Childhood and early career edit

Kyoko Okazaki was born in 1963 in Tokyo. Her father was a hairdresser and held a large drawing room. She lived in the house in a family extended to fifteen people, including grandparents, uncles and aunts, cousins, and apprentice hairdressers. Okazaki often wondered what the family and the home can represent in these conditions. She recounts that while living in a happy and peaceful environment, she was not able to feel at ease in this large family.^[1]

In 1983, while studying at Atomi University, Okazaki made her debut as a professional manga artist with a short story in Manga Burikko, an erotic hentai manga magazine primarily aimed for adult men. She published several more short stories in the magazine. In 1985, after graduating from college, she published her first manga series Virgin, and in 1989, she wrote Pink, which is about an office worker in her early 20s who works as a call girl at night in order to help support her pet crocodile.^[2][3] This work firmly established her reputation as a manga artist. Okazaki also worked on the series Tokyo Girls Bravo, which was published in CUTIE, a mainstream Japanese fashion magazine aimed at teens.^[3] Okazaki has also worked as a fashion illustrator herself.^[4]

In 1992, she released Happy House, which is about a 13-year-old daughter of a television director and actress, who are often too busy to care for her children. When the teenager faces the possible divorce of her parents, she does not want to live with her father or mother, because she feels that she cannot be happy with either one of them. Instead, she dreams of leaving her home to live alone and earn her own money so she can emancipate herself from her parents.^[1]

Later career in the 1990s edit

While previously, shōjo manga magazines would not publish Okazaki's work,^[5] in the 1990s new manga magazines with an older female audience appeared, such as Feel Young and Young Rose. She mainly worked for these magazines from then on.

In 1994, Okazaki put on a solo exhibition at the grand opening of the experimental art space, P-House, in Tokyo. From 1993 to 1994, she did a serialization called River's Edge and portrayed the conflicts and problems experienced by high-schoolers living in a suburb in Tokyo. This series had a big influence on the literary world.^[6][7]

From 1995 to 1996, she worked on Helter Skelter, which features a beautiful model, Ririko, whose body underwent a total cosmetic surgery, and illustrates the accelerating derailment of her success. Here, Okazaki exposes with much reality the obsession, jealousy, and deprivation caused by the desire to acquire “beauty” and the overpowering economic and commercial circumstances surrounding such desire.^[8] Helter Skelter was serialized in Shodensha's monthly Feel Young magazine at the time of writing and published later as a single tankōbon volume in 2003.^[9]

In May 1996, Okazaki was hit by a drunk driver and sustained severe injuries. She was in a coma for an extended period and needed to regain the ability to speak. She has not published new work since.^[4][10]

Zeitgeist of the 1980s and 1990s edit

Okazaki focused her work on contemporary urban life in Tokyo during the time that Japan witnessed an economic downturn in its transition from bubble economy of the 1980s to the Lost Decade of the 1990s. She is often credited with capturing the zeitgeist of Japanese society at the time her work was published.^[11] Over the course of her work, she shows the shift of Japan to a more individualist rather than collectivist society.^[12] According to Masanao Amano, her storytelling tries to evoke the feelings loneliness and emptiness that were characteristic for the time.^[13]

The main characters in some of her works such as Kuchibiru kara Sandanjuu and Tokyo Girls Bravo are bold, full of emotional expression and freewheeling, holding unconventional sets of values. The protagonists, especially in her later work in the mid-1990s, on the other hand such as Yumiko in Pink and Ririko in Helter Skelter carry feelings of doubt and regret that overshadow their life choices.^[8][12] According to Takeshi Hamano, her characters are typically described as "material girls". They are "daring to choose for, and express, themselves as they inexhaustibly consume goods and even bodies, only to find themselves lost and full of doubt and regret in the succeeding 'flat culture' where people’s lives are more individualized and distinctions between high and low cultures are blurred."^[14][15]

She works with intertextuality in her work, making many references to popular culture. Okazaki includes trends and jargons of the time as well as references to films, novels, pop music and contemporary philosophical ideas.^[11] Throughout her work, she has made references to other manga, including Akimi Yoshida's Kisshō Tennyo and Yumiko Ōshima's Banana Bread Pudding.^[16]

Gender and sexuality edit

Okazaki is known for reappropriating the concept of girl and things considered girly, such as the color pink and nail polish, for young adult women. Okazaki's framing of her protagonists in their twenties and thirties as "girls" (onnanoko) comes with a refusal of societal norms around femininity and a battle against the patriarchal system.^[17][18] Alwyn Spies notes that Okazaki's work, while also targeting young adult women, was distinct from the soap opera style of the Ladies comics of the 1980s due to Okazaki's reappropriation of girlhood through shōjo manga aesthetics.^[19] Okazaki is considered one of the early forebears of the gyaru manga style.^[20] Like in classic shōjo manga, the protagonist of Pink (1989) is young, female, beautiful, rich and fashionable.^[21]

Breaking the norms of 1970s shōjo manga, her work featured explicit depictions of female sexuality and discussed sexuality by including themes like sex, sex work, homosexuality, incest and death. When speaking about Pink (1989), Spies explains that Okazaki juxtaposes shōjo "fantasy" characteristics with the pornographic "realities" of sex work and pornographic visual grammar. When writing about sex work and marriage in the context of her work Pink, she has explained that her depiction of love is always related to capitalism: "All work is also love. Love. Yes, love. 'Love' is not as warm or as fuzzy as it seems when people talk about it normally. Probably. It's more like a formidable, fierce, frightful, and cruel monster. So is capitalism."^[22]

Influenced by the New Wave movement in manga in the late 1970s and early 1980s, her first work was published in erotic and pulp magazines that were open to the aesthetics of shōjo manga.^[23] Together with other female artists who worked for hentai magazines such as Erica Sakurazawa, Shungicu Uchida and Yōko Kondo, she is sometimes referred to as "onna no ko H mangaka" ("women H cartoonists").^{[24][25][26][27]}

Spies relates her work to third wave feminism for a variety of reasons: For reappropriating girl-ness, sexuality and sexuist language as well as for Okazaki's interest in punk and rock music. In her manga, she has made references to musicians like The Slits and Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth, who is considered a pioneer of the Riot Grrrl movement.^[28]

Okazaki's work led to an academic debate about the gendered dimension of her audience and its relevance to feminism. Her work has gotten exceptional attention from male manga critics and manga fans. Some feminist manga scholars such as Kazuko Nimiya have dismissed Okazaki's work because of this, as they found her depictions of sexuality led to an objectifying reception of her work by the male gaze.^[29][21]

In 2003 she received the Excellence Prize in the manga division of the Japan Media Arts Festival^[30] and in the following year the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize, both for Helter Skelter.^[31]

More than 20 years after taking a break from writing, her past works were still being reprinted intermittently and had also been made into live-action movies.^[4] Her work has been translated, among others, into English, French^[32] and German. In 2013, American Kodansha imprint Vertical, Inc. published the manga in English under the title Helter Skelter: Fashion Unfriendly.^[33]

• La nouvelle manga

• Hamano, Takeshi (2019). "Witness to a Transition: The Manga of Kyoko Okazaki and the Feminine Self in the Shift toward 'Flat Culture' in Japanese Consumer Society". In Ogi, Fusami; Suter, Rebecca; Nagaike, Kazumi; Lent, John A. (eds.). Women's Manga in Asia and Beyond. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels. Springer International Publishing. pp. 285–307. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-97229-9_7. ISBN 9783319972282. S2CID 159401888.
• Spies, Alwyn (2003a). Studying Shojo Manga. Global Education, Narratives of the Self and Pathologization of the Feminine. University of British Columbia.
• Spies, Alwyn (2003b). "pink-ness". U.S.-Japan Women's Journal. 25: 30–48.

• List of all of Okazaki's work at the Media Arts Database (Japanese)