Yoshihiro Togashi

Togashi's first work was called Tonda Birthday Present, which was followed by Tende Showaru Cupid (An Ill-tempered Cupid in Heaven: 1989, 3 volumes), Okami Nante Kowakunai! (I'm Not Afraid of Wolves: 1989, 1 volume), Yu Yu Hakusho (1990, 19 volumes), Level E (1996, 3 volumes), and Hunter X Hunter (1998, 15+ volumes). Each of these have been published by Japan's Weekly Shonen Jump. Yu Yu Hakusho has sold over 40 million copies in Japan alone

[The following was printed in the final volume of the Yu Yu Hakusho manga]: If I'm honest, I'm feeling a great relief and pleasure at the thought that I've finally been able to finish YYH. It's not that I've lost all emotional attachment to the work, but I feel that my stress levels had greatly surpassed my will to work. The six months leading up to the concluding chapter felt awfully long to me. To tell the truth, it had already been decided that YYH was going to end in December 1993 -- or rather, this was a decision that I had forced on the editorial staff. There were many reasons for this, all in all about 50 big and small ones, but in broad strokes, these were the major reasons:

• My body.

• Thoughts I had about what it means to draw manga.

• Desire to do other things than work.

Point 3 is out of the question for a professional manga writer; basically I wanted to indulge in my hobbies, rest, and sleep as much as I could. Most of my 50 reasons fall into this category.

Point 1 was caused by Point 3 not being fulfilled for too long. From when YYH began serialization up until the start of the Dark Tournament, I had half a day off every week in which I caught up on sleep. Other than that all I had time for were occasional naps, and I'd indulge in my hobbies by sleeping less. For a while, I quite enjoyed this. But my HP (as they say in RPGs) was gradually but surely falling, and around the time that I wrote a 31-page one-shot and simultaneously had to do color pages, my heart began to hurt every time I went without sleep -- and then it began to hurt more and more often.

This was when I seriously started to think about the pace of production for manga. I thought, "I probably won't be able to keep regular hours, but if I sleep as much as I want to, when I want to, how much would I be able to produce?" I tried it out. I immediately began to fall behind on my schedule. But I tried to get some sleep every night. Around this time, my feelings about writing manga as a profession began to change. "I don't want to die from overwork. If I die, I want it to be when I'm having fun or when I'm drawing manga for fun. Color pages are scary. One-shots are scary." I also began to use some time before going to bed to relieve stress. I fell even more behind, and at the point where Sensui and Yusuke were fighting, this reached its first peak.

But also around this time, I realized I was starting to experience a different kind of stress. Because I had stopped overworking my body, and started to relieve my stress, I was feeling stressed that I couldn't draw manga in a way that satisfied me. This is where point 2 comes in.

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.

So I went ahead and did what I had always wanted to do: "If I ever manage to have a long serialization in Jump, I will end it on my own terms." I knew that Jump dropped a manga after 10 weeks if the readers' surveys proved it to be unpopular, and I knew this when I started working for them. This system proved encouraging for me, and I learned a lot by being aware of readers reactions. But I ended up wanting to draw manga for myself, without thinking about anyone's reactions. I don't believe that anything I came up with on this premise will live up to Jump's standards, so I will not try.

In conclusion: I ended YYH because of my own selfishness. I'm sorry.