Kazuo Umezu

Kazuo Umezu or Kazuo Umezz (楳図 かずお, Umezu Kazuo, birth name 楳図一雄; September 3, 1936 – October 28, 2024) was a Japanese manga artist, musician and actor. Starting his career in the 1950s, he is among the most famous artists of horror manga and has been vital for its development, considered the "god of horror manga". In 1960s shōjo manga like Reptilia, he broke the industry's conventions by combining the aesthetics of the commercial manga industry with gruesome visual imagery inspired by Japanese folktales, which created a boom of horror manga and influenced manga artists of following generations. He created successful manga series such as The Drifting Classroom, Makoto-chan and My Name Is Shingo, until he retired from drawing manga in the mid 1990s. He was a public figure in Japan, known for wearing red-and-white-striped shirts and doing his signature "Gwash" hand gesture.
Umezu was born on September 3, 1936, in Kōya, Wakayama Prefecture, but raised in the mountainous Gojō, Nara Prefecture. His mother motivated him to start drawing when he was seven years old. His father would tell him local legends about ghost and snake women before going to bed. He was inspired to start drawing manga by reading Osamu Tezuka's Shin Takarajima in fifth grade. He was part of a drawing circle with others called "Kaiman Club".
In 1955, he published his first manga at the age of 18 with Mori no Kyōdai based on the fairytale Hansel and Gretel with the kashihon publisher Tomo Book. He would soon shift towards the gekiga movement and publish manga in the kashi-hon industry in Osaka of the time, which would allow him more freedom than serializing his manga in magazines. His specialty was to include paranormal elements in his stories. At the same time, he also started working on shōjo manga; he published in the magazine Shōjo Book and the kashi-hon anthology Niji.
After moving to Tokyo in 1963 due to the decline of the kashihon industry, he developed his specific style, which blended the aesthetics of shōjo manga with grotesque horror visuals and broke with conventions of shōjo manga at the time. Horror manga like Nekome no Shōjo and Reptilia became a hit in the commercial shōjo manga magazine Shōjo Friend in the mid 1960s.
In the late 1960s, he also started publishing in shōnen manga magazines and he switched publishing houses, from Kodansha to Shogakukan, when a new editor asked him to draw something other than horror manga. He became a well established author and was at times working at up to five serials at the same time. In 1974 he won the 20th Shogakukan Manga Award for his series The Drifting Classroom about a school including its schoolchildren and teachers being teleported into an alternate post-apocalyptic universe.
In 1975, Umezu started becoming a public figure also apart from creating manga. He recorded songs based on his horror manga and released them as the solo album Yami no Album.
His comedy manga Makoto-chan, which he published from 1976 to 1981 in Weekly Shōnen Sunday, became a hit. The hand gesture "Gwash" from the manga became Umezu's own trademark hand gesture as well in public.
In the 1980s and 1990s, he focused on science fiction manga depicting a near future like My Name Is Shingo and Fourteen.
In 1995, he had to retire from regular publishing due to tendinitis after finishing Fourteen. He then became even more of a public figure, appearing regularly on TV in a red and white striped shirt. He was also famous for the architecture of his candy-striped home in Kichijōji, inspired by his Makoto-chan series. In 2011, he released a second music album with his songs.
In 2018 he was awarded the Prize for Inheritance at the Angoulême International Comics Festival for the French translation of My Name Is Shingo. This was the second prize awarded to him throughout his career and Umezu had previously been unhappy about the amount of recognition he had gotten for his work. The award motivated him to start working again and he produced a series of 101 paintings based on My Name Is Shingo, which were exhibited for the first time in 2022 and were his first new work in 27 years.
In July 2024, Umezu was hospitalized after collapsing at his home in Kichijōji, Tokyo. He was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer, but did not undergo surgery, remaining in hospice care from September. On November 5, 2024, Shogakukan announced that Umezu died on October 28. He was 88. A private funeral was held by his family and close friends. Umezu was planning a new work prior to his death.
His work is influenced by Japanese folklore. Manga artist and critic Sakumi Yoshino explains that his horror manga is related to religion in Japan, as monsters and demons are not considered completely evil, and Umezu wants readers to sometimes also feel compassion for the monsters in his works.
Many of his manga feature intergenerational conflict between children and adults. Umezu initially focused on this topic as he found that relationships between mothers and children in shōjo manga in the early 1960s were portrayed only as caring, never as scary. His manga Reptilia depicts an intense conflict between a schoolgirl and her sick mother, who turns out to be a snake woman when she visits her in hospital. Manga scholar Tsuchiya Dollase compares this character with the Jungian "Terrible Mother". The children of the deserted school in The Drifting Classroom are immediately betrayed by their teachers and need to fight for their survival. In My Name Is Shingo, children are the only ones able to communicate with and have an emotional connection with an AI computer. Umezu explained that he himself finds the world of children more relatable, as children are much more open and adaptable to illogical thinking: "I’m writing about myself in a way. I don’t want to become an adult and 'grow up.'"
His works inspired a new generation of horror manga artists. Junji Ito, Toru Yamazaki and Minetarō Mochizuki cite him as one of their biggest influences and Kanako Inuki got her career start in a magazine compiled by him. Rumiko Takahashi briefly worked as an assistant for him, while he was working on Makoto-chan. His reputation gave him the nickname "god of horror manga" (ホラーまんがの神様) in Japanese media.
Umezu's manga broke with the norms of the commercial manga industry at the time that he started publishing in major magazines in the mid 1960s and created a boom around horror manga in the late 1960s. Tsuchiya Dollase writes: "The monstrous mothers must certainly have scared the audience; at the same time, however, the torture of the pretty but superficial heroines by these horrifying mothers must have given the same audience a certain pleasure."
Umezu regularly received complaint letters from parents in the beginning of his career due to his horror visuals and also editors of magazines would ask him to scale down the violence in his imagery. He remarks in an interview: "I was protested but never boycotted. I considered such criticism to be a form of praise." He was critical of watering down horror elements: "Old Japanese folk stories and fairy tales could be unflinchingly brutal. They come from a time when tragedy and carnage was an everyday part of life. Now we have people calling to water them down, which essentially whitewashes history. It’s insulting to the memory of those who suffered to bring us these stories."
Besides his impact on the development of horror manga, scholar Tomoko Yamada counts Umezu as one of the shōjo manga artists in the 1950s who contributed to the development of ballet manga with his series Haha Yobu Koe (1958) and Maboroshi Shōjo (1959).
In 2019, Umezu received the Commissioner for Cultural Affairs award from the Agency for Cultural Affairs. It is an award for "individuals who have made distinguished accomplishment in artistic and cultural activities". It is rarely awarded to people in the manga industry.
In 2016, his manga My Name Is Shingo was adapted into a musical. It stars Mitsuki Takahata and Mugi Kadowaki as the lead characters and is directed and choreographed by Philippe Decouflé.