The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

My opinion of the series

Today, I’m going to have a quick look at The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. Let’s take a look at the blurb:

Makoto Konno is a junior in high school. She is good friends with her childhood friend, Kousuke Tsuda and transfer student Chiaki Mamiya. They “pretend play” baseball after school everyday.

But their relationship starts to change drastically when Makot acquires the ability to leap through time.

Relive the beauty of a timeless story in the manga adaptation of the acclaimed anime feature film The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.

Now, that does sound a bit familiar. Wait a minute, I remember one that was very familiar to this, The Girl Who Runs Through Time. In fact, both books credit the same person as coming up with the original story, and both seem to be adaptions of the same original story. So, what’s the difference?

Well, I quite liked The Girl Who Runs Through Time. I didn’t think it was brilliant but it was still quite good. You can read my original review on this site. But how does The Girl Who Leapt Through Time compare?

Well, it’s the same basic plot-line. The lead character has a different name (Kazuko runs and Makoto leaps respectively), she’s in high school in both cases, and she has the ability to travel through time in both cases. In The Girl Who Runs Through Time she spent most of her time trying to work out what was happening, how come she could time travel, and she didn’t have the ability to control it - it happened at various important moments; basically it was driven by the plot. 

In The Girl Who Leapt Through Time there is much less on the mystery of how Makoto can time travel, and more how she can use it to her advantage; the key difference being that in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time Makoto can time travel at will.

By time traveling, I don’t mean DeLorean-style where someone uses some mechanism to travel through time, and they travel through time but not space (relative to the Earth) to appear where they were standing in the past (which happens in The Girl Who Runs Through Time). In this version, the time travel is more mental, in that her memories of events are transmitted back to her past-self; nothing physically comes back, but she gets to relieve past events and change their outcome.

The story is a lot more interesting, even if the basic outline is roughly the same, and the start and the end are vaguely similar. But what actually happens is different, because in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time Makoto can control her leaps at will, and can use them to start playing around. For example, she does things like use it to cheat on a test (by traveling back in time and using her knowledge of the answers to get perfect score), and avoid social situations that are awkward to her. (Don’t want to talk to someone? Travel back in time, walk a different way down the street.)

Of the two, I prefer The Girl Who Leapt Through Time slightly more. They’re both good reads; if you like the sound of the concept then you might want to pick up both of them, because even through the story between the two is similar they’re different enough to justify reading both.

If you like the sound of the concept but only want to pick up one then I’d recommend going for The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. It’s only one volume long; it’s not a series, just a short story. I enjoyed it and I’d recommend having a look at it.