Rereading Kazuo Umezu, On Fear and a Fractured World
Kazuo Umezu was born on September 3, 1936, in Koya, Wakayama Prefecture, and was raised in the mountain area of Gojo, Nara Prefecture. His father often told him local legends about ghosts and snake women before sleep, while his mother encouraged him to draw from the age of seven. A childhood steeped in Japanese folklore became an important foundation for the aesthetic of his later work.
His encounter with the manga New Treasure Island, or Shin Takarajima by Osamu Tezuka, in the fifth grade inspired him to take manga seriously. In 1955, at the age of eighteen, Umezu published his first manga through the kashi hon publisher Tomo Book. Mori no Kyōdai adapted Hansel and Gretel in the cartoon style common at the time. The kashi hon system, a book rental network that grew after the war, offered a looser working space than magazines. There he became interested in gekiga, underground manga that was described as more cinematic for adult readers. Umezu inserted supernatural elements into the hard stories he was making. From this point, the direction of his work began to take shape.
In the mid 1960s, he moved to Tokyo. He combined shōjo manga aesthetics with horror imagery drawn from Japanese folklore. Works such as Cat Eyed Boy and Reptilia in Shōjo Friend showed readers’ responses to this approach. Umezu was skeptical of the image of the mother child relationship that had long appeared as uniformly affectionate. From that suspicion came Reptilia, a story about a schoolgirl and her ill mother, who is later revealed to be a snake woman in the hospital. The story was rooted in Okameike Densetsu, which his father had once told him.
In 1961, Umezu used the term kyōfu manga, fear manga, to distinguish his work from kaiki manga, weird manga, which emphasized grotesque imagery. For him, the important kind of fear was something that still worked even when it could not be seen. His key transitional work, The Moment the Mouth Splits to the Ears from 1962, became the first manga to be openly labeled kyōfu manga.
His visual language had a consistent trait. He often used close ups of characters’ eyes from tight and tilted angles. This technique combined the interiority common in shōjo manga with expressions of fear and disgust. These close ups slowed the pace of the story and pressed readers into moments of psychological realization, or into a character’s hatred of the self.
Umezu’s way of thinking was simple. Something could feel frightening or funny depending on the viewer’s position. “If you are the one being chased, it is horror. If you are the one chasing, it is a gag,” he said. This perspective became a thread running through his works from 1968 to 1973, including the series Scary Book. From there emerged a relativism that spread into basic themes such as good and evil, beautiful and ugly, true and false. His stories often reveal the damaged moral interior of characters who appear respectable, with horror arising from their own awareness.
Recurring themes include intergenerational conflict, domestic violence, and the fragility of the family. Umezu’s stories revolve around the terror that a family can turn into a space of violence, or that it has contained it from the start. For Umezu, children and women are the groups most often victimized, and therefore become fitting hosts for fear itself.
Throughout his career, he received protest letters from parents and pressure from editors to reduce violence. He responded without much drama. He said he was never boycotted, and he took criticism as a sign that his work was functioning. In an interview with Tokyo Scum Brigade, he rejected the idea of softening folklore. In his view, these stories were born in times when tragedy and massacre were part of life, and whitening them was the same as erasing the memory of that suffering. He also mentioned the most important lesson he took from Tezuka, that works for children do not need to be simplified or shielded from complex themes.
In 1982, Umezu began a project that moved away from horror. Watashi wa Shingo was serialized in Big Comic Spirits until 1986. He wanted to reduce the horror element and focus the story on consciousness, love, and metaphysics. The story follows Satoru Kondo and Marin Yamamoto, two twelve year olds who meet during a factory visit and see a new industrial robot. They return to the factory at night, meet a robot named Monroe, then teach it katakana and input data about themselves. The robot chooses the name Shingo, taking one character from each of their parents’ names. The word watashi in the title signals a neutral and innocent identity.
Shingo evolves and travels to Europe to look for Marin. He uses his life energy to restore the people he meets, and this weakens him. Machines attack him. He is damaged and loses his memory. In the end, he is only able to write two characters, “A” and “I”, which can be read as “love” or “I”. Satoru, now grown, does not recognize the message. The inventors gather Shingo’s parts and rebuild Monroe without finding a soul. The robot is then displayed as an example of an industrial machine.
In 2018, Watashi wa Shingo received the Heritage Award at the Angoulême International Comics Festival, an award for comics considered worthy of preservation. The award encouraged Umezu to work again after twenty seven years of stopping because of tendinitis. He created 101 paintings based on Watashi wa Shingo and exhibited them in 2022. In an interview with TOKION, he said, “At some point, I realized that the task of a manga artist is to draw what will happen next.”
“Those paintings depict a kind of competition between robots and humans. I simply thought that humans would decline as robots advance because they will not be able to keep up. I feel people are convinced that everything must and will progress. They do not think about decline,” he said.
In July 2024, he was hospitalized after falling at his home in Kichijōji, Tokyo, and was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer. He was still talking about plans for new work. He told The Japan News that he wanted to make a story that would not submit to quantum computers. Umezu died on October 28, 2024, at the age of eighty eight.
His influence is clear in Junji Ito. Ito was four or five years old when he first read Umezu’s horror manga with his older siblings. In an interview with RetroFuturista, he called Umezu’s manga his first horror reading. He said Umezu shaped his way of storytelling. In 1987, Ito sent a story to Monthly Halloween and received a special mention at the Kazuo Umezu Prize, with Umezu as one of the judges. That work developed into Tomie. The influence spread further. Rumiko Takahashi once worked as his assistant. Kanako Inuki named Reptilia as her favorite horror manga, an experience she had since kindergarten.
All of this began with a mountain child who grew up with folklore, who learned that fear often comes from what is closest. From his father’s stories about snake women, he built a visual language that has now become a foundation for the next generation of manga artists.
