Kazuya Kuramoto is a Japanese manga artist whose work draws on interviews with soldiers and civilians who have experienced Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. His representative work and first collected volume, “Battle Scar,” was selected as a finalist for the Manga Grand Prize at the 29th Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize. Its stories include one modeled on a real Ukrainian soldier inspired by Japanese ninja manga, as well as accounts of people who have lost family members and homes and soldiers living with the physical and psychological effects of combat. Through these individual experiences, Kuramoto records the daily reality of war and the lasting wounds that cannot be conveyed by casualty figures or maps of the front.
