Yumiko Igarashi
4The Structure · 76いがらし ゆみこ
Born 1950
The artist of Candy Candy, whose sparkling-eyed heroines defined the look of 1970s shōjo.
4Filed under 4. The Structure takes a structure, and this entry is frames one.
Career
Yumiko Igarashi was born in Hokkaido in 1950 and made her debut in the late 1960s. She drew for Kodansha's girls' magazines, especially Nakayoshi.
The work
Candy Candy (1975–1979), written by Kyōko Mizuki, made her famous. She also drew Georgie!, a romance set in nineteenth-century Australia, and many other shōjo stories.
The style
Igarashi's art is the classic look of 1970s shōjo: huge, starry eyes, delicate faces, flowing hair and elaborate costume, often surrounded by flowers. It was imitated widely.
Why she matters
Her drawings of Candy are among the most recognisable images of shōjo manga, and her style shaped how a generation pictured girls' comics.
The name by its numbers
The arithmetic is unremarkable and worth doing anyway: 76 across 2 words, reducing to 4. The weight sits in “Igarashi”, which carries 45 on its own and reduces to 9.
Four is builder & organizer — structure, labour, and the building of lasting systems. The reference files it as a structure. Read that way, what the entry is really recording is the 4's insistence that what lasts must be built patiently.
Heart's Desire 11, Personality 11: the subject wants exactly what it appears to want, which is vision — an unusually undivided reading.
人格 core is 3, 総格 total is 16, a 7 and born is 1950, a 6 — none of which lands on the 4 the title gives. That disagreement is worth more than an agreement would be: it marks the distance between how a name travels and how it was written.
The 4 confuses the frame for the work. Structures outlive their usefulness, and several entries here describe conventions kept long past their reason. What the 4 still asks is that you look for the constraint the subject was working inside. The other entries that reduce to 4 are collected on The Structure.