Fumiko Takano

is a Japanese manga artist. She is considered to be one of the manga artists of the "New Wave" of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when she started as a (amateur) artist and then drew short stories with an unconventional style for magazines like June and Petit Flower. She was also a pioneer for female manga artists to publish outside of female-oriented publishing venues. Two of Takano's short story collections, Zettai Anzen Kamisori and Kiiroi Hon (2002), won awards. While she has a strong fan base in Japan, her work is less known internationally.

Life

Takano was born in the countryside of Niigata Prefecture in 1957. When she was nine years old, she had to spend three months in a hospital due to a problem with her kidney. She did not read many manga during her childhood, as none except few by Osamu Tezuka were available, and instead she read children's literature that she borrowed from the library. During high school, she became fascinated with the works of manga artist Moto Hagio

After graduating from high school, she moved to Tokyo and studied at a nursing school. She worked as a nurse for two years afterwards. During this time, she discovered COM magazine and the works of Shinji Nagashima and . She started drawing amateur manga, she participated in the Comiket and published her first short story Hana ("Flower") in 1977 in the zine Rakugakikan. One of the members of the zine became one of the founders of the new manga magazine June, which became crucial for the development of Boys' love manga. She continued publishing in June as well as anthologies around the Meikyū manga critic circle like Manga Kisōtengai. However, soon she also drew manga for commercial manga magazines like Petit Flower and Seventeen.

Her first short story collection Zettai Anzen Kamisori, named after her professional debut, was published by Hakusensha in 1982 in an unusual A5 format and with a cover design by Garo editor Minami Shinbo. The short story collection was a critical success. In the beginning of the 1980s, she was working as a secretary at the small publisher Kitansha. Her husband Kyoichiro Akiyama also worked for this publisher and edited, among others, some of Katsuhiro Otomo's short story collections. Kitansha published Takano's second short story collection Otomodachi in 1983. She drew two series, Lucky Jō-chan no Atarashii Shigoto (1986–1987) and Ruki-san (1988–1992). She also continued publishing short stories in the magazine Petit Flower until the early 1990s.

Style

Most of her manga are short stories rather than series. In her early work, she experimented with several different genres, among them samurai stories, social satires and love stories. Takano was one of the only women at the time who published manga outside of shōjo manga and josei manga. Scholar Jacqueline Berndt calls her a pioneer for women like Kyoko Okazaki, Erica Sakurazawa and Shungicu Uchida, who started publishing manga in erotic and alternative manga magazines in the 1980s. She received the Japan Cartoonists Association Award in 1982 for Zettai Anzen Kamisori and the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize in 2003 for Kiiroi Hon. Her manga Dimitri Tomkins was nominated for the Manga Taishō in 2015.

While she is relatively little known in the English-speaking world, some of her manga have been translated into French and German.

Works