Dream Saga
Dream Saga is a shōjo manga by Megumi Tachikawa. From the February 1997 issue to the June 1999 issue, it appeared as a serial in the Japanese manga magazine Nakayoshi. Kodansha compiled the twenty-seven chapters into five bound volumes and published them from October 1997 to September 1999.
It is a fantasy adventure tale about a young girl called Yuuki Wakasa, who one day acquires a magical red stone. The stone allows her to travel to Takamagahara, the dream world, when she sleeps, and can only return to Nakatsukuni, the real world, when she goes to sleep in the dream. Yuuki discovers that she must save the sun, Amaterasu, from being trapped and destroyed in Takamagahara, or the light will be lost from both worlds forever.
The manga has been translated and republished in German by Egmont Manga & Anime from November 2002 to May 2003, and English by Tokyopop from August 2004 to August 2005. The series has since gone out of print.
Characters
;Yuuki Wakasa; Takaomi Kai
;Binga
;Souta Inaba
; Taizou Hyuga
; Keima Sagami
; Nachi Izumi
; Miss Nakime
Development
created Dream Saga during the time that her previous serial, Saint Tail, was concluding. The genre, fantasy, was the first to be decided on, and she decided to draw on mythology. She consulted several books on the mythologies of different cultures, ruling out Greek mythology, as she felt that it was often seen in manga, and Chinese mythology, because one of her earlier works had dealt with it. Japanese mythology was decided on, as she and her editor felt that it was "familiar, but seldom-seen." The concept for the five magic stones was inspired by the Japanese fantasy novel Nannsou Satomi Hatsuken-Den by Bakin Takizawa, which centers on eight canines, each possessing a ball that corresponds to a virtue.Despite drawing on mythology for Dream Saga, she included original elements, such as the 'Horizon Girl'. She also deviated from the mythology by altering the role of Tsukuyami, originally brother to Amaterasu, and using the myth of Takama-ga-hara, the home of the gods, only as a basis for Dream Sagas spiritual world. Aspects from other mythologies also appear in the manga: the character Karyubinga is derived from a legendary bird of the same name in Indian mythology. For the language of Takama-ga-hara, Tachikawa combined syllables primarily from English, Indian, Spanish, and Turkish.
Release
Written and illustrated by Megumi Tachikawa, the twenty-seven chapters of Dream Saga appeared as a serial in the Japanese manga magazine Nakayoshi from the February 1997 issue to the June 1999 issue. The chapters were collected into five bound volumes by Kodansha and published from October 1997 to September 1999.Tokyopop licensed Dream Saga for an English-language release in North America in 2003. It published the five volumes from August 10, 2004, to August 9, 2005. Tokyopop's translation has since gone out of print. Dream Saga has also been translated into German by Egmont Manga & Anime.