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Akihiro Yamada is a Japanese illustrator and manga artist best known for his work in the sub-genre of historical fantasy, as well as character design for video games and other media. All of this art is very accomplished—he’s great with lengths of billowing fabric—while giving no hint at all of his earlier detours into cosmic horror. I’ve been familiar for some time with a couple of his covers in the “Cthulhu” series (c. 1988–1993) but hadn’t gone looking for the entire run until now. Doing so turned up another series of books published in the early 2000s by Kurodahan Press, Lairs of the Hidden Gods, with a quartet of covers in which the traditional Japanese print-making theme of the four seasons is given a demonic twist. All of these books are reprints of stories by Lovecraft and other writers, past and present, with the Kurodahan series being introduced by Robert M. Price. The artwork, meanwhile, is very different in style to Yamada’s more recent output, to an extent that you wouldn’t connect these covers with his fantasy illustrations without seeing a credit.

I’ve long been curious about Japanese representations of the Cthulhu Mythos. Lovecraft’s fiction has obvious attractions for the Japanese imagination but the art used by Japanese publishers doesn’t always travel overseas unless the artists themselves capture the attention of aficionados in other countries. ISFDB is a very useful resource but it’s still lacking when it comes to the listing of foreign editions. There’s more out there to be discovered.

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