Ai Yazawa

Ai Yazawa, born March 7, 1967, is a Japanese manga artist and illustrator whose work came to wide attention in the 1990s and 2000s. She began reading manga magazines at 10, tried drawing manga at 12, and submitted her work to Ribon Manga School, where she first entered the lowest class. By about 15 she was training and submitting more seriously, moving into a higher class. As a student, she admired singer Eikichi Yazawa and adopted his surname for her pen name.

Yazawa made her manga debut in 1985, at 17 and in her final year of high school, with the short story Ano Natsu, accepted on her tenth submission to Ribon with help from an editor. At the time, she was unsure whether she could make a living as a manga artist and entered Osaka Mode Gakuen to become a stylist. When Ribon decided to serialize her work, she left school to focus on drawing manga, a choice she later described as “disappointing” and “painful” at the time.

Her breakthrough came with I’m No Angel, published in Ribon from 1991 to 1995. She followed it with Neighborhood Story, then Last Quarter. Asked to draw two short stories for the launch of Cookie, Yazawa chose to connect them so they would be easier to read if they became a series. That idea became Nana, first published in 2000 and later one of the best-selling manga series. In 2003, she received the Shogakukan Manga Award for Nana.

Yazawa’s work was shaped by manga, music, and fashion. She has cited manga artists Fuyumi Ogura and Ryo Ikuemi as inspirations, along with music by Miyuki Nakajima and Yumi Matsutoya. Her art has often been discussed for its connection to Japanese alternative fashion: Kera ran features on Mikako Komatsu from Neighborhood Story and produced sewing patterns based on the character’s fictional brand, Happy Berry. Nana prominently features Vivienne Westwood, and some clothing in the series was based on items from Yazawa’s own collection.

In June 2009, Yazawa was hospitalized after contracting an unspecified illness, and Nana was placed on indefinite hiatus. She was discharged in April 2010 and later said in 2022 that she was still recovering and interested in continuing Nana in the future. Since 2009 she has focused mainly on illustration work, including new images for a 2015 Nana calendar, a 2016 mini-manga with characters from I’m No Angel and Neighborhood Story, artwork for Juju’s 2017 single “Iiwake,” and a 2024 promotional visual for a Lulu Felice wedding dress collaboration based on Nana and Neighborhood Story.

Yazawa’s sentences can feel as direct as her drawings. “Being alone and being lonely are two different things” has the clean shape of a thought many people recognize but may not have put into words. Her career joins sharp visual style, music, humor, and fashion with feelings that are easy to name once she names them.