Tsubasa Yamaguchi
9The Closing · 54山口 つばさ
The creator of Blue Period, a manga about learning to paint, drawn by an artist trained at Tokyo University of the Arts.
9Name sums to 54 and reduces to 9 — The Closing, where the reference files a completion.
Career
Tsubasa Yamaguchi studied oil painting at Tokyo University of the Arts, the school her hero aims for in Blue Period. She began publishing manga in the 2010s.
The work
Blue Period, which began in Monthly Afternoon in 2017, won the Manga Taishō in 2020 and has been adapted as an anime and a film.
The style
Yamaguchi draws on her own training, explaining techniques and critiques in detail, and shows art as both a craft to be learned and a way of expressing oneself. Her characters are complex and honest about their doubts.
Why she matters
Blue Period is one of the best manga about learning an art, and has inspired many readers to start drawing and painting.
The name by its numbers
Counted letter by letter this name comes to 54 — 9 once reduced. The weight sits in “Yamaguchi”, which carries 43 on its own and reduces to 7.
The reference files it as a completion. The number's contribution is endings, compassion, and the closing of cycles — and with it the 9's sense of a cycle closing and something being released, which is the thread the reference follows here.
Split the name again and the vowels give a Heart's Desire of 1 (initiative) against a Personality of 8 (power) in the consonants — initiative underneath, power on the surface. The gap between them is where the subject is most interesting.
The letters give 9; the subject's own figures do not agree. 人格 core is 4 and 総格 total is 15, a 6. Where the two part company the reference trusts the figures, because the romanisation is a convenience for readers abroad, while the strokes are what the pen name was actually built from.
Read on the 9's terms, this entry asks you to work out what survived the ending. The 9 sentimentalises. An ending is not automatically a meaning, and the reference tries not to pretend otherwise. The other entries that reduce to 9 are collected on The Closing.