Chief Assistant to the Rose Queen
Drawing Another Woman's Love Stories

About this book:

Maya Shinohara has ink-stained fingers, a mastery of the dip pen, and a portfolio that just landed her the interview of a lifetime: Chief Assistant to the Rose Queen, the reclusive legend behind Japan's most beloved shōjo manga. But Studio Rosa isn't the gilded palace Maya imagined—it's a crumbling Victorian house in Kichijōji where deadlines are measured in sleepless nights, lace collars must be cross-hatched by hand, and the Queen herself is a fifty-something woman in an ink-splattered apron who tests recruits with a stopwatch and a merciless eye.

Enter Ren Subaru: sharp-suited editor, the Queen's son, and the only person who brings Maya tea instead of terror. As Maya races to ink twenty-eight pages of Victorian heartbreak in seventy-two hours, she finds herself caught between the Queen's exacting legacy and Ren's quiet, steady warmth. Every stroke of her pen pulls her deeper into a world where rain must have emotional weight, backgrounds breathe history, and the line between drawing a love story and living one blurs with every midnight deadline.

*Chief Assistant to the Rose Queen* is a love letter to analog artistry and the messy, magnificent business of making manga—a slow-burn workplace romance where the heroine draws other people's happy endings while wondering if she's brave enough to ink her own.