Yuko Shimizu – The Beautiful and the Grotesque

I follow a few different artists on Behance, including Yuko Shimizu.

 I wrote about Shimizu a while back but as a quick recap, she was born in Japan  and worked 11 years doing corporate PR in Tokyo until burning out (her only office job before switching to art), at which point she moved to NYC where she had lived briefly in her childhood. Once in NYC, Shimizu got an art degree, and is now an award-winning illustrator & teacher. Not bad, right?

Anyhow, back to Behance, I see that Shimizu has a new project up, illustrations for The Beautiful and the Grotesque by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. Akutagawa is a big deal in Japan but is best known in the West as the author of Rashōmon, which inspired the Akira Kurosawa film of the same name. For fans of the author, “The Beautiful and the Grotesque” was originally published as “Exotic Japanese Stories”.

Shimizu has illustrated the cover as well as numerous exquisite black and white illustrations throughout this collection of short stories. My personal favourite is this illustration for “The Kappa”.

Kappa are an interesting part of Japanese folklore. They are water spirits, varyingly portrayed as monsters or tricksters, but also worshipped as benevolent Shinto deities to ensure sufficient water for crops.   Is it wrong that they remind me of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Or, more to the point, that the TMNT remind me of them. Most westerners are only familiar with Kappa in the context of kappa rolls (kappamaki), so named as a traditional offering to prevent Kappa from abducting children is to throw cucumbers in a nearby lake.

Here are a couple more of the story illustrations – “Saigō Takamori” on the left, and “The Badger” on the right.

Amazing work as always. The entire Behance project can be seen here, and more of Shimizu’s work can be seen on her personal site, yukoart.com.