Manga Profile: Desert Coral

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Desert Coral is a five-volume fantasy manga by Wataru Murayama, serialized in Mag Garden's Comic Blade magazine from 2002 to 2004 and released in English by Tokyopop in the mid-2000s. It follows Naoto Saki, an unassuming, daydreaming high schooler who has spent his life sleeping through classes and being chided by his childhood friend Chisato for never paying attention. What no one realizes is that the world he keeps slipping into when he closes his eyes is real.

A young, hot-tempered sorceress named Lusia, fighting alongside her partner Camu in a war-torn desert world built on the borrowed power of a dying god, attempts to summon a monstrous beast in a moment of desperation and accidentally pulls Naoto across the veil instead. Pressed into service by her band of magic users, who call themselves Desert Coral, Naoto is suddenly an actual presence in a place he had always assumed was a private dream, and his ordinary, sleepy life on Earth becomes the strange half-existence he has to return to every time he wakes up.

The manga balances broad shōnen-adventure fight scenes with a quieter, almost melancholy meditation on what it means to belong to two worlds at once. It ran for five tankōbon volumes before the story drew to a close in 2004. No anime adaptation of Desert Coral was ever produced.