Hiroshi Masumura

is a Japanese manga artist. He is best known for his adaptations of Kenji Miyazawa's children novels, including his work on the anime film Night on the Galactic Railroad, and for several manga series set in the fantasy universe Atagoul. Several of his manga feature anthropomorphic cats as protagonists.

Career Masumura started his career in 1973 at the age of 21, when he was the runner-up in the 5th Tezuka Award and subsequently got to publish his debut work Kiri ni musebu yoru in Weekly Shōnen Jump, still using the kanji version of his name (増村博) rather than the hiragana one he would subsequently use. In 1975, he published a few short stories in the alternative manga magazine Garo,

Starting from 1983, Masumura has adapted several stories by Kenji Miyazawa into manga.

The world-building of Atagoul is influenced by Kenji Miyazawa's fantasy world of Itahov,

Masumura is counted as one of the artists of the New Wave in manga in the late 1970s and 1980s, which highlighted artists that transcended the traditional gendered categories of shōjo manga and shōnen manga.

Legacy and awards

His work has been exhibited several times in art museums in Japan, among them solo exhibitions at Hachiōji Yume Art Museum in Tokyo in 2007, and Hachioji Yume Art Museum in 2023. A public transport bus in his hometown of Yonezawa features characters from Atagoul.

After the popularity of the 1985 adaptation of Night on the Galactic Railroad, other anime films based on Miyazawa's work also used character design inspired by Masumura, like Spring and Chaos (1996, directed by Shōji Kawamori) and The Life of Budori Gusuko (2012, also directed by Gisaburō Sugii). Atagoul was adapted into an CG-animated short released in 2004.

His manga have not been translated into English. However, the first four volumes of Atagoul wa Neko no Mori have been translated into French in 2015.

Besides the Tezuka Award in 1973, Masumura received the following awards: Japan Cartoonists Association Award 1997: Grand Prize for Atagoul Tamatebako Itahov Prize 2001

Works Serializations