Barbara Ikai

Barbara Ikai (バルバラ異界) is a science fiction manga by Moto Hagio. It is set in a near-future Japan, and begins with a girl, Jyujo Aoba, who has been in a coma since she was nine years old, who was discovered next to her parents' bodies, with their hearts inside her stomach. To discover why she killed her parents, a specialist enters her coma dreams and finds that Jyujo is dreaming about and simultaneously creating the future. Barbara Ikai was serialised in Shinshokan's Flowers between September 2002 and August 2005 and is collected in 4 volumes. Barbara Ikai won the 2006 Nihon SF Taisho Award, and is the first manga that has won this award. It is published in Traditional Chinese by Sharp Point Press.

Development
Hagio "wanted to do something about meat" when she created the story for Barbara Ikai, and felt that the story "turned out kind of gross". Thorn felt that Hagio also used her interest in the right and left brain, and the origin of language. She read Noam Chomsky's Noam Chomsky on The Generative Enterprise, A discussion with Riny Hyybregts and Henk van Riemsdijk., Vilayanur S. Ramachandran's Phantoms in the Brain : Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind, and Andrew B. Newberg's Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief.