Marry, F---, or Kill with Alternative Manga Artist Shiu Yoshijima

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Anime Boston's one Japanese guest this year was Shiu Yoshijima, an illustrator and manga artist who specializes in drawing cute yet edgy “poisonous” women, typically incorporating fantasy elements into her work. Yoshijima participated in multiple live drawing panels and took commissions in the Artists' Alley at the Chaotic Harmony booth. Anime News Network got to speak with Yoshijima one-on-one about some of her recent projects, artistic influences, and her personal tastes.

Which manga artists were most influential on your style?

There are two artists in particular. One is Runrun Yamamoto, and the other one is Mikio Igarashi, who wrote a series called Bonobono. His art style is a little different from my art, but it has a very cynical style to it, which I drew inspiration from.

What about artists in other mediums who have influenced you?

In terms of other media, for movies, I drew a lot of inspiration from Tim Burton. In terms of music, there's a Japanese artist named Chihiro Izuka — I drew a lot of inspiration from her music.

You've done illustrations for the Godzilla puppet show Godziban, and you even got to design Biolanthe's daughter Erika, who is of course a cute girl that happens to also be a plant monster. What was it like creating your own new kaiju?

When I work on nonhuman characters, I tend to feel a melancholy feeling of not being quite able to become human, so when I design characters like that, it tends to have a feeling of melancholy, a feeling of sorrow, a somberness almost when I think about the characters. For Erika, I worked with the director for that, but even there, I felt there was a feeling of melancholy, a feeling of somberness surrounding her when I designed her.

I see you also worked on a board game recently called Devil and Lolita. What can you tell us about this game?

When I was a designer for Devil and Lolita, I worked with a game designer…board games are generally played by all ages, but this game, in particular, has some themes of fetishism involved, so I was very intrigued by the mixture of being an “all ages” game but having that slightly darker, a bit guilty side. The game involves collecting little girls, so I want people to experience the mixture, and feel the darker side of the board game.

Are there any plans to translate any of your manga into English? Which one of your works would you like published English first and why?

I don't have any works that have been translated into English yet. There's a published book [in Japan] called Poison Yuri Anthology, and there's one particular story in that I would like foreign fans to enjoy, which is about a death god and a nurse. If I were to choose one particular to translate, I would choose that story.

To explain the plot, it's a yuri manga, so it's about the love story between a death god and a nurse, and the irony is a death god can only visit the nurse's place if someone dies. So there's this bit of an ironic situation, a bit of a conflicting idea, because both the death god and the nurse are in love with each other, but they can't see each other due to the death god's nature of only being able to show up if someone dies. Personally, I think this is a very intriguing story and a story I personally like, so I want my foreign audiences to enjoy it as well.

Based on the common subject matter in your art, I challenge you to a game of Marry, F---, or Kill. Your options are centaurs, mermaids, and bunny girls.

I would probably marry a centaur. Because you'll be living together with this person, I figure it would be pretty useful to have a method of transportation in the form of a centaur. If I were to kill, I would probably kill a mermaid because there's a legend that if you kill a mermaid, and you have its meat, you can obtain eternal life, so I would like to try that out if I had the chance. For the last option, I simply think bunny girls are cute, and so if I were to have sexual intercourse with them, I would probably pick the bunny girl.

Update (04/09): Anime Boston 2023 Sponsorship disclaimer added.