Aka Akasaka (赤坂 アカ, born August 29, 1988 in Niigata Prefecture) is a Seinen manga writer and artist. Besides drawing manga, he also works as an illustrator and character designer, though in November 2022 he announced
that he would retire from drawing manga to focus solely on writing.
After working as an assistant, he debuted in 2011 with his first serialized manga, an adaptation of Hikaru Sugii's light novel Sayonara Piano Sonata in ASCII Media Works' Dengeki Maoh magazine. In 2013, Akasaka's own serialized manga ib: Instant Bullet was serialized in Dengeki Maoh, but was prematurely ended after 25 chapters in 2015.
In the same year, Akasaka launched his new work Kaguya-sama: Love Is War in Shueisha's monthly Miracle Jump. The romantic comedy series instantly became a hit, so that in March 2016 the series was transferred to Shueisha's Weekly Young Jump. The manga received two manga spinoffs, a light novel, an anime and a live-action adaptation. In April 2020, parallel to Kaguya-sama, Akasaka launched a second series in Weekly Young Jump, Oshi no Ko, with him as author and Mengo Yokoyari as artist. In 2023, after Kaguya-sama ended, Akasaka announced his retirement as an artist, but launched Renai Daikou as an author with Nishizawa 5mm as artist. Kaguya-sama, Oshi No Ko and Renai Daikou take place in the same universe.
He is also known to be an avid Apex Legends fan, to the point that he regularly takes breaks from writing during the same time a new Apex season starts.
Akasaka has a Twitter account, which he regularly updates with news about his works.
Manga series
- Sayonara Piano Sonata (2011–2012; artist, story by Hikaru Sugii, character design by Ryou Ueda)
- ib: Instant Bullet (2013-2015)
- Kaguya-sama: Love Is War (2015-2022)
- Kaguya-sama: Love is War - Doujin Edition (2018-2020; by Shinta Sakayama): An alternate universe fanfic.
- We Want to Talk About Kaguya-sama (2018-2022; by G3 Ida): A yonkoma spinoff of two side characters telling the story from their point-of-view.
- Original Hinatazaka (2021; artist; story by Nao Kosaka, Hinano Kamimura, and Miho Watanabe)
- Oshi no Ko (2020-present; storyboard, art by Mengo Yokoyari)
- Renai Daikou (2023-present; writer, art by Nishizawa 5mm)
