Someday's Dreamers, Volume 1

I enjoyed reading this manga. It's about a young girl, Yume, who is a magic user. Now that she is of age, she has to move to Tokyo to earn official certification. She moves in with her male teacher, and the lessons begin. Yume gets into a bit of trouble at first for using magic the wrong way. There are some hard lessons to be learned regarding that. But she always has the bast interests in mind for the people she helps, so you can't really blame her for that. The artwork is nice, and the story is nicely paced. The magic used isn't over-the-top, which was another plus.

Seeing Someday's Dreamers described as a cross between Harry Potter and Sailor Moon made me want to pick it up, and given the gentle-looking drawing of Yume Kikuchi, I figured the heroine had to be something of a shy romantic, and I was right. And yume is Japanese for dream, apt considering how romantics are dreamers. Fresh from Tono, Iwate-ken, which is in north Honshu (the main island of Japan), the magically gifted Yume travels to Tokyo to get magic training from Masami Oyamada. He tells her how his agency does contracts for the government, industry, and private individuals, but that even magic is limited, as it cannot be used to transform others, replace body parts, etc. However, "when a magic user grants a wish, it will only work if the wish is defined. A magic user aligns herself [or himself] with the desire of the other person and grants their wish by channeling that desire." Yume meets a few people with whom she interacts with in order to make that wish come true. In some cases, it's a virtual sensation, like a dream. Zennosuke wanted to be a soccer player, but lost a leg in an accident, thus losing his dream, and also, his kindness. Yume grants him a virtual dream where he is at a soccer championship, with both his legs, and scores the winning goal. Another job, that has a heartbreaking aftermath, involves returning an old woman to memories of herself when she was 35, so she could relive her moment with Kana, a daughter who was studying music in Vienna and died in a traffic accident. To that effect, Yume becomes Kana, playing the violin, trying on a dress, in the dream. For others, Yume learns a lesson in what people actually want. She confuses the desire of a woman to be reunited with her falsely-jailed lover with money won from a lottery so he'll read about her in the news. However, when she helps a boy doing weeding with a fork by making the weeds vanish, she is scolded, as the boy had to do weeding as a punishment. And she has to fight perceptions that magic is used for sneaky things, and that those who use magic are tarred with that brush. The whole point is how one uses magic. Creating money is a no-no, as is doing evil, but using it for good and making people happy is the aim of Oyadama's agency. Despite the bumps in the road, Yume decides to "be a beacon of hope in a world that still struggles to appreciate magic." A good start to a promising series, originally titled in Japanese as Mahou Tsukai ni taisetsu na koto, or Treasured Things for a Using Magic. This spawned an anime series that had The Indigo doing the theme song "Under the Blue Sky"