Shūzō Oshimi


Shūzō Oshimi is a Japanese manga artist and writer based in Tokyo who publishes works primarily for Kodansha. He made his debut with Superfly in Kodansha's Monthly Shōnen Magazine. He is best known for his manga Drifting Net Cafe, The Flowers of Evil, Happiness, and Blood on the Tracks. His works have been adapted into many different media including television drama, anime, and live action film. In 2001, he won the Tetsuya Chiba Award.
Oshimi is particularly known to write stories to his manga that reflect his own experiences, often centered around gender, puberty or psychosexual development, and other coming-of-age themes that reflect adolescence.
𝕏 shuzo_oshimi

Early life

Oshimi was born on March 19, 1981. His childhood hometown was in the countryside of Kiryu, Gunma, which also served as the setting of his manga The Flowers of Evil. While growing up there, the main places he would visit were the riverbank, the stairs of his junior high school, and the bookstore.

Career

Oshimi debuted with the one-shot manga Superfly in Kodansha's Monthly Shōnen Magazine. He would go on to start his first series Avant-Garde Yumeko in the magazine. His works have been adapted into many different media, with Drifting Net Café and Inside Mari into television dramas, The Flowers of Evil into an anime, and Sweet Poolside into a live action film. In 2001, he won the Tetsuya Chiba Award.

Influences

In his childhood Oshimi would read modernist poems from authors like Sakutarō Hagiwara and Mitsuharu Kaneko. Oshimi also thought that surrealist artists like André Breton, Max Ernst, and Paul Delvaux were cool. His favorite artist is Redon, and he also likes Francisco Goya. In his youth, Oshimi heavily identified with the protagonist of Tetsu Adachi's Song of Cherry Blossoms and it would later influence his manga The Flowers of Evil.

Themes

Oshimi's narrative style consists of stories presenting quirky, clumsy main characters, usually a boy and a girl couple, and how their relationship unfolds as the narrative progresses. He also presents uncommon, uncomfortable and, sometimes, disturbing situations through which the protagonists take part. This narrative style has been seen in all of the author's works, including his best-known work, The Flowers of Evil.
Oshimi likes to explore themes such as coming-of-age and perversion, combined with his experiences in his youth. He thinks that the end of adolescence is hard to define, and is up to an individual to discover, such as in The Flowers of Evil. He also believes that perversion is a characteristic of every person that is surrounded by stigma which he wants people to think about. Oshimi also wants to explore the female perspective in his gender-bender manga Inside Mari, because to him, girls are "half of the world".

Works