Many authors and illustrators have tried to write about what it means to work in a creative field. For my money, John Kendrick Bangs' 1896 novel A Rebellious Heroine best captures the writing life, and that's illustrious company for Taiyo Matsumoto to be in as he turns his talents to exploring the manga field from various creative angles. (Or, if you prefer, Matsumoto is the illustrious company for the largely and criminally forgotten Bangs.) Where Bangs' novel focuses on the way that stories can spiral out of their writers' control, the first volume of Matsumoto's series looks at how working in manga can become an all-consuming passion, a needed escape, and a labor of unappreciated love as he explores it through the perspectives of several characters.

The primary focus of the narrative is Shiozawa, a manga editor. When we meet him, he is retiring after thirty years in the business and a life-long love affair with the medium. Shiozawa is regarded as something of a great in his office, but after a magazine he helmed is canceled, he feels like he has lost the pulse of the industry. The implication is that he believes that he has lost the right to continue to work in manga, which extends to many areas of his life, including one moment when he almost sells off his entire collection, accrued throughout his life. Shiozawa is punishing himself for how the industry has changed, even if he doesn't recognize it.

The idea of a changing manga landscape is not necessarily overtly explored but is the underpinning of the book. Throughout his career, Shiozawa has worked on some of the major titles of what is implied to be the late Showa era, titles that, when mentioned to younger people in the volume, are met with resounding silence. This implies that the standards by which manga is judged in the Reiwa and Heisei periods have evolved, or at least changed, which isn't quite the same when viewed from a nostalgic perspective. Much like cheap paperbacks contributed to the demise of the pulp short story magazine, shifting tastes and reading modalities have altered the manga landscape, and Shiozawa and his contemporaries are struggling with it. Two of the other characters we meet are old-school manga creators, one of whom is retiring and the other who has stopped creating altogether to work at a "regular" job in a supermarket. They're presented on either side of another creator who has recently passed away. Although Shiozawa still values their work – and encourages them to begin creating again – there's a feeling that the deceased manga creator is the only one who successfully moved out of the sphere of manga and that she only managed that by dying. Manga, whether you want it to be or not, is for life.

The question then becomes whether or not it's worth it to try to move past the field or to evolve with it. That's still an open-ended debate as of the volume's end, with Shiozawa struggling to find his place in it. We watch him waffle back and forth, and by the last page, he seems to have decided to take on one last project, working with the two older creators, which inspires a struggling younger one and his editor. But the issue of whether you create for an audience or yourself is beginning to come to the fore; as an example, the woman who had quit the industry to work at a grocery store is delighted to be drawing Riyoko Ikeda-style epic shoujo again, but her husband and son don't understand her work at all, brushing it off as some weird, violent thing. She finds joy in it, but whether or not that's enough is left open. The young manga creator's journey is more about the commercial aspect, because while he finds pleasure in making manga, he also wants to sell, something that doesn't appear to be a concern for the older characters, with Shiozawa firmly in the middle.

There are no clear-cut answers, and that's perhaps the point. Matsumoto infuses the story with elements of magic realism to help highlight this, such as Shiozawa's encounter with a ghost and his conversations with his bird. The latter is one of the more interesting devices in the book – he and the bird have full human-language discussions, and at one point, someone asks who he is talking to, as he can hear voices through the door. But to everyone else in the room, the bird only sounds like he's chirping, which begs the question of whether or not Shiozawa is truly having those conversations. Is the bird representative of Shiozawa's inner creativity? Or is he simply responding in the bird's "voice" to his questions?

As always with Matsumoto's manga, you must be willing to do some work while reading. Tokyo These Days wants you to think, which sometimes includes how you parse the images that accompany the text, often separately. Ultimately, this volume introduces a changing world, represented by the Tokyo the characters inhabit and have inhabited in their pasts. It's about the inescapable hold creative work (and manga, in particular) has on us. What you do with that hold, it says, is up to you.