Mari Yamazaki

ヤマザキ マリ

Mari Yamazaki is a Japanese manga artist known for her seinen comedy manga Thermae Romae. She was born in Tokyo, but spent many years in Italy and now lives in Chicago. Between 2003 and 2013 she lived in Syria, Portugal and the United States.

First, she went to Italy to study art when she was 17. She was planning to study in UK, but a ceramics artist called Marco Tasco (マルコ爺さん) convinced her and her family to go to Italy instead. She attend the National Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, where she studied art history and oil painting.

As soon as her son, Derusu was born in Italy, she decided to become a single mother and returned to Sapporo, Japan with her son where her mother lived. That's about when she started Manga seriously in order to support herself and her son. She debuted as a manga artist in 1997. She couldn’t make a living just from manga at her earlier career, and so taught Italian at a university, worked on TV as a reporter specializing in hot spring resorts. This eventually inspired her later big hit, "Thermae Romae."

She was awarded the 3rd Manga Taishō and the Short Story Award in the 2010 Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prizes. An anime adaptation of the manga has been produced and aired and a live-action film adaptation was released in April 2012, with its sequel, Thermae Romae II, in April 2014.