Heart of Thomas Hardcover by Moto Hagio

Product Details

• Publisher: Fantagraphics (2013-01-18)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 528 pages
• ISBN-13: 9781606995518
• Item Weight: 1457.19 grams
• Dimensions: 24.26 x 17.37 x 4.75 cm

A shojo classic in English for the first time.

The setting: A boys’ boarding school in Germany, sometime in the latter 20th Century. Fourteen year-old Thomas Werner falls from a lonely pedestrian overpass to his death immediately after sending a single, brief letter to a schoolmate:

To Juli, one last time
This is my love
This is the sound of my heart
Surely you must understand

Thus begins the legendary and enigmatic Heart of Thomas, by Moto Hagio. Inspired by Jean Delannoy’s 1964 film, Les Amitiés Particulières, The Heart of Thomas was nearly cancelled early in its serialization, in 1974, until Hagio’s first trade paperback, The Poe Clan, Volume 1, sold out in a single day, giving her new series a new lease on life. The result was a story more complex, less accessible, and yet so compelling it can be found near or at the top of any list of classic shojo manga. Translated by manga scholar Rachel Thorn and packaged with the same loving attention to detail as Hagio’s Eisner Award nominated A Drunken Dream, The Heart of Thomas is one of the most eagerly awaited manga translations of the decade.

About the Author

Moto Hagio was born May 12, 1949, in Omuta City, Fukuoka Prefecture. She is one of a group of women born that year that broke into the male-dominated manga industry and pioneered the shojo (girls’) movement. Hagio’s Heart of Thomas, inspired by the 1964 film A Special Friendship, was one of the early entries in the shonen-ai (boys in love) subgenre. Her major works include A Drunken Dream, A,A’, They Were Eleven, and Otherworld Barbara. She’s won the Japanese Medal of Honor with the Purple Ribbon (the first woman comics creator to do so), received Japan’s SF Grand Prize, the Osamu Tezuka Culture Award Grand Prize, and an Inkpot Award, among other accolades. She lives in the Saitama Prefecture.


Rachel Thorn is from in Lansdale, Pennsylvania. She is a cultural anthropologist, writer, and an associate professor in the manga department at Kyoto Seika University. Her translations include the New York Times Best-Seller Nijigahara Holograph by Inio Asano and Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.