Mari Okazaki

Okazaki started drawing in high school and submitted her illustrations to different magazines. For her, this was both a training for art school, which she wanted to apply for, and a way to make money from the prize money. She had saved more than 1 million yen when graduating from high school. The magazine Fanroad by the publisher Rapport published her first manga. She enrolled in and graduated from Tama Art University with a major in design. After university, she worked for the advertising company Hakuhodo, doing conceptual and design work.[1][2]

Her career as a manga artist became more successful in 1994, when she won a newcomers' award of Bouquet magazine, published the short story "Bathroom Gūwa" and started becoming a regular contributor for the magazine afterwards. Okazaki herself considers this to be her proper debut as a professional manga artist. She was a regular contributor for [[Cookie (Japanese magazine)|{{Nihongo|Cookie]] from its first issue, the successor to Bouquet. She continued working in advertising until 2001, when she decided to completely focus on her career as a manga artist.[1][3][4] Her first longer series was Suppli, which she published from 2003 to 2009 in the josei magazine Feel Young and which is set in an advertising company.[2] While working on Suppli, she gave birth to three children.[5]

Okazaki worked occasionally for seinen magazines already in the early 2000s. From 2014 to 2021, her first longer series for a seinen magazine was published in Monthly Big Comic Spirits, the historical manga A-un. The series is her most critically acclaimed work so far. It was commended by manga authors Ryoko Yamagishi, Yuki Suetsugu and Masami Yuki and writers Rio Shimamoto and Kazuki Kaneshiro.[6] A-un was one of the Jury Recommended Works at the 23rd Japan Media Arts Festival in 2020.[7]

Several of her manga, among them Kanojo ga Shinjatta and Shibuya ku Maruyama cho, have been adapted as live-action films or TV series. Her work has been translated into English, French[8] and Polish.