Line #21 Manga/ADistantNeighborhood


1	[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Distant.jpg]]
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3	''To a Distant Town'' (original title 遥かな町へ) is a {{Seinen}} manga by Creator/JiroTaniguchi, which ran in ''Big Comic'' from 1998 to 1999.
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5	Nakahara Hiroshi is a middle aged {{Salaryman}}, who feels disconnected from his wife and children, and is haunted by a sense of existential failure. One early morning, after a night out, he takes the wrong commuter train home and ends up in the suburban town where he spent his early life. On a whim, he decides to visit his mother's grave, and while he prays in front of it, he passes out.
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7	He wakes up feeling oddly different. He's shorter and lighter than he's been in decades. Looking at his reflection, he realizes he has been sent back in time, and he is once again a 14-year-old boy. He must re-adapt to the school and family life of a teenager in the early 1960s, all the while trying to figure out why his father mysteriously disappeared that summer, never to return.
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9	The story was adapted to movie format in 2010 with the French film ''Quartier Lointain,'' which moved the setting to 1960s France. Taniguchi got a [[TheCameo cameo]] in it.
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11	----
12	!!Contains examples of:
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14	* TheAlcoholic: In his forties, Hiroshi is frequently derided by his family for being a drunk, and being hungover is actually what causes him to board the wrong train. It is hinted at that Hiroshi drinks to cope with the grief of his mother's untimely death, and his father's disappearance.
15	* AnnoyingYoungerSibling: Hiroshi's kid sister Kyoko. As a real teen he got along reasonably well with her, but as an adult in a teen's body he no longer has any patience for her.
16	* BeachEpisode: Hiroshi and Tomoko bring their respective younger siblings to the beach.
17	* BittersweetEnding: [[spoiler:Hiroshi gets back to 1998 after he collapses in the cemetary in the 1960s. He reunites with his family and doesn't know what happened to his father. However, Daisuke sent him a package containing a book dedicated to him.]]
18	* BreakHerHeartToSaveHer: [[spoiler: Hiroshi, despondent after having failed to prevent his father from leaving, ultimately realizes that he is an adult and can't keep stringing Tomoko along forever, but his rebuttals of her concerned questions only makes it look as though he is lashing out at her, and she runs away in tears.]]
19	* ButterflyOfDeathAndRebirth: A butterfly can be seen the first time Hiroshi loses consciousness in the cemetary, and a second time when he's sent back to 1998.
20	* CallingTheOldManOut: [[spoiler: Hiroshi gives in to thirty years of pent up resentment and sadness by giving his father quite the verbal dressing down when he intercepts him at the station, detailing exactly how things are going to be after he's gone and just how selfish he is for abandoning his wife and children.]]
21	* ChildhoodFriendRomance: Hiroshi's mother Kazue and her first husband Shinichi are a tragic spin on this, since Shinichi was drafted to war not long after they were married and was subsequently killed in action.
22	* DrowningMySorrows: Hiroshi accidentally gets wasted a second time after his father leaves.
23	* FishOutOfTemporalWater: The early 1960s were a different time.
24	* GeekyTurnOn: Hiroshi's newfound interest in his studies and particular ease with foreign languages sparks the interest of Tomoko, the prettiest girl in his year, who is no slouch in the language department herself.
25	* GetBackToTheFuture: Hiroshi tries this exactly once, by praying at the family grave the way he did before he was sent back in time. It doesn't work.
26	* HowDadMetMom: Hiroshi's grandmother tells him this story when he asks her about a memorial tablet on the family altar, dedicated to a man he doesn't know. The man in question is Shinichi Kotani, his mother's first husband, who met Hiroshi's father in the army and saved his life. Shinichi was killed in action and Yoshio made it his sworn duty to bring his remains back home to his family. He and Shinichi's widow bonded over their grief, and fell into something that somewhat resembled love.
27	* InSpiteOfANail: Hiroshi's time travel experience doesn't seem to have altered anything when he gets back to 1998. [[spoiler: Unless you count his old buddy Daisuke reaching out to him across time and even dedicating his novel to him.]]
28	* {{Joshikousei}}: Tomoko.
29	* LikesOlderWomen: Good grief, Daisuke. He takes seemingly no notice of girls his own age, but is quick to comment on beautiful older women like Kazue or Tamiko, and he even takes his mother's barmaid out on a "date". He seems to think he and Hiroshi have this in common, which [[TrappedInThePast technically isn't inaccurate]].
30	* TheMindIsAPlaythingOfTheBody: The more time Hiroshi spends in 1963, the more he acts and thinks like a teenage boy. He realizes this and worries that he might forget his adult life altogether.
31	* MirrorReveal: Hiroshi doesn't fully realize what's happened to him until he spots his reflection in a shop window and screams.
32	* MissedHimByThatMuch: [[spoiler: Hiroshi accidentally bumps shoulders with an old man as he's boarding his train to Tokyo. He absent-mindedly apologizes before it hits him that the old man looks quite a bit like his father. The train door closes before he can do anything about it, however, and he can only watch his father disappear again as the train rolls out of the station.]]
33	* MistakenForCheating: As he investigates the possible reasons why his father would want to abandon the family, Hiroshi tails him all the way to the hospital in Tottori; there he finds out that Yoshio has been paying regular visits to his childhood friend Tamiko, who is terminally ill, but Hiroshi quickly realizes that these visits really are just that.
34	* MythArc: One of the things Hiroshi did when he ''went'' back to the past is to figure out what happened to his father, who somehow walked out of his family.
35	* OhCrap: Hiroshi gets several.
36	** When he remembers [[BusCrash what happened]] to his old friend Masao just as he's getting reacquainted with him.
37	** When he walks Tomoko home after they get acquainted in the school library, and it hits him that nothing of the sort had ever happened in his original timeline.
38	** When he drinks himself into a stupor at Daisuke's and regains consciousness hours later; Daisuke then informs him that his mother rang Hiroshi's house, and that his father is on his way to pick him up.
39	** When it dawns on him that he, a 48 year old man with a wife and two children, is falling for Tomoko, a girl ''barely older than his own daughter''.
40	* OrdinaryHighSchoolStudent: Inside that 14-year-old's body is the mind of an adult man from 35 years in the future.
41	* OrWasItADream: When Hiroshi at last gets back to 1998, he checks his watch to realize that it has only been a couple of minutes since he collapsed, despite the fact that [[YearInsideHourOutside five months went by]] during his involuntary time travel; this leads him to wonder if he just fell asleep. [[spoiler: Daisuke's gift at the end, which is addressed to "the time traveller", hints that it may not have all been a dream.]]
42	* ParentalAbandonment: Hiroshi never got over his father's unexplained disappearance.
43	* PeggySue: Hiroshi. He, [[spoiler: much like the Trope Namer, returns to his older body with a new book dedicated to him by someone he heavily interacted with him in the past]] waiting for him at home.
44	* PenName: [[spoiler: Daizaburo Horie is Daisuke Shimada's ''nom de plume''. Also Hiroshi's friend Takashi, who eventually grows up to be a famous mangaka by the name of Ryu Hamada.]]
45	* PleaseDontLeaveMe: [[spoiler: Hiroshi says this almost verbatim as his father is about to board the train that'll take him away from his family for good.]]
46	* PragmaticAdaptation: The film version, while otherwise faithful to the original story, moved the setting to France.
47	* PrecociousCrush: Little Kyoko has an instant one on Daisuke, who is three years older than she is.
48	* RetroactivePrecognition: Hiroshi gets drunk on Daisuke's hidden whisky and starts to prattle about things to come, such as the death of famous sumo wrestler {{Wrestling/Rikidozan}}. Daisuke is appropriately creeped out, but not as much as when a sober Hiroshi later tells him about his father's upcoming disappearance.
49	* StacysMom: Daisuke is quite floored at how beautiful Hiroshi's mother is.
50	* StrongFamilyResemblance: Hiroshi's older daughter Ayako looks a lot like his mother Kazue, while his younger daughter Akiko looks quite a bit like his younger sister Kyoko, even down to the haircut.
51	* SetRightWhatOnceWentWrong: Hiroshi tries to do it, but it's more complicated than it looks.
52	* SettleForSibling: Invoked with Kazue, whose ex father-in-law suggested that she could marry [[TheLostLenore Shinichi]]'s younger brother Shinji.
53	* SoreLoser: [[JerkJock Toru Onishi]] doesn't take kindly to Hiroshi beating him in a foot race and later taunts him when he catches wind that Hiroshi is considering getting into sports.
54	* StrugglingSingleMother: [[spoiler: Kazue becomes this after Yoshio disappears from her and the children's lives, working herself to the bone to keep the family afloat, never remarrying, never complaining about her situation, to the point where her already dodgy health ends up drastically declining, and she dies at only 48 years old.]]
55	* TimeTravelRomance: Meshed together with AgeDownRomance. Hiroshi travels back to his teenage years and accidentally attracts the interest of Tomoko Nagase, a beautiful and studious girl who in his original timeline had never even spoken to him. Tomoko soon falls for him, and while Hiroshi doesn't properly reciprocate, he doesn't dissuade her from pursuing him, either. That said, he is also quite attracted to Mrs Shimada's pretty barmaid, who of course thinks he's just a kid and pays him no mind.
56	* TrappedInThePast: Hiroshi is sent back in time to his early teenage years.
57	* TroublingUnchildlikeBehavior: Some of Hiroshi's more adult behaviors, such as smoking a cigarette with unexpected ease or downing whisky with little difficulty, tend to rub people up the wrong way since to them he looks like a 14 year-old boy.
58	* UmbrellaOfTogetherness: Hiroshi and Tomoko share an umbrella when he walks her home under the rain, which hints to the RomanceArc he has unintentionally set in motion.
59	* WarIsHell: Hiroshi's father Yoshio is a UsefulNotes/WorldWarII vet and went through hell during Japan's Burma campaign, including a bout of malaria that would have killed him had it not been for Shinichi.
60	* WhenYouComingHomeDad: Present-day Hiroshi uses work to distance himself from his family in spite of himself. His wife Yuko points this out to him and he brushes it off. [[HeelRealization He grows out of it.]]
61	* WhereAreTheyNowEpilogue: [[ZigZaggedTrope Zig-zagged]] in that Hiroshi gives the reader a running commentary of what happened to his family and old schoolfriends in the original timeline, which does count as an epilogue on ''their'' side of the story.
62	** Hiroshi's little sister Kyoko went to business school before joining a insurance firm in Tottori, where she eventually met her future husband. She's now a 45 year old housewife with three children.
63	** Tomoko eventually married a diplomat, and now lives abroad.
64	** Takashi turned his love of manga into a profession, and his works are enjoyed by schoolchildren all over Japan.
65	** Masao was tragically killed in a motorcycle accident when he was 16.
66	** [[spoiler: Daisuke became a respected novelist under the pen name Daizaburo Horie.]]

Context Manga / ADistantNeighborhood