By Yasutaka Tsutsui and Gaku Tsugano
CMX, 194 pages
Rating: Teen

Don’t read The Girl Who Runs Through Time if you’re looking for a kinetic, action-packed manga with science-fiction trappings and lots of testosterone. On the other hand, please pick it up if you’re in the mood for an engaging coming-of-age story with good writing and terrific artwork – and which happens to use time travel as a key plot device.

The main character of the series is a teenager named Kazuko Yoshiyama, who is at an important crossroads in her life. A senior in high school, she is under pressure from friends and family to choose a direction for herself, whether it’s going to college or getting a job. Unfortunately, Kazuko has a nostalgic personality, and no matter how often she coaches herself that, “Now’s not the time to let myself get lost in memories,” she inevitably does just that.

One day, following a fainting spell in the school science laboratory, Kazuko discovers certain stimuli cause her to travel backwards in time. Although the terms and limits of this newfound ability aren’t fully explored in the first volume, it does appear to be a form of wish-fulfillment, and allows Kazuko to perform small miracles, like eating the sweet bean jam buns of her youth once again. But she also gets to correct what she views as mistakes from her own past: not seeing her sick grandmother before she passed away; and preventing a freak accident that injured her friend, causing him to miss an important competition.

Who wouldn’t want to step back in time, revisit places of sentimental value that are now gone, or stop terrible things from happening to loved ones? Time travel has universal appeal; luckily, the creators seem to understand that revisiting the past – whether as a mental exercise or, in Kazuko’s case, quite literally – also represents the act of avoiding the present and future. Thus, Kazuko may spend extra time in the past, but her adventures always teach important lessons that are applicable to her present-day self, such as the value of seizing the moment, and not worrying whether the future could be jeopardized by the choices one makes.

“Whichever you choose, as long as there’s a ‘Time is,’ the flowers will bloom, so hold on,” says one of Kazuko’s pals, who may be a time traveler himself. When he makes this remark, both characters are standing inside an actual greenhouse full of flowers; the plants, however, also symbolize Kazuko and her tight-knit group of friends, whose day for blooming is still on the horizon. This kind of literal-mindedness is symptomatic of the heavy-handed storytelling approach that threatens to be a bit much at times. However, the top-notch artwork more than makes up for it; the overall style is clean, backgrounds are frequently stunning, and the use of canted angles and interesting perspectives creates a sense of excitement at key moments.

Meanwhile, despite the series’ fantasy premise, writer Yasutaka Tsutsui and artist Gaku Tsugano chose to depict time travel in a relatively-understated manner: a match on motion from one panel to the next, e.g., Kazuko steps through a doorway in the present, exits through a doorway in the past. The creators could have done it differently, surrounding Kazuko with lots of whiz-bang special effects, but this way seems like a better fit, given that traversing the space-time continuum merely turns the engine, while seeing these characters enter adulthood is the car.

Volume one of The Girl Who Runs Through Time is available now.