Minetarō Mochizuki

is a Japanese manga artist.

Life and career He grew up in a single parent household and spent a lot of time alone at home, which is when he would start drawing on the shoji at home. He became an avid reader of the horror manga of Kazuo Umezu in elementary school.

Mochizuki graduated from Tokyo Design Gakuin. In 1984, he won the 11th Tetsuya Chiba Award for outstanding newcomer for the short story "Tadatada Honobo no Heart". He wanted to participate in the competition, because he respected Tetsuya Chiba and knew that he would be one of the judges.

He continued working for Young Magazine and was successful throughout the 1990s. He drew the horror manga Hauntress (1993) and the comedy Samehada Otoko to Momojiri Onna (1993–1994). One of his biggest successes came with Dragon Head, which he serialized in Young Magazine from 1994 until 1999. The manga follows a high school student whose train enters a tunnel and has an accident. When he manages to get out of the tunnel, he finds the world devastated and tries to unravel what happened.

In the 2000s, with Tōkyō Kaidō, his style became gradually more streamlined, with more attention to details and to body parts. He thought that limiting lines and choosing them well would make the series stronger. Ochanoma was adapted into a TV drama in 1993.

His work has been translated into English, Spanish, Italian , German , and Polish .

He won the Award for Excellence at the 4th Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize and the Award for General Manga at the 21st Kodansha Manga Award for Dragon Head. For Chiisakobee, he received an Excellence Award at the 17th Japan Media Arts Festival in 2013. The manga also won the Fauve D'Angoulême - Prix de la Série at the Angoulême International Comics Festival in 2017.

Works