Artist Mizuno Junko, guro-kawaii, and girlhood

CONTENT WARNING for body horror and NSFW images.

My memory tells me that I stumbled upon Mizuno Junko’s work before I was twelve, but copyright dates tell me otherwise. I have this distinct impression of being in Media Play, the now-defunct entertainment store in my hometown, browsing through their relatively new, hip manga section. In and amongst the volumes of Sailor Moon and Dragon Knights were books I knew were not meant for me, with their “older teen” or “mature” ratings—books that drew my eye but that I would reshelve in haste lest some adult scold me for my indiscretion.

That’s when I saw Mizuno’s work for the first time. I didn’t really understand the display of squat, adorable girls in lingerie acting violently or brazenly. I thought maybe it was meant for men, like the skin magazines just a few aisles away. But why would they want something so…cute?

Despite my confusion, I was intrigued. I wouldn’t buy any of Mizuno’s work until I was an adult working in a comic shop myself, but the imagery remained with me, a fascinating question at the back of my mind: could this be for me?

One of my favorite themes is the concept of duality or multiplicity of self, especially in stories about women. I don’t mean to say that women are intrinsically duplicitous but that we are, like people of any other gender, multi-layered in our interests, motivations, and feelings.  Mizuno’s work wonderfully represents the weird combinations of purity, lust, hunger, violence, greed, affection, and whimsy that traipse through many a woman’s psyche.

Born in Tokyo in 1973, Mizuno Junko grew up during the incredible output of shoujo manga’s Year 24 Group. Mizuno cites shoujo manga as one of her major influences, alongside the work of Aubrey Beardsley and various erotic artists of the late 20th century. Her website provides a fascinating timeline of her inspiration and works from her childhood up through her current gallery shows. It is clear that she is very honest to herself, eschewing any attempt to categorize her work.

And Mizuno’s work is, indeed, impossible to define. I use the term “guro-kawaii” (literally “grotesque-cute”) here to talk specifically about the appeal of the grotesque wrapped up in a cute package for consumption by other girls and women, but even that falls short of the mark. Is there a convenient term to describe the turbulence of girlhood? Because that is what is on display: all the aspects of burgeoning sexuality and expectation that society does not want to discuss when referring to girls.

The double-standard of girlhood is that girls are meant to be agreeable and attractive and never, ever express the rage and desire that moves through them. To do so would acknowledge a complex personhood that folds in the superficial with the genuine, that implies that a love of the innocent and mundane can co-exist with the hatred of being told who to be.

Being an independent thinker does not preclude taking pleasure in being feminine or in having feminine interests. This type of complexity is often reflected in Mizuno’s characters who, although they are technically flat characters, often wield their femininity in tandem with their less socially acceptable qualities like greed, lust, anger, or power.

Mizuno’s work hit the North American market in the early 2000s, shortly after her Japanese graphic novel debut, Pure Trance, was published in 1998. Her sexy-scary aesthetic played nicely with the rise of pop-punk and emo music, the Hot Topic-esque rebranding of Hello Kitty, and the Venn diagram overlap of mall goth kids who were also manga readers.

Mizuno never saw quite the same North American success as other women creators who played with dark themes, such as CLAMP or Kaori Yuki, but her work made sense when you took it as part of a whole. If teenage girls were reading things like Angel Sanctuary, which provides beauty and darkness and an exploration of the taboo, then they would surely want to move on to something like Pure Trance with its frank treatment of sex, drugs, eating disorders, and single motherhood; not to mention its criticisms of corrupt government, the treatment of women by men in power, and the controlling power of capitalism.

Her next series of manga in the early 2000s centered on rewriting classic fairy tales, a common venture in both Japanese and North American publishing at the time, which allowed women authors to re-center the stories around characters who are traditionally portrayed as passive or doomed. Cinderalla, the first in these separate-but-similar works, centers on a young woman who genuinely loves working with her father in their yakitori restaurant and who falls in love with a zombie singer called “The Prince.”

Instead of being granted a beautiful outfit for the ball, Cinderalla is temporarily turned into a zombie in order to get close to her love interest. The other two books in this mode, Princess Mermaid and Hansel & Gretel, similarly break the fairy tale mold beyond recognition, turning the Little Mermaid into a dragon and Gretel into a delinquent who has to save her community from a witch tricking everyone into eating dirt.

Mizuno has always had a knack for taking on subjects that preoccupy the minds of many girls, thoughts that those same girls don’t always feel they are allowed to explore. She highlights the plight of the innocent in her two-volume manga Little Fluffy Gigolo Pelu.

In it, Pelu, a strange alien from the planet Princess Kotobuki, learns that he is part of the sexual organs of the women that populate the planet. These women reproduce asexually, but that’s because they have two little creatures living in their uterus who copulate and impregnate them. When the time is right, a baby drops right out from between a young lady’s legs and she becomes a mother.

When young Pelu learns of his origins, he is devastated. His sister Palu has just had a baby, and he wants one as well. And so with some help from a man-eating hippo’s magic mirror, he alights upon Earth, intent on finding a suitable bride.

Pelu’s intense preoccupation with having a baby is the fixation of the immature. He has no clue what goes into partnership or child-rearing, but he’s determined to achieve his goals. Along the way, he meets women who range in age, occupation, style, and personality, and he falls in love many times with no success.

Pelu is the perfect analogue for the young person who is trying desperately to make sense of the adult world, but who also feels that they should not ask questions lest they be seen as unfit for that very world. He is an adolescent, unyielding in his goals but without the emotional and mental toolkit to achieve them.

Meanwhile, the people around him are growing and struggling through unplanned pregnancies, compromised dreams, unrequited love, conflicted female friendships, and even gender confirmation surgery. He is kind, but he leaves almost every encounter frustrated by his inability to find a bride, feeling isolated on this planet where everyone else’s lives seem so full and turbulent.

But, like Mizuno’s audience, her work has also grown up and developed over the years. Alongside her manga forays, she has published illustration books like Collector’s File 002: Junko Mizuno’s Illustration Work and the picture book Ravina, the Witch.

She’s living in San Francisco now and has found a nice little niche in product design, especially for vinyl toys, enamel pins and, in one memorable case, a beer growler. Her most recent publications have been a pop-up book called Triad and a coloring book from the publisher Last Gasp of San Francisco. In August, Titan Comics will release Hell Ladies, which looks to be a reprint of her 2001 work, Hell Babies, a collection of illustrations of cute girls doing un-cute things.

Her recent gallery show, Soma, was intended to “encapsulate the growth, maturity, and finality of the human existence” through large-scale acrylic paintings. This was a departure from many of her early themes, though she has always been liberal in her explorations of death and ageing—topics that inform the desperate scramble felt by many women to remain young and beautiful.

As I approach my thirties, slowly coming to grips with the fact that, yes, I am actually an adult now, my thoughts begin to turn toward motherhood, and I wonder again if Mizuno’s work is still intended for me. In many ways, I feel that it is more intended for me now than ever before.

Sure, many of her protagonists are young and sexy, leading turbulent lives full of drugs, alcohol, and unwise sexual entanglements—a lifestyle I never led even when I was expected to be full of youthful naivete. But I also see in these women a desire to love and nurture, since much emphasis is placed on female relationships and motherhood, and breastfeeding.

There is a celebration of female sexuality here, not just as it pertains to self-empowerment through lingerie and BDSM (though that is very prevalent), but also as it extends to mothering. In Mizuno’s recent pop-up book, Triad, nearly every single image presents breasts as a focal point, and at least in two instances they are relieving themselves of milk. This stands alongside the familiar themes of pills, food, internal organs, and the new addition of women in luchador masks.

In Trance, there is a marriage of motherhood, a condition that occupies the minds of many young girls in one way or another, and the trappings of individuality and freedom, which that motherhood allegedly removes. It is almost as if Mizuno is saying “you do not ‘become’ a mother, but motherhood lives in you, as a potential part of your personhood.”

This is, of course, the speculation of someone who is grappling with how motherhood changes a person, and not necessarily how the artist feels about her own work. But that is the power of presenting such a broad and eccentric range of womanhood to her audience: Each image tackles a wholly different take on femininity, and none are necessarily presented as “correct.” In Mizuno’s world, women are the focus, and they are never just the Madonna or the Magdalene, but often times both rolled into one—and others, besides.

It has been gratifying to see her continue to work in multiple fields, pursuing whatever appeals to her at any given moment and never afraid to blend her shoujo manga “popular art” roots with her fine art work. She is shameless, and I mean that in the most enviable way possible: She is unafraid to present images that challenge ideas of womanhood, whether she means to or not, and the art world, so often bogged down with only male-centric “ideal” representations of womanhood, is all the richer for it.

So who is Mizuno Junko’s work intended for? Chiefly, I think, for herself, but also for anyone who finds validation in the concept of confusion—the idea that identity and selfhood are complex, not easily represented visually, ever-changing and ephemeral. It is for anyone who wants to hold on to their girlhood as they grow up, not in a regressive way, but in a way that acknowledges an internal balance of forces—the selfish and the selfless, the innocent and the angry, the lover and the loved. And, to answer my younger self’s question: Yes. It’s very much made for me, too.