Korean-Japanese journalist and film critic Tomohiro Machiyama caught up with Hideshi Hino in 2004 as the ambitious Hino Horror series shifted into high gear, with nearly a dozen English-language translations of his greatest works released in just one year. The following interview covers Hino's life and work in manga, recent and ancient Japanese history, his family's connections to the Yakuza, and the notoriety surrounding his work on the Japanese horror film, Guinea Pig.

TOMO MACHIYAMA: You were born in 1946, the year after the Second World War ended.

HIDESHI HINO: My father worked for the Manchuria Railroad so we were living in a town called Chichiharu in Manchuria. [The country was then a Japanese colony.] After Japan was defeated, my father was supervising the retreat of the Japanese colonists from Manchuria; that is why we were still living there. My family went through all the hardship to retreat from the enemy territory to Japan, but I was too young to remember.

MACHIYAMA: Where did you grow up in Japan?

HINO: Initially we were staying with my mother's family in Gunma prefecture, but later we moved to Itabashi in Tokyo to stay with relatives. My father worked as a craftsman making buckets from copper and tin. My parents were surprised that I remembered that, saying, "You were only two years old!"

MACHIYAMA: Your stories often take place in rural settings.

HINO: Itabashi was very rural after the war.

MACHIYAMA: Your protagonists are often children who play with snakes and insects.

HINO: I didn't particularly like insects. I played with insects by pulling them apart, just as other kids did, but it's not that I had a special interest in them. I think insects are creepy, and that is why I use them in my horror stories. I also didn't particularly care for horror movies, or ghosts either.

MACHIYAMA: What was your first exposure to manga?

HINO: That would be Sugiura Shigeru. Like Sarutobi Sasuke or Doron Chibimaru, I liked the Ninja comedy manga. Sugiura's art was cute but also very surrealistic. I started drawing to imitate them, so I admit my art style has influences from his works. But later on I became more interested in movies than manga, particularly period pieces (Jidai Geki). I liked Akira Kurosawa but the biggest impact was from Seppuku (1962) directed by Masaki Kobayashi.

MACHIYAMA: There is a very shocking scene in Seppuku, where someone disembowels himself using a bamboo sword.

HINO: When I talk about Seppuku people usually say that I must have been impacted by the violence and cruelty, but that was not it. It was the movie's sense of realism that really stunned me. It was as if one traveled back in time to the Edo Period and used a video camera to film it. That is why I started thinking that I wanted to become a film director and create period pieces. So, when I was learning more about the Edo Period, I learned that there were very different fashions and life styles depending on the time period. It is a really deep subject. I felt that it would take my entire lifetime just to figure out what the Edo Period was all about. It was around this time that Sanpei Shirato's Ninja Bugeicho and Kamui Den really changed the world of manga. Now one could create stories and "spectacle" comics very realistically, like in film. So I was doodling in class and one of my friends saw what I was doing. Then he came and threw a stack of papers on my desk. They were drafts of manga that he had created. So I started competing with him making manga, and aspired to someday become a real manga artist.

MACHIYAMA: Did you start with horror?

HINO: No, period pieces, science fiction, and comedy. When I was 21 years old my work was featured in Com, a manga magazine published by Mushi Production, Osamu Tezuka's company. A group of us young aspiring manga artists were referred to as Gracon in Com, and somehow I ended up being the group's manager in Tokyo. Then one day, I found out that a new feature by Hosei Hasegawa had been canceled. I was chosen to fill in the pages. So I created a short piece called Tsumetai Ase (Cold Sweat), which is a comedy about a teahouse in the Edo Period.

MACHIYAMA: So your debut work was a comedy?

HINO: I intended it to be a black-humor piece, but nobody thought so. [Laughs.] The real breakthrough was Doro Ningyo (Mud Dolls), which was a feature in Garo. It's a story about kids who were born with defects due to pollution, which is along the lines of my work that followed. I was compensated nicely, and that was when I thought maybe I could make a living from this.

MACHIYAMA: That's when you switched from comedy to horror.

HINO: After I read Ray Bradbury's compilation of short stories, The Illustrated Man, I felt sparks in my head and all these ideas started flying out. That's when I thought maybe this genre is more suited for me. I was attracted by Bradbury's mixture of horror and fairy tale. At the time Shigeru Mizuki and Kazuo Umezu were popular in the horror manga genre, but there weren't any works that combined horror with a sense of märchen [German word for "fairy tales"]. So I thought of creating a short story like Bradbury's in a Japanese folktale world, and that is how Zoroku no Kibyo (Strange Disease of Zoroku) was born.

MACHIYAMA: Zouroku no Kibyo was a legend, and had its debut in a children's magazine. This work traumatized millions of Japanese kids, myself included, and has become synonymous with your name.

HINO: It took me about a full year to complete it in 1969. I redid so many hundreds of pages. I put everything I had into it. I thought it would either make me or break me. First I took it to Akita Shoten Publishing in Idabashi. They had just published Boken-Oh and Manga-Oh, aimed at elementary school kids. But the editor-in-chief told me "This work is too grotesque," and I was very disappointed. When I left the building I saw the Shonen Gaho Publishing building. So I immediately went to their editing department but they also rejected me. Next I thought of Kodansha Publishing. At the time their Shonen Magazine (then the most popular kids magazine) was featuring experimental stuff under Mr. Uchida, its editor-in-chief.

MACHIYAMA: That's when they were showing works like Tatsuhiko Yamagami's controversial anti-government political fiction, Hikaru Kaze (Shining Wind).

HINO: Yes. I was thinking about paying them a visit in the following year in 1970, but then Shonen Gaho contacted me, saying that they wanted my Zouroku no Kibyo in their magazine after all.

MACHIYAMA: And the response to the work?

HINO: I received many requests from other manga magazines as a result.

MACHIYAMA: I mean, did you receive any complaints from the readers? The story is about a lonely man named Zoroku, who had been infected with a strange disease. And thousands of colorful neoplasm erupt all over his body and he starts rotting. You depict the disgusting detail graphically.

HINO: [Laughs.] I guess there were complaints, but I didn't know about them at the time. Long afterwards people would tell me things like, "Reading your manga as a child made me feel sick so I stapled the pages together," or "I threw it down the pit toilet." I couldn't believe it, why down the pit toilet? [Laughs.]

[To read the full version of this interview, please see The Comics Journal 2005 Special Edition.]

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