The Heart of Thomas

The Heart of Thomas
The cover of the second volume, featuring Erich (left), Oskar (center), and Juli (right)
トーマの心臓 (Tōma no Shinzō)
Genre	Bildungsroman[1] Shōnen-ai[2]
Created by	Moto Hagio
Manga
Written by	Moto Hagio
Published by	Shogakukan
English publisher	NA: Fantagraphics Books
Imprint	Flower Comics
Magazine	Shūkan Shōjo Comic
Demographic	Shōjo
Original run	May 5, 1974 – December 22, 1974
Volumes	3 (1 in North America)
Sequels & related works
The November Gymnasium (1971) By the Lake (1976) The Visitor (1980)
Adaptations
Summer Vacation 1999 (film, 1988) The Heart of Thomas (stage play, 1996) Lost Heart for Thoma (novel, 2009)

The Heart of Thomas (Japanese: トーマの心臓, Hepburn: Tōma no Shinzō) is a 1974 Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Moto Hagio. Originally serialized in Shūkan Shōjo Comic, a weekly manga magazine publishing shōjo manga (manga aimed at young and adolescent women), the series follows the events at a German all-boys gymnasium following the suicide of student Thomas Werner. Hagio drew inspiration for the series from the novels of Hermann Hesse, especially Demian (1919); the Bildungsroman genre; and the 1964 film Les amitiés particulières. It is one of the earliest works of shōnen-ai, a genre of male-male romance manga aimed at a female audience.

The Heart of Thomas was developed and published during a period of immense change and upheaval for shōjo manga as a medium, characterized by the emergence of new aesthetic styles and more narratively complex stories. This change came to be embodied by a new generation of shōjo manga artists collectively referred to as the Year 24 Group, of which Hagio was a member. Hagio originally developed the series as a personal project that she did not expect would ever be published. After changing publishing houses from Kodansha to Shogakukan in 1971, Hagio published a loosely-adapted one-shot (standalone single chapter) version of The Heart of Thomas titled The November Gymnasium (11月のギムナジウム, Jūichigatsu no Gimunajiumu) before publishing the full series in 1974.

While The Heart of Thomas was initially poorly received by readers, by the end of its serialization it was among the most popular series in Shūkan Shōjo Comic. It significantly influenced shōjo manga as a medium, with many of the stylistic and narrative hallmarks of the series becoming standard tropes of the genre. The series has attracted considerable scholarly interest both in Japan and internationally, and has been adapted into a film, a stage play, and a novel. An English-language translation of The Heart of Thomas, translated by Rachel Thorn, was published by Fantagraphics Books in 2013.