Biografia

While passing in a prep school, he suffered a severe case of diarrhea for 3 weeks. Believing he had not long to live, he wanted to leave some evidence that he had lived, through doing something that he liked as a child: working on manga. He was determined to create one work of manga in what he thought were his last months. As Nagai prepared for the task, he went to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with catarrh of the colon, and soon healed. But this was a turning point in his life: convinced that he would continue working on manga, he stopped attending school after three months and started living as a ronin.

Nagai liked foreign movies, and used to read Playboy magazine.

His "Harenchi Gakuen" work drew serious complaints and protests from Japanese parents and teachers. His fans supported him throughout the protests however; they sent him letters where they expressed how they were aware that the adults cracking down on them were reading raunchier stuff than what Nagai was producing.

He cites the works of artist Gustave Doré and cartoonist Osamu Tezuka as an influence on his work.

Considered to be the pioneer of ecchi and hentai manga with having first started erotic drawings of girls in manga. He started this with his 1968 comedy manga "Harenchi Gakuen" ("Shameless School"), which was meant to showcase embarrassing situations (girls exposing their panties, boys peeping on girls). It developed serious controversy, but also became wildly popular and succeeded in influencing Japanese society radically, and completely changing the common perceptions of manga.

About "Harenchi Gakuen": We started "Harenchi Gakuen" with the idea of making a comic based on messing around at a school. I liked the word 'harenchi' (scandal), which was always being used in advertising copy for adult movies. Scandal and school are like oil and water, so I thought mixing them would be fun and easily came up with the name.

My heroines were types who would hide themselves behind the idea of masculine sexuality. That's why I drew them as incredibly strong characters. What I drew was not eroticism. It was all about Japan's culture of shame. The characters want to show what they've got, but they're too embarrassed to do so. It's all about the tug of war between men and women. I wanted that embarrassment to be the eroticism of the stories.

The reason why I depict the effects of war in my comics is because I strongly believe that a person should learn from childhood how war can be destructive and how much people and societies may suffer from it, just the same way I learned it from the stories of adults around me when I was a little child.

It's not much fun if you show everything, or if you give too much information. I prefer to let loose with a little bit and let the imagination do the rest.

I must admit that I really like pictures of nude girls and that influenced the way I drew.