Akiko Higashimura

is a Japanese manga artist.

Life and career Higashimura was born in 1975 in Kushima in Miyazaki Prefecture. During her childhood, she moved frequently due to her father's job, relocating five times during elementary school and twice during junior high. From a young age, she enjoyed drawing and was supported by her parents in her artistic interests. Influenced broadly by shōjo manga of the 1980s, she aspired to become a manga artist from early on, though she did not pursue this dream professionally until adulthood.

She debuted as a professional manga artist in the now-defunct manga magazine Bouquet Deluxe in 1999 with the short story . Her first serialized work was Kisekae Yuka-chan (2001), published in the shōjo magazine Cookie. The series centered around a fashion-loving sixth-grade girl, a choice Higashimura made due to her initial discomfort with writing romance, despite it being a hallmark of the shōjo genre.

One of her breakout hits was Mama wa Tenparist, an autobiographical child-rearing manga that began in 2007 in the josei magazine Chorus. The series documents her life with her toddler son and became an unexpected hit, selling over one million copies.

In 2006, she began serializing Himawari: Kenichi Legend in the seinen magazine Morning, marking her foray into male-targeted publications and launching a dual-career track in both shōjo/josei and seinen magazines.

Style and themes

Working method Higashimura is renowned for her extraordinary productivity. Since the mid-2000s, she has consistently maintained multiple serializations at once, producing roughly 100 pages of manga every month for over a decade. At one point in 2007, she was working on three episodes of Himawari, one of Kisekae Yuka-chan, three of Mama wa Tenparist, two one-shots, and various smaller assignments in a single summer. in 2009 for Mama wa Tenparist, in 2010 for Princess Jellyfish, in 2011 for , and in 2016 and 2017 for Tokyo Tarareba Girls. In 2010, she won the 34th Kodansha Manga Award for Best Manga for Princess Jellyfish. In 2015, she won both the 8th Manga Taishō and the Grand Prize at the 19th Japan Media Arts Festival for Blank Canvas: My So-Called Artist's Journey. In 2019, she won the Eisner Award for Best U.S. Edition of International Material—Asia for Tokyo Tarareba Girls.

Works

(1999) Its serialization was suspended for four years following the publication of the July 2008 issue. Higashimura returned with a new chapter in the July 2012 issue on May 26, 2012; the chapter's final page stated that would continue, despite a previous report that the 2012 chapter would probably be the series finale. (2006–2010, Kodansha) (2007–2011, Shueisha) (2008–2017, Kodansha) (2010–2012, Kodansha) (2011–2015, Shueisha) (2013–2014, Kodansha) (2014–2017, Kodansha) (2015–present, Shueisha) (2015, Kodansha, suspended) (2015–2020, Shogakukan) (2017–2019, Bungeishunjū) (2017–2018, Kodansha) (2018–2021, with Mariko Hayashi, Shueisha) (2018, Kodansha) (2019–2021, Kodansha) (2019, Shogakukan) (2020–present, Piccoma)