Kyouko Hikawa is a Japanese manga artist known primarily for her long-running fantasy series From Far Away. Born on February 15 in Osaka Prefecture, she made her professional debut in 1979 with the short story Akikaze Yurete, published in a supplement issue of the shojo manga magazine LaLa. Her early works included romance stories such as the Chizumi & Fujiomi series, which helped establish her gentle and sincere narrative style. Over the following decade, she continued to produce a steady stream of shorter works before launching her first major serialized hit, The Wilderness Angel, in 1983, followed by two sequels. This series, set in the American West with a young female protagonist, allowed her to refine her clean artistic approach and character-driven storytelling.

Hikawa is best known for From Far Away, also known as Kanata Kara, which she wrote and illustrated from 1993 to 2003. The manga was serialized in LaLa and collected into fourteen volumes. The story follows a high school girl who is unexpectedly transported to a strange fantasy world and befriends a warrior who harbors a terrible destructive power. The series was licensed and published in English by Viz Media and received the Seiun Award for Best Science Fiction Comic in 2004. Following this success, Hikawa shifted to historical fantasy with Otogimoyou Ayanishiki, which debuted in 2005 and draws on Japanese folklore and the Heian period for its atmosphere and plot. She later created the series Miriam, which returned to a western setting.

Throughout her career, Hikawa has been associated with the publisher Hakusensha and the magazine LaLa, where the majority of her work has appeared. Her art is characterized by clean lines, expressive character work, and a strong command of visual pacing and page composition. Her narratives often focus on the quiet development of relationships between protagonists who are thrown together by circumstance, building romantic tension gradually through trust and shared trials. From Far Away is frequently cited as an influential title in the shojo isekai genre, a subgenre of fantasy manga in which an ordinary person is transported to another world, and it remains her most significant work. While not an especially prolific artist, she has maintained a consistent presence in the industry since the late 1970s, and her later titles, including Otogimoyou Ayanishiki, have continued to reach readers through collected editions.