A story about waking up.

Itaru Shinjou is a shut-in boy who feels incapable of living his own life. He tries to numb his need for fulfillment by acting as a spectator to the lives of others and even his own, forever watching and yet, never truly knowing.

One day, he receives a once-in-a-lifetime offer to join the LOTUS Project, a breakthrough in science where multiple people are able to enter a shared dream world in their sleep. Joining three others, Itaru's world will soon be shaken and he must now hit the ground running - living a life he never thought was possible.

Joining Itaru is Matsuki, his complete opposite. Matsuki is driven and has always lived her life with initiative. Constantly in control of her present and future, the thing that changed it all was the day she enters the LOTUS Project, slowly losing that control against any choice she could have made.

For the first time, her world too is shaken, and for the first time, she questions her future and will soon have to face the person she must truly become.

"There is no place like here...

"And no time like now."

"There is no world like ours...

"And there is no one

like you."

Anata is a story conceived since I was in high school - when I was young, in love, and had no idea about the world around me or myself. During some of the low points in my life, I constantly find myself coming back to it, pouring my emotions and inner thoughts into its world and characters. This story has, in a way, become a reflection of myself, and hopefully it can be mirror for others as well.

The story was born in a classroom in 2010-11, where I sketched the first two characters, Itaru and Matsuki, onto an exercise book. I drew and wrote more, the characters evolving alongside every stage of my life since. I have constantly revisited and rewritten it, pouring hundreds of pages into numerous documents about the story and characters, scrapping so much but learning even more in the process. I won my first National Novel Writing Month in 2013 by writing a light novel of one of Anata's later drafts, writing a 50,000 word draft of the first few chapters within a month.

Anata is a romantic drama with fantasy elements of dreams and reality. It's a coming-of-age story of two very different souls who must discover each other in order to find themselves.

JOURNEY OF A

DREAM