Millennium Actress

AD 1999, the Earth was in a critical situation; a planet Lar Metal was approaching to the Earth. Meanwhile, Yukino Yayoi was heard about Lar Metal from Dr. Amamori of Tokyo Observatory. She was a junior high school teacher, but she also worked for Dr. Amamori who appreciated her astronomical knowledge. Actually Yukino Yayoi was Queen Millennia who had come from Lar Metal 1000 years before, and she had been watching human beings since then. Soon, numerous meteors fell on the Earth, and people were in panic. In this catastrophe, Hajime, who was a student of Yayoi, came to help Yayoi. Yayoi invited him into a big cave under the ground.

The year is 1999. Amamori Hajime is just a normal, everyday elementary school student, trying to study and hanging out with his crazy pals. But then one day as his father is testing a piece of equipment he has been working on, something causes it to blow up, taking the house with it! Now orphaned, Hajime is taken in by his uncle, who is an astronomer. There at his uncle's observatory, he meets a girl he's seen before and developed somewhat of a crush on. He finds out her name is Yukino Yayoi, and her parents run a ramen shop in town. But even better than that, she's his uncle's assistant! What luck! But Yayoi isn't exactly what she seems. There is a reason she helps out Amamori-san at the observatory. She is the Millennial Queen (Sen-Nen Joou), specially chosen by her home planet, LaMetal, to go to Earth and help prepare for the possible annihilation of the planet. What will cause this disaster? LaMetal has an extremely elliptical orbit, which sends it very, very near Earth every 1000 years. When it gets close enough, the earth reacts, causing all sorts of natural disasters. Although she was chosen with the idea of protecting LaMetal in mind, her personal plan is to evacuate as many humans as she can to LaMetal, so if their planet is destroyed, they will survive. However, there is one person who strives to stop her plan, the head of the Millennial Theives. Why does he want to stop Yayoi? And how does he know about the Millennial Queen, anyway?

In an alternate timeline, Japan was divided after losing World War II: Hokkaido was annexed by "Union" while Honshu and other southern islands were under US sovereignty. A gigantic yet mysterious tower was constructed at Hokkaido and could be seen clearly from Aomori (the northernmost prefecture of Honshu) across Tsugaru Strait. In the summer of 1996, three 9th-graders had made a promise that one day they'll build an aircraft and unravel the tower's mystery, but their project was abandoned after the girl, Sayuri Sawatari, began experiencing sleeping sickness and transferred to Tokyo for better treatment. Three years later, Hiroki Fujisawa accidentally found out that Sayuri had been in a coma since then, and he asked Takuya Shirakawa to help him finding a way to revive her. What they don't know yet is that Sayuri's unconsciousness is somehow linked with secrets of the tower and the world.

The story is set in 1955 in Kokuga, Hofu City, Yamaguchi Prefecture. One thousand years ago it was the site of the ancient capital, Suo no Kuni, and traces of the Heian Period (year 794-1185) are passed down to us in the form of ruins and historical place names. The protagonist is Shinko, a third grade elementary school student, who was born and raised in one of the town's venerable families. She is a little girl whose characteristic is a strange curl on her forehead (she calls it her "Mai Mai"), and her love for playing in the fields. On the other hand, her secret joy is to imagine and to daydream about the world of one thousand years ago. Her fantasies travel far into the days of the Heian Period… One day, a girl called Kiiko transfers from Tokyo and enters Shinko's class. This girl from the big city has difficulty feeling at home in this small town, but gradually her friendship with Shinko deepens. Before long, the two of them become engulfed in a strange incident of one thousand years earlier...?!