The Groundbreaking Female Artist Who Shaped Manga History
In 1962, when she was still in middle school in a coastal town of Japan, the cartoonist Kuniko Tsurita sent a despairing letter to The City, a popular comics magazine. Manga was her life. The 14-year-old loved reading a variety of genres, including shōjo, which was aimed at adolescent girls, and the more male-targeted kashi-hon, which often featured grit, gore, and gunfights. Tsurita had dreamed for years of becoming a mangaka, or manga artist. But her repeated failure to win any of the contests that she submitted her comics to had dimmed her hopes. “From the moment I wake up, until late in the night, I spend all my time drawing manga,” her letter read. “I have been submitting work to you for some time now, but am embarrassed by the fact that I’ve never ranked above fourth place. This has really made me realize just how difficult comics are (much harder than school exams, for sure).”
If Tsurita’s letter was subdued, the response she received from the all-male editorial staff was bleaker, which, in those days, typically followed formulaic heterosexual-romance plots and was tacitly aimed at preparing its young readership for the societal norms of womanhood—namely finding and supporting a husband.
