One of the interesting issues I occasionally bump up against when covering the sort of things I cover is the fact that a lot of Asian creators operate under pen names and keep the details of who they really are rather private. I respect that wherever possible; you'll notice in my recent interview with the writer of The Expression: Amrilato, I only refer to them by their pen name and don't use gendered pronouns. (That latter one is primarily because, to be perfectly frank, I wasn't entirely certain if they were male or female and didn't want to offend!)
In certain circumstances, there are little nuggets of information that are interesting to include, however. I find the fact that Nekopara creator and artist Sayori is female rather interesting, for example — particularly as she hails from China, a culture even more restrictive than that of traditional Japan — and from a bit of cursory research today it appears that Ishikei, artist for Neko Works' new visual novel release Love Cube and apparently one of the most prolific doujinshi artists out there, might be female too.
I say "might" because I'm not sure. I've seen Ishikei referred to as "he" in numerous locations, including on Fakku, where several of their works are published in both digital and hardcopy format. But I also found an imgur gallery that seemed pretty convinced that Ishikei is a woman, as well as several threads around the place being quite excited about discovering that, again, supposedly, Ishikei is a woman.
This is particularly intriguing in the case of Love Cube because there's a character in it who appears to be either a self-insert for Ishikei or an homage to them… assuming Ishikei actually is female. It's a character who is reclusive and shrouded in mystery, yet widely respected as one of the best hentai manga artists out there, and even gets referred to as "sensei" in the same way that Ishikei does.
Trouble is, I'm not entirely sure how to find out one way or the other for absolutely certain without feeling like I'm getting a bit intrusive. Ishikei is actually on Twitter, so in theory I could just ask (in Japanese) but that, obviously, would be an extremely rude thing to do. I could also ask Fakku, but given that they refer to Ishikei as "he" on their website I probably can't count on an authoritative answer there. I do have someone on Twitter looking into the Japanese Internet for me, but who knows if they'll manage to find a definitive answer!
I don't suppose any of you lot reading this happen to know, do you…? 🙂
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