Kazuo Umezu or Kazuo Umezz (楳図 かずお, Umezu Kazuo; birth name 楳図一雄; September 3, 1936 – October 28, 2024) was a Japanese manga artist, musician and actor. Starting his career in the 1950s, he is among the most famous artists of horror manga and has been vital for its development, considered the "god of horror manga". In 1960s shōjo manga like Reptilia, he broke the industry's conventions by combining the aesthetics of the commercial manga industry with gruesome visual imagery inspired by Japanese folktales, which created a boom of horror manga and influenced manga artists of following generations. He created successful manga series such as The Drifting Classroom, Makoto-chan and My Name Is Shingo, until he retired from drawing manga in the mid 1990s. He was a public figure in Japan, known for wearing red-and-white-striped shirts and doing his signature "Gwash" hand gesture.
Umezu was born on September 3, 1936, in Kōya, Wakayama Prefecture, but raised in the mountainous Gojō, Nara Prefecture. His mother motivated him to start drawing when he was seven years old. His father would tell him local legends about ghost and snake women before going to bed. He was inspired to start drawing manga by reading Osamu Tezuka's Shin Takarajima in fifth grade. He was part of a drawing circle with others called "Kaiman Club".
In 1955, he published his first manga at the age of 18 with Mori no Kyōdai based on the fairytale Hansel and Gretel with the kashihon publisher Tomo Book. He would soon shift towards the gekiga movement and publish manga in the kashi-hon industry in Osaka of the time, which would allow him more freedom than serializing his manga in magazines. His specialty was to include paranormal elements in his stories. At the same time, he also started working on shōjo manga; he published in the magazine Shōjo Book and the kashi-hon anthology Niji.
Breakthrough in the 1960s and 1970s
After moving to Tokyo in 1963 due to the decline of the kashihon industry, he developed his specific style, which blended the aesthetics of shōjo manga with grotesque horror visuals and broke with conventions of shōjo manga at the time. Horror manga like Nekome no Shōjo and Reptilia became a hit in the commercial shōjo manga magazine Shōjo Friend in the mid 1960s.
In the late 1960s, he also started publishing in shōnen manga magazines and he switched publishing houses, from Kodansha to Shogakukan, when a new editor asked him to draw something other than horror manga. He became a well established author and was at times working at up to five serials at the same time. In 1974 he won the 20th Shogakukan Manga Award for his series The Drifting Classroom about a school including its schoolchildren and teachers being teleported into an alternate post-apocalyptic universe.
In 1975, Umezu started becoming a public figure also apart from creating manga. He recorded songs based on his horror manga and released them as the solo album Yami no Album.
His comedy manga Makoto-chan, which he published from 1976 to 1981 in Weekly Shōnen Sunday, became a hit. The hand gesture "Gwash" from the manga became Umezu's own trademark hand gesture as well in public.
In the 1980s and 1990s, he focused on science fiction manga depicting a near future like My Name Is Shingo and Fourteen.
In 1995, he had to retire from regular publishing due to tendinitis after finishing Fourteen. He then became even more of a public figure, appearing regularly on TV in a red and white striped shirt. He was also famous for the architecture of his candy-striped home in Kichijōji, inspired by his Makoto-chan series. In 2011, he released a second music album with his songs.
In 2018 he was awarded the Prize for Inheritance at the Angoulême International Comics Festival for the French translation of My Name Is Shingo. This was the second prize awarded to him throughout his career and Umezu had previously been unhappy about the amount of recognition he had gotten for his work. The award motivated him to start working again and he produced a series of 101 paintings based on My Name Is Shingo, which were exhibited for the first time in 2022 and were his first new work in 27 years.
In July 2024, Umezu was hospitalized after collapsing at his home in Kichijōji, Tokyo. He was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer, but did not undergo surgery, remaining in hospice care from September. On November 5, 2024, Shogakukan announced that Umezu died on October 28. He was 88. A private funeral was held by his family and close friends. Umezu was planning a new work prior to his death.
On May 28, 2025 a public farewell ceremony was held at a hotel in Kichijōji. Flowers were available for fans to be placed on a stand for the deceased. There was a line to enter the hotel that extended several blocks outside. Participants included Machiko Satonaka, Junji Itō, Noboru Takahashi, and Shōko Nakagawa.
Umezu coined the term "fear manga" (kyōfu manga) in 1961 to describe his work, consciously distinguishing it from "weird tale" (kaiki) manga, which he felt overemphasized grotesque visuals. For Umezu, true "fear" was something that "makes you shudder even if you can't see it." Scholar Akihiko Takahashi argues that Umezu's "fear manga" was established when he broke the implicit constraint that "weird tales were for boys" and "fantasy was for girls", synthesizing these elements. A key transitional work was The Moment the Mouth Splits to the Ears (1962), the first to be explicitly labeled a "fear manga."
Umezu's own commentary and common criticism posit a linear evolution from "physiological fear" (e.g., motifs of snakes, spiders) in the mid-1960s to "psychological fear" in the late 1960s. Takahashi problematizes this, noting that psychological terror was present from the start. He posits that "fear" is the fundamental concept that subsumes both the "weird" and the distinction between physiological and psychological terror, representing a deeper, more holistic approach to the human condition.
A core philosophical underpinning of Umezu's work is a form of perspectivism. He articulated that whether a reader finds something "scary" or "funny" depends entirely on their standpoint: "If you're the one being chased, it's horror. If you're the one chasing, it's a gag." This "perspectivalism" (enkinhō shugi), where value is not inherent in the object but dependent on the viewer's position, became a defining feature of his 1968–1973 works like the Scary Book (Kowai Hon) series. Takahashi extends this, arguing that Umezu's relativism applies not just to horror and comedy, but to fundamental dichotomies like good/evil, beauty/ugliness, and truth/falsehood. His narratives often reveal the "ugly moral interior" of seemingly respectable characters, with the horror stemming from their painful self-awareness.
Folklore, monsters and theology
His work is influenced by Japanese folklore. Manga artist and critic Sakumi Yoshino explains that his horror manga is related to religion in Japan, as monsters and demons are not considered completely evil, and Umezu wants readers to sometimes also feel compassion for the monsters in his works. However, scholar Akihiko Takahashi cautions against interpreting this simply as an expression of "Japanese native spirituality or folkloric spirit", arguing that for Umezu, folklore served primarily as raw material and inspiration for story construction, not as an attempt to express or manifest a mystical otherworld. In series like Cat Eyed Boy, Umezu wove local yōkai (monster) culture with historical events, yet often created entirely original monstrous beings to serve his narratives. Scholar Ryōichi Hosokawa notes that Umezu integrates factual events, such as the 1946 Nankai earthquake which the author lived through, into these supernatural frameworks.