– highly stylized character designs, a focus on romance and fantasy, grandiloquent writing – in favor of artwork that was stripped-down and realistic, panels that focused on characters and actions over backgrounds and environments, and frequent action sequences. Her characters are drawn as realistically proportioned, contrasting both the "willowy bodies" typical of men in manga and the "hyperdefined anatomy" typical of men in manga (boys' manga). In contrast to the European settings popular in manga of the 1970s, Yoshida expressed a general disinterest in European culture and "English pretty boy types", preferring instead the "carefree attitude" of working-class American men. The physical appearance of many of the characters in Banana Fish is based on real-life public figures: Ash's appearance is based on tennis player Stefan Edberg in the earliest chapters of the series before shifting to a design based on actor River Phoenix, while Eiji is based on actor Hironobu Nomura. Yoshida likened this process of selecting real-life figures to depict as characters to casting a "B-grade action movie". The author developed an interest in River Phoenix after watching his 1986 film The Mosquito Coast while visiting the United States; she was unaware Phoenix also appeared in the 1986 film Stand By Me, which she had previously seen, and became intrigued by Phoenix's range as an actor given the differences between the two characters. Yoshida notes how as Ash's design shifted from the Edberg to the Phoenix design his physicality shifts as well, from "athletic and solidly-built" to a "slender pretty boy". Despite her lack of fixed composition for the story, Yoshida intended from the earliest stages of the series' development to have Banana Fish conclude with Ash's death. She briefly reconsidered this approach following Phoenix's death in 1993 at the age of 23, as she did not wish the series to be perceived as making light of a real-life tragedy. In discussing her rationale for Ash's death, Yoshida has indicated her fascination with people who live intensely and die young, describing Ash as a person who "lived his full life in 17 years"; further, Yoshida believed that as Ash had committed acts of violence and murder throughout the series, he needed to pay for these actions with his own life. The seeming ignominy of Ash's death at the hands of a low-level gang member was intentional on Yoshida's part; a protagonist who seems to die meaninglessly recurs as a