Eccentric mangaka with red and white sailor stripes, Kazuo Umezu (also written Kazuo Umezz) died on October 28 at the age of 88, announced Tuesday, November 5, on X, the collaborators of his production house as well as NHK, the main public television Japanese.
Born in September 1936 in Koya, in Wakayama prefecture, the Japanese cartoonist published his first stories before he turned 20, in 1955, and decided early on that he would devote himself to horror manga, despite the lukewarmness of publishers. of the time. “Horror stimulated me because it was precisely a genre that was absolutely not represented and which I felt could capture a very young audience”confided the author to the specialized magazine Atom in 2017, in his house museum in Tokyo.
If it was his mother who instilled in him a taste for drawing, Kazuo Umezu got his appetite for the horrific register from his schoolmaster father who, when he was a child in the Nara region, told him tales and scary captions before going to bed. One story particularly marked him: that of the snake woman, which he considered to be the starting point of his career as a manga artist. He will feature her in a trilogy aimed at young girls, in the 1960s (The Snake Womaneditions Le lézard noir, 2017).
Pioneer and emblem of Japanese nightmarish graphic stories, Kazuo Umezu is particularly revered for his series published in the early 1970s, The School Taken Away (Glénat, 2004). In this initiatory disaster story, a modern educational establishment is projected into a very dark near future. « [Ses] Manga is inherently scary. Not because he seeks to frighten his readers, but rather because this author continues to live while keeping his fears intact.said the cultural critic Saburo Kawamoto of him, in the afterword to the French reissue of The School Taken Awayin 2021.
In his prolific and extremely varied bibliography served by a densely dark line, the author has also tried his hand with talent at science fiction (I am Shingo, The Black Lizard, 2017) and delighted little Japanese with his grotesque and sometimes scatophilic pranks performed by a little boy in Makoto-chan (The Black Lizard, 2023), one of his most popular titles in the Archipelago.
Kazuo Umezu left the drawing board in 1995 but happily continued to appear on TV sets across the country. A colorful and smiling pop icon, he was a source of inspiration for mangakas like Junji Ito but also contributed to shaping the “J-Horror” (“Japanese horror”) imagination in contemporary visual arts.
