Fumiko Takano is a Japanese manga artist. Influential among the "New Wave" manga artists in the late 70s and early 80s, Takano was one of the first women manga artists to publish in outlets not explicitly aimed at a female readership. She won the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize in 2003, and in 2015 she was the second-ever manga artist to win the Iwaya Sazanami Literary Award. She lives in Tokyo.

Alexa Frank is an editor and translator of Japanese. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Fulbright program, she has translated over twenty volumes of manga, most recently Nazuna Saito's Offshore Lightning (nominated for the 2024 Ignatz Awards), Kyoko Okazaki's River's Edge (nominated for the 2024 Eisner Awards), and Shirakawa Gin's A Story of Seven Lives. She lives in New York.