The eccentric mangaka with red and white sailor stripes, Kazuo Umezu (also spelled Kazuo Umezz) died on October 28 at the age of 88, announced on Tuesday, November 5 to X, the collaborators of his production company as well as NHK, the main Japanese public. television.
Born in September 1936 in Koya, Wakayama prefecture, the Japanese cartoonist published his first stories before turning 20, in 1955, and decided from the beginning to dedicate himself to horror manga despite the lukewarmness of the publishers. time. “Horror stimulated me because it was precisely a genre that was not represented at all and that I felt could capture a very young audience”the author confided 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 taste for terrifying writing from his father, a schoolteacher who, when he was a child in the Nara region, told him terrifying stories and legends before going to bed. One story particularly marked him: that of the snake woman, which he considered the starting point of his career as a manga artist. He will star in a trilogy aimed at young girls, in the 1960s (The snake womaneditions Le lézard noir, 2017).
Pioneer and emblem of Japanese graphic nightmare stories, Kazuo Umezu is particularly revered for his series published in the early 1970s. The school removed (Glénat, 2004). In this coming-of-age disaster story, a modern educational establishment is projected into a very dark near future. “ [Ses] The manga is inherently scary. Not because he seeks to scare his readers, but because this author continues to live keeping his fears intact.the cultural critic Saburo Kawamoto said of him, in the epilogue of the French reissue of The school removedin 2021.
In his prolific and varied bibliography, marked by a densely dark line, the author has also proven his talent in science fiction (I’m Shingo, The Black Lizard, 2017) and delighted the little Japanese boy with his grotesque and sometimes scatophilic pranks performed by a little boy in Makoto-chan (The Black Lizard, 2023), one of its most popular titles in the archipelago.
Kazuo Umezu left the drawing board in 1995, but happily continued to appear on televisions across the country. A colorful and smiling pop icon, he was a source of inspiration for manga artists such as Junji Ito, but also helped shape the imagination of “J-Horror” (“Japanese horror”) in contemporary visual arts.
