Minetarō Mochizuki
Minetarō Mochizuki (born January 29, 1964) is a Japanese manga artist from Yokohama. He grew up in a single-parent home and spent a lot of time drawing at home. As a child heLoved Kazuo Umezu’s horror manga. He studied at Tokyo Design Gakuin. In 1984 he won the 11th Tetsuya Chiba Award for a short story, which helped him start his professional career. He published his first work in 1985 in Weekly Young Magazine and soon launched Bataashi Kingyo (1985–1988).
Other early works include Hauntress (1993) and Samehada Otoko to Momojiri Onna (1993–1994). His big breakthrough came with Dragon Head (1994–1999), a horror story about a high school student who survives a train crash and faces a ruined world.
In the 2000s he moved to Morning magazine and did Maiwai (2002–2008) and Tōkyō Kaidō (2008–2010). In the 2010s he also began writing for Shogakukan’s seinen magazines and focused more on adaptations. He created Chiisakobee (2012–2015) in Big Comic Spirits, based on a novel by Shūgorō Yamamoto. In 2018 he drew a manga adaptation of the Isle of Dogs movie at the request of Wes Anderson and Kunichi Nomura, published in Morning.
His influences include the late 1970s–early 1980s New Wave and Yoshikazu Ebisu. In the 2000s his style became more streamlined with careful line work and attention to body parts.
Several of his works have been turned into films or TV shows: Bataashi Kingyo (1990), Samehada Otoko to Momojiri Onna (1999), Dragon Head (2003), and Ochanoma (1993). His work has been translated into English, French, Spanish, Italian and German.
Awards: Dragon Head won the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize Award for Excellence and the Kodansha Manga Award (General Manga). Chiisakobee won an Excellence Award at the 2013 Japan Media Arts Festival and the Fauve d’Angoulême Prix de la Série in 2017.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 03:11 (CET).