Taku Tsumugi

is a Japanese manga artist. She published manga mostly in the 1980s and 1990s in the magazine Bessatsu Margaret. She was commercially successful; her series Hot Road (1986–1987) was one of the best-selling shōjo manga of the 1980s. Tsumugi developed a specific style within the visual and narrative grammar of shōjo manga to convey the emotional depth of her characters. Her storytelling techniques and play with form got attention by manga scholars and critic.

Life and career Tsumugi does usually not accept interviews and there is only little known about her personal life. She was born in Yokohama in 1964.

She was 17 years old, when she started her career as a professional manga artist. Her first published work was the short story "Machibito" ("Waiting"), which appeared in 1982 in the manga magazine Bessatsu Margaret. She became a regular contributor to the magazine and wrote short stories. From 1984 until 1985, she drew her first series with Tsukue wo Stage ni. which made it one of the best-selling shōjo manga of the 1980s. Her next series ("Without Blinking") was her longest; it ran from 1987 until 1990 and depicts the love story between two high school students in a small town.

Style

Storytelling She uses inner monologue in form of a stream of consciousness narration and her storytelling is considered documentary-like realistic. Tsumugi's storytelling has a focus on conveying emotions like pain, anxiety and the eventual healing from them. Themes like mental health and grief appear in Kanashimi no Machi ("Town of Sorrow), Manga scholar Rachel Thorn called her stories "sensitive" and "moving". Masanao Amano describes that Tsumugi often draws "the kind of situation when a person is so engrossed with what they are feeling internally, the world around them fails to have any kind of meaning." Thorn sees Tsumugi's focus on marginalized youth as an example of the development of shōjo manga in the 1980s, which at this point had lost some of its innocence when depicting relationships and identity.

While some of her manga like Hot Road are set in urban environments, other like Mabataki mo Sezu are set in the countryside.

Visuals While her aesthetic is, according to Rachel Thorn, within the "visual grammar of shōjo manga", Tsumugi is credited with creating new forms of expression within this aesthetic.

Her style is marked by placing empty space and, especially in Mabataki mo Sezu, vast landscapes in the center. There are hardly any close-ups of faces of characters in her work, often characters stand alone in a scenery. Critic Eiji Ōtsuka considers Tsumugi's experimentation with form in her work in the second half of the 1980s as the peak of a visual trend in shōjo manga that was established by the Year 24 Group in the 1970s. This trend weakened in the 1990s, as readers had problems understanding manga with a more experimental form and instead of this a visual trend called "flatness" emerged, as seen in the works of artists Kiriko Nananan, Erica Sakurazawa and Moyoco Anno. Musicians Yutaka Ozaki and Kishidan lead singer SHOW cite Tsumugi as an inspiration.

Her work from the 1980s continued to be read and re-printed, especially Hot Road. Around the 50th anniversary of Margaret and Bessatsu Margaret in 2013 and 2014, Hot Road was adapted into a live-action film, and the magazines You and Bessatsu Margaret published tributes to the series. In 2016, original pages of Hot Road were exhibited in Sendai.

Works The following is a list of Tsumugi's serialized works and short story collections as well as short stories that were analyzed in literature.