Ichiko Ima
Ichiko Ima is a Japanese manga artist.
She is known for her long-running horror manga series Hyakkiyakō Shō, serialized since 1995. Blending Japanese folklore with lyrical storytelling and subtle social critique, the series has been critically acclaimed. Ima's work is noted for its delicate visual style, gender-fluid characters, and feminist reinterpretations of horror. She is also an established author in the boys’ love genre.
Life and career
She was born in rural Toyama Prefecture. Her grandmother would tell her scary stories before going to bed. She started reading manga through her sister, discovering Kazuo Umezu's horror manga and Masako Watanabe's Garasu no Shiro at an early age. She mostly read shōjo manga and came to appreciate Moto Hagio as her favorite artist.She started drawing manga in elementary school.
In high school, she self-published her own doujinshi. While attending Tokyo Woman's Christian University, she was part of a manga club and learned techniques for drawing manga. After working as an assistant for other manga artists, she finally published her first work as a professional manga artist with the short story "My Beautiful Green Palace" in the magazine Comic Image in 1993.
She sold doujinshi at the Comitia convention and the editor of what would become the horror manga magazine Nemuki discovered her work in a pile of unsold doujinshi. In 1993, she published her first short story in a predecessor of the magazine, for which she would become a regular contributor.
Her biggest commercial and critical success is the series Hyakkiyakō Shō, which has run in Nemuki since 1995. The series has also been published by Asahi Sonorama in thirty-one volumes, which have been sold more than 5.8 million times.
She has also published several boys-love manga. She has regularly contributed to the boys-love magazine Hana Oto since the 1990s.
Style and themes
According to manga scholar Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase, Ima's manga, particularly her series Hyakkiyakō Shō, is marked by a blend of refined literary sensibility, folkloric depth, and subtle social critique. The series interweaves traditional Japanese supernatural motifs such as marebito, oni, and zashiki warashi with themes drawn from ethnology and classical literature, creating a form of modern yōkai storytelling that is both educational and emotionally resonant for the reader.Ima's work occupies a unique place in the shōjo horror genre by infusing horror with lyrical nostalgia, intellectual depth, and a distinctly feminist orientation. Her manga presents horror not through bloodshed or violence, but through melancholy, longing, and emotional complexity. Rather than relying on shock, her stories evoke a romanticized vision of Japan’s past. This nostalgic dimension, far from being regressive, provides a critical lens on modernity, gender roles, and alienation.
The main character Iijima Ritsu's blurred gender identity—he bears a unisex name and was raised as a girl—mirrors the manga’s broader thematic interest in subverting gender norms. The domestic sphere in Hyakkiyakō Shō is also unconventional: rather than a patriarchal stronghold, the family home is portrayed as a nurturing and egalitarian space. Ritsu’s family, including his female cousins with similar supernatural abilities as him, supports rather than represses his spiritual sensitivity, in contrast to the oppressive traditional family structures often featured in the ghost stories recounted by spirits. These ghost narratives frequently explore the suffering of women under inherited family obligations and supernatural contracts, as in tales involving non-human brides or deities betrayed by humans. Gender roles are repeatedly inverted, with women taking on the roles of seekers or rescuers, and male characters occupying emotionally vulnerable or passive positions. Ima’s narrative strategies resist conventional romantic and heroic tropes, instead presenting gender and identity as fluid and open to reconfiguration.
Ima's style evokes the visual and narrative structure of traditional Japanese painting, particularly the Hyakkiyakō emaki scrolls, offering episodic tales centered on marginalized spirits or creatures, often imbued with tragic or melancholic backstories. Junko Miura emphasizes the cold, still beauty of Ima's illustrations. The aesthetic, marked by delicate linework and muted tones, is not focused on action but on evoking mood and tension. This use of visual restraint is key to the series’ distinctive atmosphere, making the supernatural feel both intimate and unsettling. Miura aligns her ability to draw atmosphere with other artists like Mariko Iwadate and notes her ability to portray invisible presences and lingering spirits.
Miura also highlights the use of narrative structure and foreshadowing in Ima's storytelling. Although the stories may at first seem disjointed or illogical, they often resolve with satisfying coherence, similar to the denouement in a mystery novel. This narrative technique draws readers into a world where logic operates under supernatural terms, requiring emotional rather than purely rational engagement.
Legacy
Hyakkiyakō Shō was critically acclaimed. The series was awarded a Excellence Award at the 2006 Japan [Media Arts Festival] and was nominated for the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize in 2005.The series has gained some international attention. The first six volumes of the manga have been translated into French and it is being published in Italian. An English translation, titled Beyond Twilight, was announced by Aurora Publishing in 2010, but it was never released due to the publisher's closure.