Photo/Illutration This young man posts his manga on his Facebook account. (Junko Watanabe)

A college student has found redemption from his traumatic family life through a keepsake letter from an old childhood friend. 

It led him to create his own manga and, in turn, rekindle the friendship, giving him a new lease on life.

The student, 25, troubled by his parents' feud since childhood, found inspiration for his manga after rediscovering the words of a former classmate.

He was sitting alone one day, with his curtains closed to block out the spring sunlight, feeling apathetic and scratching away at his notebook with a utility knife.

He said he was trying to remember “something nice that may have happened in my life,” and so he pulled out a photo album and unearthed an old letter.

“You would say, ‘I always lose’, but I do not think so,” it read.

The delicately written message was from a girl he studied with about a decade ago at a junior high school on an islet. She handed the note to him when he moved to a new school.

“I was happy to meet you,” she wrote.

Those words reminded him of the days when he attempted to conceal his family troubles by behaving cheerfully. He drew manga at the time to distract himself.

“Why don’t you do what you really like to do? I am sorry for my possibly patronizing way of writing,” she wrote.

A vivid image of the girl in her sailor-like school uniform came to him, and the young man felt as if her words seeped into his body.

He quickly made up his mind, picked up a pen and put his feelings about his family and others onto paper.

He detailed his faint love for the classmate and how he is now clinging to the words from his past.

He shared his manga on social media, publicizing his emotional suffering from his family life as a way of dealing with his pain.

By sharing his circumstances, he gradually felt relief.

When he uploaded the 200-page manga to his Facebook account, the man wanted to say thank you to the girl he once knew.

He hoped she would find his manga and read it. But he was also afraid she would not like the man he has become.

Three months later, early in the afternoon, he received a “like” notification while he was job searching on a computer in a campus lab. It was from her.

He wondered how far she read the manga, then realized it was, coincidentally, her birthday.

It took him a full three hours of agonizing before he could send a thank you message and wish her a happy birthday. His heart was beating fast. Message sent.

He checked his smartphone for a reply so frequently that night came before he knew it.

When midnight finally rolled around, he received a long message from the girl, who had, in fact, read the entire manga.

She told him that on her birthday, she and her mother talked about her school days with him. She said she checked his Facebook page because she wondered how he is doing now.

She shared how she felt about his manga.

“I feel your work helped me to sort out my mind. I have recently been thinking about a family and what I can do,” she wrote.

“Thank you for continuing to make manga. I hope we can meet again someday,” the reply concluded.

As he scrolled down his smartphone screen, he could not hold back his tears.

Filled with the joy of realizing he had made the best connection in his life in those formative days, he could not sleep until the next morning.

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