Storytelling

She uses inner monologue in form of a stream of consciousness narration and her storytelling is considered documentary-like realistic.^[5] Tsumugi's storytelling has a focus on conveying emotions like pain, anxiety and the eventual healing from them. Themes like mental health and grief appear in Kanashimi no Machi ("Town of Sorrow),^[5] the short story "Yokohama, 14-sai, Yūko" deals with a 14-year-old having an abortion.^[7] Manga scholar Rachel Thorn called her stories "sensitive" and "moving".^[8] Masanao Amano describes that Tsumugi often draws "the kind of situation when a person is so engrossed with what they are feeling internally, the world around them fails to have any kind of meaning."^[5]

While the protagonists in her first short stories were college students, she became most known for centering the lives of high school and junior high school students. In her later career, she had works focusing on elementary school students. Her characters were usually youth with family issues such as problems between parents and children, an absent father the breakdown of a family.^[1] Hot Road deals with the impact of "yankee" subcultures of juvenile delinquents in motorcycle gangs in Japan in the 1980s; Marie Kim considers her portrayal of rebellious female delinquents a glorification of "yankee" culture. Other shōjo manga artists like Satosumi Takaguchi [ja] also portrayed "yankee" culture at the time.^[9] Thorn sees Tsumugi's focus on marginalized youth as an example of the development of shōjo manga in the 1980s, which at this point had lost some of its innocence when depicting relationships and identity.^[10]

While some of her manga like Hot Road are set in urban environments, other like Mabataki mo Sezu are set in the countryside.^[5] Titles and dialogue often incorporate colloquialisms.^[3] For example, the dialogue in Mabataki mo Sezu is consistently written in the local dialect of Yamaguchi Prefecture, where the story is set.^[11][12]

Visuals

While her aesthetic is, according to Rachel Thorn, within the "visual grammar of shōjo manga", Tsumugi is credited with creating new forms of expression within this aesthetic.^[8] Tsumugi uses experimentation with form in order in order to create multi-layered depictions of the psychology of her characters.^[13]

Her style is marked by placing empty space and, especially in Mabataki mo Sezu, vast landscapes in the center. There are hardly any close-ups of faces of characters in her work, often characters stand alone in a scenery.^[11][12] Tsumugi expressed in an interview that she enjoys drawing background scenery, as opposed to many other shōjo manga artists.^[3] She adds sound words to background scenes taking place in the far distance.^[5] Thorn writes, "Delicate images are set against a stark white background. Readers get the feeling of viewing the action from afar, as if remembering some long-forgotten memory".^[10] Tsumugi also conveys emotion through the placement of speech bubbles, the empty space around them and experimental page layouts with dissolving or overflowing panels.^[13]

Rachel Thorn calls her use of light, white space and fluid page layouts "unprecedented" in shōjo manga.^[10] She been compared to fellow manga artist Ai Yazawa for her play with depth and layering.^[14] Critic Eiji Ōtsuka considers Tsumugi's experimentation with form in her work in the second half of the 1980s as the peak of a visual trend in shōjo manga that was established by the Year 24 Group in the 1970s. This trend weakened in the 1990s, as readers had problems understanding manga with a more experimental form and instead of this a visual trend called "flatness" emerged, as seen in the works of artists Kiriko Nananan, Erica Sakurazawa and Moyoco Anno.^[13]

Influences

Tsumugi considers Fusako Kuramochi an important influence, especially in terms of framing and use of monologues.^[3]