversational fluency, she still stumbles from time to time. It's a remarkably grounding piece of the story – Noriko may be a long-dreaded arrival as The Awakening and magic and other fantasy bits and pieces abound, but there's still no substitute for buckling down and figuring out how to communicate with people, who are, after all, just humans like her.

Or at least, mostly like her. Long before Noriko's arrival in the Sea of Trees, legend told of the coming of The Awakening, although no one was quite sure what that would look like. (They certainly weren't expecting a teenager from another world.) The Awakening is feared because the prophecies say that they will “awaken” a monster known as The Sky Demon, whose advent will bring about destruction. To that end, finding The Awakening and removing it from the game is something many groups have a vested interest in – and one of them is Izark, the young man who finds Noriko upon her arrival. Izark's desire to destroy The Awakening is very personal, but when he sees this lost, confused girl, he's not sure how to handle it. Izark himself has a troubled past, and he can't bring himself to kill Noriko, who basically imprints on him when they meet. Even as he tries to leave her behind and distance himself from her, something draws them back together, and both of them have to decide whether or not to fight against so-called fate.

The ideas of fate and prophecy form a through-line for these volumes, which make up the first half and first three chapters of the story. Because so little is known about both The Awakening and The Sky Demon, a lot of assumptions have been made, mostly to the tune of allowing the two to meet will be disastrous. But as we know, fear can skew perceptions and ideas, and as Izark and Noriko grow closer, it begins to look less like The Awakening will cause disaster and more like she will temper The Sky Demon. Love can certainly be destructive, but it's more often shown as a healing emotion. What if, then, it's the lack of Awakening that will cause The Sky Demon to rampage? It's a theory that seems to hold more and more water as these volumes go on, culminating in the idea that separation will ultimately be more destructive.

While this isn't a new idea, and probably not the first isekai story to use it (it's certainly not the last), the way that Hikawa writes and draws it is impressive. She never states the idea outright, instead taking care to show readers and lead them to the possibility that the world has gotten it wrong. People are so afraid of these monsters under society's collective bed that they can't see them as humans; they're always Othered. Noriko, as a transplant from late-20th-century Japan, is a twofold Other: she's The Awakening, but she's also a foreigner who has to learn the language and customs. That makes it doubly hard for some people to view her as human, and Hikawa takes care to ensure that one of the defining traits of the villains is their inability to view Noriko as a person. Even her allies, such as Izark and Agol, have to overcome their assumptions about her to become her true friends…and even then, Agol and some of the others may not be able to continue to see her that way as events unfold.

Hikawa's art does a beautiful job of helping the plot to show rather than tell. One of my favorite pieces of her artwork is the way she draws eyelashes – Hikawa's style is very much of the early 80s, with huge, fluffy, multilayered lashes whenever Noriko or another young woman closes her eyes. This, and the shapes of the men's faces, are the most dated bits of her art style, but they really add to the otherworldly feel of Noriko's adventures. Other details, like the fact that the animals called “horses” look nothing like our horses, as well as the clear fashions people wear, enhance the isekai qualities of the story, giving everything a very creative, otherworldly air. The translation is clearly an older one in terms of the slang occasionally thrown in, but it still reads beautifully. My one complaint is that the print version is out-of-print as of this writing.

From Far Away is, as far as I'm concerned, the gold standard for isekai that all modern series should be guided by. With solid worldbuilding, protagonists who have to work to figure things out, and a good story, it's a beautiful manga. Whether you like isekai or not, shoujo or not, and older manga or not, do pick this up. From the faraway days of 1991 to today, it's more than worth it.