having an abortion. Manga scholar Rachel Thorn called her stories "sensitive" and "moving". Masanao Amano describes that Tsumugi often draws "the kind of situation when a person is so engrossed with what they are feeling internally, the world around them fails to have any kind of meaning." While the protagonists in her first short stories were college students, she became most known for centering the lives of high school and junior high school students. In her later career, she had works focusing on elementary school students. Her characters were usually youth with family issues such as problems between parents and children, an absent father the breakdown of a family. Hot Road deals with the impact of "yankee" subcultures of juvenile delinquents in motorcycle gangs in Japan in the 1980s; Marie Kim considers her portrayal of rebellious female delinquents a glorification of "yankee" culture. Other shōjo manga artists like also portrayed "yankee" culture at the time. Thorn sees Tsumugi's focus on marginalized youth as an example of the development of shōjo manga in the 1980s, which at this point had lost some of its innocence when depicting relationships and identity. While some of her manga like Hot Road are set in urban environments, other like Mabataki mo Sezu are set in the countryside. Titles and dialogue often incorporate colloquialisms. The dialogue in Mabataki mo Sezu is consistently written in the local dialect of Yamaguchi Prefecture, where the story is set. Visuals While her aesthetic is, according to Rachel Thorn, within the "visual grammar of shōjo manga", Tsumugi is credited with creating new forms of expression within this aesthetic. Tsumugi uses experimentation with form in order in order to create multi-layered depictions of the psychology of her characters. Her style is marked by placing empty space and, especially in Mabataki mo Sezu, vast landscapes in the center. There are hardly any close-ups of faces of characters in her work, often characters stand alone in a scenery. Tsumugi herself expressed in an interview that she enjoys drawing background scenery, as opposed to many other shōjo manga artists. She adds sound words to background scenes taking place in the far distance. Thorn writes, "Delicate images are set against a stark white background. Readers get the feeling of viewing the action from afar, as if remembering some long-forgotten memory". Tsumugi conveys emotion through the placement of speech bubbles, the empty space around them and experimental