Yōko Kondō (manga artist)

Yōko Kondō (Japanese: 近藤 ようこ, Hepburn: Kondō Yōko, born May 11, 1957) is a Japanese manga artist. Beginning her career in 1979 in the alternative manga magazine Garo, she is known for her historical and folklore-inspired works as well as for adaptations of classic Japanese literature.

Kondō was born on May 11, 1957 in Niigata. She started being interested in manga after reading Sanpei Shirato's Kamui Gaiden and started drawing by imitating his style. In highschool, she met Rumiko Takahashi and together they founded a manga club at their school. Kondō supported Takahashi in the beginnings of her trying to start a career as a manga artist. She was also interested in folklore, influenced by the works of Shinobu Orikuchi, which is why she studied folklore at Kokugakuin University in Tokyo after finishing high school.^[1][2]

In her last year at university in 1979 she published her first work as a professional manga artist in the alternative manga magazine Garo, the short story "Monorōgu".^[3][4] She was an active contributor to several gekiga magazines after this and profited from the boom in erotic gekiga publications such as Gekiga Alice.^[2] Together with other female artists who worked for erotic magazines for men such as Kyoko Okazaki, Erica Sakurazawa and Shungicu Uchida, she is sometimes referred to as "onna no ko H mangaka" ("women H cartoonists").^[5] She also worked as an assistant for manga artist Murasaki Yamada.^[6]

In 1984, when the boom of erotic gekiga was subsiding, she was approached by the editors of Weekly Manga Sunday to publish in the magazine. This led her to publish short stories about the daily life of neighbors in a quarter of Niigata in the magazine from 1984 until 1985. The ensuing short story collection Miharashi ga oka nite was a success and she won the excellence award at the Japan Cartoonists Association Award 1986 for it. She kept publishing manga with similar daily life themes for several years.^[2] She was working for magazines in different age- and gender-specific publishing categories of the Japanese manga industry; for shōjo manga magazines like Asuka, seinen manga magazines like Big Comic and josei manga magazines like Feel Young.^[7][8][9]

After this, she shifted towards adaptations of classic Japanese literature, among them works of Shinobu Orikuchi, Natsume Sōseki and Ango Sakaguchi.^[1] Several of these literature adaptations were published in the manga magazine Comic Beam.^[10][11]

Her early work for Garo received scholarly attention for bringing female perspectives into alternative manga. Together with Murasaki Yamada and Hinako Sugiura, who also worked as an assistant for Yamada, she was referred to as "three Garo girls" (ガロ三人娘 Garo san'nin musume),^[12] translated by Ryan Holmberg (translator of Murasaki Yamada's Talk to My Back) as "three daughters of Garo". Holmberg argued that the moniker was "highly misleading", and that while male artists were not usually distinguished by gender, the moniker does so for the female artists. Holmberg argued that, therefore, the moniker displays sexism.^[13]

Besides the Excellence Prize at the Japan Cartoonists Association Award that she received in 1986 for Miharashi ga oka nite, she won the Grand Prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival 2014 for her adaptation of Yasumi Tsuhara's fantasy novel Goshiki no Fune. The jury commented: "We cannot help but admire KONDO’s sincerity and creativity when she addressed issues. This masterpiece, praised unanimously by its readers for its beauty in staunchly portraying the cruelty concealed in the world while at the same time providing the humor and courage to live, compels us to give something back."^[14] Her manga Sensō to Hitori no Onna, based on a novel by Ango Sakaguchi, was among the jury-selected works of Japan Media Arts Festival 2013.^[15]

She has been nominated twice for the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize; once in 2005 for a re-edition of her 1980s series Suikyō Kitan^[16] and once in 2022 for her series Takaoka Shinnō Kōkaiki.^[17]

Several of her manga have been adapted for film or television. Her manga series Roommates was adapted into a live-action TV series in 1996.^[2] An adaptation of her Ani Kaeru was released as a TV drama in 2009.^[18]

In the late 2010s, some of her works were translated into French,^[19] Italian^[20] and Spanish.^[21]