Intro

Dream Saga is a fantasy adventure manga of five volumes that was first serialized in the shoujo manga magazine Nakayoshi between 1997 and 1999. The series contains light elements of Japanese mythology, notably the tale of the sun goddess Amaterasu and the heavenly rock cave. “Saga” is not supposed to mean chronicle or a long narrative, but a tradition; the Japanese title expresses this more accurately: Mugen Densetsu Takamagahara — Dream Legend Takamagahara.

The story follows elementary school student Yuuki Wakasa as she finds a red Magatama with magical powers one day. She soon discovers that the jewel allows her to travel to Takamagahara (“the plain of high heaven”) in her sleep — the dream world that exists parallel to Nakatsukuni (“the middle country of reed beds”), her own world. Time flows differently in the two worlds, and falling asleep in one world means waking in the other. Every person leads a separate life in each world without being aware of it, as memories of the other self are not retained upon waking, just as one doesn’t usually remember dreams with full clarity.

Only those chosen by the Magatama share memories of their different selves across the worlds, and it is those chosen ones that Yuuki is tasked to gather around her in order to save the weakened Amaterasu, the goddess who is the personified sun of both worlds. For without the sun, neither nature nor its children are able to thrive, and both worlds would eventually succumb to the everlasting darkness of Ragnarök

Covers

Below are the German front and back covers. The Japanese covers feature text about twice the size of what you see here, whereas the text on the English covers least interferes with the pictures, but injects them with an abundance of pink.


I love these covers so much due to the common elements in all of them, but also due to how they pick up story elements in their backgrounds and how they reflect Yuuki’s actual change of attire across the volumes.