Sakumi Yoshino

Sakumi Yoshino (吉野朔実, Yoshino Sakumi, February 19, 1959 – April 20, 2016) was a Japanese manga artist and literary critic. She became known for her shōjo manga in Bouquet magazine in the 1980s and 1990s. In the late 1990s, she also started drawing seinen manga and publishing essays on film, manga and literature.

Yoshino was born in 1959 in Osaka. She developed a passion for drawing while in elementary school and became an avid manga reader, becoming especially fond of shōjo manga and artists from the Year 24 Group such as Moto Hagio, Ryoko Yamagishi and Yumiko Oshima.^[1] Initially, Yoshino did not aspire to become a manga artist or work for a company after high school. When a classmate of hers began a career as a professional manga artist, however, she decided to give it a try as well.^[2]

Yoshino had an independent start in the industry, occasionally providing temporary assistance to other manga artists but not regularly, and did not attend art school.^[3] Her first work as a professional manga artist was the short story "Utsu Yori Sō ga Yoroshii no!", which appeared in the January 1980 issue of Bouquet.^[4][5] A few years into her career, she developed a passion for drawing rather than just seeing it as a way to make ends meet and moved to Tokyo to fully focus on her career in 1985.^[6] She was one of the most prominent artists working for Bouquet in the 1980s and 1990s, creating series such as Shōnen wa Kōya wo Mezasu and Juliet no Tamago for the magazine.

When the editorial team of Bouquet changed and the magazine was eventually shut down at the end of the 1990s, Yoshino switched from Shueisha to publishing with Shogakukan. With Shogakukan, she drew short stories and series both for the magazine Petit Flower and its successor Flowers, both of which had a similar target group of young women as the magazine she previously worked with, and the seinen manga magazine Big Comic Spirits, which had adult men as its main target group. In 2002, she created the cover illustration for the first issue of Flowers.^[7] She also became an active film and literature critic, publishing essays and predictions of horse racing.^[7] Her book-related essay manga Yoshino Sakumi Gekijō ran for 20 years in a literary magazine.

In 2003, Yoshino approached the seinen magazine Monthly Ikki, which then had recently become a standalone monthly magazine, to draw the series Period. She felt that Monthly Ikki would allow her to write what she wanted as the manga revolved around the theme of violence in different forms.^[8]

Yoshino died in 2016 at the age of 57 due to illness. A few days after her death, the June issue of Flowers published her short story "Itsuka Midori no Hanataba ni" posthumously and an interview with her as part of the magazine's 15th anniversary.^[9]

Yoshino considers manga artists Yumiko Oshima and Moto Hagio as her greatest influences.^[7] Similar to these two artists, mother-daughter relationships are a recurring theme for Yoshino.^[10]: 246

Yoshino preferred drawing short stories and episodic series such as Itaike na Hitomi over continuous series as she was fatigued by committing to character development and solving issues coming up in the story line. Her preference for short stories was also due to their capacity to incorporate sudden and violent breaks in storytelling, which allowed her to conclude a manga abruptly the need for extensive justification.^[3]

While her work for female readers features an irregular panel layout, she arranges panels in separate squares in her work for seinen magazines.^[11]

Yoshino's work has been translated into Chinese and Korean^[12] and will be translated into French in 2024.^[13] Her short story Kioku no Gihō was adapted into a live-action film in 2020.^[6]