Moto Hagio
In her youth, Moto Hagio disliked stories featuring vampires, as they were depicted as "villains who attack human beings." In 1962, the manga artist Shotaro Ishinomori published the one-shot (single-chapter) manga "Mist, Roses and Stars", a science fiction story about the tragic life of a vampire girl, in the manga magazine "Shōjo Club". Hagio became inspired by the manga, and began to conceive of her own "beautiful vampire story" about a vampire who "long[s] to return to a normal human existence" but is "rejected by humanity."