Rumiko Takahashi

Rumiko Takahashi, born October 10, 1957, in Niigata, Japan, is a Japanese manga artist whose career began in 1978 and grew into one of the most commercially successful bodies of work in manga. Her series have been translated into many languages, with more than 230 million copies in circulation, placing her among the best-selling authors of all time. She became known not through a single title, but through a run of major works that moved between comedy, romance, fantasy, science fiction, martial arts, and darker supernatural stories.

As a child, Takahashi showed little interest in manga, though she was said to doodle at times in the margins of her papers while attending Niigata Chūō High School. She co-founded a manga club there with Yōko Kondō, who also became a manga artist. During her university years, Takahashi enrolled in Gekiga Sonjuku, a manga school founded by Kazuo Koike, the author of Crying Freeman and Lone Wolf and Cub. Koike urged students to create well-thought out, interesting characters, an influence that strongly shaped Takahashi’s work. She also worked as an assistant for Kazuo Umezu, a horror manga artist and creator of Makoto-chan.

Takahashi’s professional debut came in 1978 with the one-shot Katte na Yatsura, which earned an honorable mention at the Shogakukan New Comics Contest. That same year she began Urusei Yatsura in Weekly Shōnen Sunday, a comedic science fiction series. At first, she had trouble meeting deadlines, and chapters appeared sporadically until 1980. During the series’ run, she shared a small apartment with two assistants and often slept in a closet because there was so little space. Weekly Shōnen Sunday would remain the home of most of her major works for the next twenty years.

In 1980, Takahashi began Maison Ikkoku in Big Comic Spirits, a magazine with an older target audience than her earlier work. The late 1970s New Wave movement had made seinen manga more open to shōjo manga aesthetics and to hiring female manga artists. Takahashi drew on her own experience living in an apartment complex to make Maison Ikkoku, a romantic comedy. She worked on it while also continuing Urusei Yatsura, ending both in 1987, with Urusei Yatsura at 34 volumes and Maison Ikkoku at 15.

Her later major series extended her range. Ranma ½, begun in 1987, brought a gender-bending twist to shōnen martial arts manga and ended in 1996 at 38 volumes. Inuyasha, serialized from 1996 to 2008 in Weekly Shōnen Sunday, had a darker tone and became her longest series to that point. She later created Kyōkai no Rinne, which ran from 2009 to 2017, and began Mao in 2019. Her work also moved widely into animation, beginning with Urusei Yatsura in 1981.

Takahashi has received the Shogakukan Manga Award twice, for Urusei Yatsura in 1980 and Inuyasha in 2001, and the Seiun Award twice, for Urusei Yatsura in 1987 and Mermaid Saga in 1989. In 2019, she received the Grand Prix de la ville d’Angoulême, becoming the second woman and second Japanese winner of the prize. In 2020, Japan awarded her the Medal with Purple Ribbon for contributions to the arts. Readers keep returning to Takahashi because her characters are carefully made, funny, strange, flawed, and memorable, carrying whole worlds through the force of personality and timing.