Daisuke Igarashi

is a Japanese manga artist. Active since the 1990s, he is known for his detailed depictions of nature in combination with spiritual or surreal themes. Manga series like Witches and Children of the Sea have been critically acclaimed and translated into several languages.

Life and career Igarashi was born in Saitama in the suburbs of Tokyo. As a child, he would often spend time in a grove of in Saitama, consisting of trees that were several hundreds of years old. He started drawing, because he wanted to depict the beauty of these trees. where he studied oil painting from 1989 on. He was classmates with fellow manga artist Hiroaki Samura, but the two of them only properly met later while working for the same manga magazine. After graduating, he travelled through Japan and sketched landscapes that he saw.

In 2003 he started working for other publishers than Kodansha. In Shogakukan's then new manga magazine Monthly Ikki, he published the series Witches until 2004. From 2006 until 2011 he drew Children of the Sea for the same magazine. Both works received awards and Children of the Sea was adapted into an anime film in 2019 by Studio 4°C. Under Shogakukan's Ikki Comics imprint, he published the two-volume series Saru in 2010 as a collaboration with novelist Kōtarō Isaka, who published the novel SOS no Saru at the same time, with the novel and the manga referencing each other.

He also drew smaller work for publishers other than Kodansha and Shogakukan. In 2005, French comic artist Frédéric Boilet invited him to create a short story about Iwate Prefecture and the cover illustration for the French-Japanese anthology Japan: As Viewed by 17 Creators. While growing up, he didn't live by the seaside and his inspiration mostly come from vacation in Okinawa. After having started to work on the manga, he himself moved from the mountains to the seaside.

Many of his works deal with spiritual themes and folklore. For Witches, he did research around Japanese festivals that have similarities all across Japan and mythology that has similarities all across the world. He states: "Maybe that, a long time ago, there was a sort of community that used to share a similar way of thinking, across the world."

Visual style and drawing process Most of Igarashi's human characters are often drawn in a simple and sketched way in order to differentiate them from detailed backgrounds and accounts of nature. He has claimed that he is much less interested in depicting humans than nature. The manga artist Yuki Urushibara cites him as an inspiration.

Several of his manga have been translated into other languages, among them English, Korean, French, Italian, Spanish, Czech Polish and Serbian.

For his work, Igarashi has received the following awards and nominations:

Works