Hide And Seek

Reviews Brian Nicholson | August 4, 2026 Children are always screaming, or so it seems, from the Drifting Classroom of Kazuo Umezz, or the sounds of a schoolyard. But it is not the case. Sometimes things are quite quiet, and it is in this quiet where despair lies, the cousin to the melancholy of childhood that so much of the best art about childhood touches on. The feelings evoked by Naono Yoshiko’s manga — dubbed “trauma shojo,” a genre designation I had never seen before, and collected in the volume Hide And Seek from the Smudge imprint of historic horror manga — are upsetting to behold, the silence offered up in the stead of cries for help. While Umezz's mood is one of hysteria, Naono's is one of desperation. Her art, comparatively amateurish, conveys a sense that she felt psychologically compelled to tell these stories; her retrospective essay recalling much back-and-forth with editors to make work of professional standards. You can see it in her characters’ eyes: The rough-hewn linework of the pupils, suggesting the gleam of suppressed tears in marks that don’t accumulate into a solid black. Umezz's characters find themselves in horrible circumstances, but Naono's hells are of...