A Thousand Years of Snow

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A Thousand Years of Snow

千年の雪 (Sennen no Yuki)
Genre	Romance, Shōjo, Supernatural
Manga
Authored by	Bisco Hatori
Publisher	Hakusensha Viz Media
Serialized in	Hana to Yume
Original run	November 2001 – August 2002
No. of volumes	2

A Thousand Years of Snow (千年の雪, Sennen no Yuki^?) is the title of a manga series written and illustrated by Japanese author Bisco Hatori about a young girl about to die and the vampire that just might save her life.

It was first serialized in Hana to Yume by Hakusensha. The manga has since been licensed by United States based company Viz Media.

1 Plot
2 Characters
3 Manga
4 External links

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

A Thousand Years of Snow is a story revolving around the main protagonist Chiyuki Matsuoka who is a high school girl hospitalized with a heart problem. Since birth her heart has been very weak and she was told that she would probably live to be only fifteen. However, one day she meets Tōya Kanō, a vampire, with the opposite problem: Tōya lives for about one thousand years. It's customary for a vampire at his age of 18 to choose a human partner to be with for 1000 years who in turn would let him drink their blood and share his life span for the millennium.

Eventually, Chiyuki offers Tōya her blood, so that she would be able to live longer, but Tōya refuses, claiming he dislikes the sight and taste of blood. Additionaly, he dislikes humans, thinking of them as filthy and disgusting creatures.

[edit] Characters

Chiyuki Matsuoka: The heroine of the story, Chiyuki is a 17-year-old high schooler who is hospitalized due to having a poor heart condition since birth. She has frequent heart attacks when she becomes distressed, and lately the heart attacks have been worsening. She tends to be a spunky person who is able to withstand anything. However, she also can be very emotional and cries a lot accordingly.

Tōya Kanō: Tōya is the 18-year-old vampire that Chiyuki meets. Unlike most typical vampires, he hates blood and wants nothing to do with it whatsoever. He can be out during the daytime, though still avoids garlic. Since he doesn't take in any blood, he has become anemic and whenever he is starving for food, he often falls over and is unable to move around until his bat Yamimaru comes to help him.

The main reason Tōya doesn't want to look for a partner is that he has too nice a personality and wouldn't want to force anyone to live for 1000 years as he sees it as more of a curse than a blessing.

Tōya often puts on the façade that he's a tough guy, but in reality he's quite the opposite.

Yamimaru: Tōya's servant bat who is the only one that Tōya can rely on, especially if Tōya has collapsed from a lack of energy. He has the ability to transform into a normal looking human, though this can only be done for about 4 and a half hours per day. He has two human forms: one that is very tall and theoretically looks like Tōya's older brother, and a much younger version who can theoretically appear to be Tōya's younger brother.

Yamimaru proved to be the most popular character of Sennen no Yuki.

Satsuki Akiyoshi: He is a very handsome student at Chiyuki's school who is very popular among the girls. He tends to be very suave and flirts a lot with the female students. As noted by Chiyuki, he also has a great sense of humor.

Satsuki lives with his grandmother and has been able to gain a lot of her wisdom because of it. Also, like Tōya, he is not a human but in fact a werewolf. It is due to this that he constantly tries to appear as a normal person. If he didn't, he would always feel very insecure about him being a werewolf.

Kei Kuramata: He is Chiyuki's 26 year old cousin and he's very protective of her due to her health issues. In effect, they share a brother-sister type relationship. He has been described as very smart and he even left to study English in the United States. However, his possessive streak borders on the extreme and on one occasion even tied Chiyuki up just to keep her and Tōya separated.

Spoilers end here.

[edit] Manga

The manga series was first serialized in the Japanese manga magazine Hana to Yume with the first tankōbon, or volume, released in November 2001. The series was rather short, ending just after the completion of the second volume and its release on August 5, 2002. The series contained only nine individual chapters.