Moto Hagio was born May 12, 1949, in Omuta City, Fukuoka Prefecture. She is one of a group of women born that year that broke into the male-dominated manga industry and pioneered the shojo (girls') movement. Hagio's Heart of Thomas, inspired by the 1964 film A Special Friendship, was one of the early entries in the shonen-ai (boys in love) subgenre. Her major works include A Drunken Dream, A, A', They Were Eleven, and Otherworld Barbara. She's won the Japanese Medal of Honor with the Purple Ribbon (the first woman comics creator to do so), received Japan's SF Grand Prize, the Osamu Tezuka Culture Award Grand Prize, and an Inkpot Award, among other accolades. She lives in the Saitama Prefecture. Rachel Thorn is from in Lansdale, Pennsylvania. She is a cultural anthropologist, writer, and an associate professor in the manga department at Kyoto Seika University. Her translations include the New York Times Best-Seller Nijigahara Holograph by Inio Asano and Hayao Miyazaki's Nausica� of the Valley of the Wind.