YuYu Hakusho

"I believe that anyone who draws has a desire to attract people with their art, but this is an ambition that I had suppressed for a long time. This is because back when I had just had my debut, my editor at the time had shown me a manga page by Hagiwara Kazushi (BASTARD!!). I felt that if I were honest with myself, my art would never be able to compete with something like this. But I was never able to throw away my ideal of being able to draw manga without help from other people. A few times during the run of YYH, I finished my manuscripts all by myself. All of these instances were when my stress levels were at their highest. I don't know if anyone will understand, but when I was stressed because I wasn't satisfied with my manga, the only way for me to relieve this stress was to draw all my manga by myself. As a result, those chapters ended up horrible. Both the characters and the backgrounds were messy. The one shot Two Shots, Karasu vs. Kurama, Yusuke vs. Sensui, the scene where Yusuke meets Raizen, I drew most of those alone. The latter two were finished in half a day before my deadline, as a reader guessed and criticized in a letter. This might mean I fail as a professional, but I was satisfied. I had already started to think that no matter what anyone says, no matter how messy the finished pages are, I just wanted to draw this by myself, and I had no reason not to go through with it. It saddens me to say this, but I had explored every possible direction for the YYH characters that I could in the context of a professional publication. All I could do at this point was to start deconstructing the characters, or go on repeating the same storylines over and over until the readers got bored. My attempts to deconstruct the characters were, of course, turned down by Jump. I didn't have the strength, physically and mentally, to keep doing the same thing over and over."