Naoya Matsumoto

Naoya Matsumoto is the Japanese manga artist behind *Kaiju No. 8*, a series that began publication on Shueisha’s Shonen Jump+ platform in July 2020. Before that breakout work, he created *Neko Wappa!*, serialized in *Weekly Shonen Jump*, and *Pochi Kuro*, published on Shonen Jump+. Those titles trace a career across both Shueisha’s print magazine and its digital manga platform.

*Kaiju No. 8* follows Kafka Hibino, a man in his thirties who works for a company that cleans up the remains of monsters. Kafka once hoped to join Japan’s Defense Force alongside his childhood friend Mina Ashiro, but she became a commander while he remained outside the organization. After an encounter with a small creature, Kafka gains the ability to transform into a powerful kaiju. Matsumoto builds the story around a difficult contradiction: Kafka wants to protect people as a Defense Force member, yet the force exists to destroy beings like the one he has become.

The series gives that conflict a specific workplace setting. Kafka’s cleanup job shows what happens after a spectacular monster battle, while his younger colleague Reno Ichikawa helps push him to try for the Defense Force again. Other central figures include recruit Kikoru Shinomiya and Soshiro Hoshina, vice-captain of the Third Division. The Defense Force assigns numbers to significant kaiju, giving Kafka’s transformed form the designation that supplies the manga’s title.

Matsumoto’s earlier *Pochi Kuro* also uses an encounter between different worlds as its premise. It centers on Kuro, a demon, and Pochi, a human girl who arrives in the demon world. Unlike the military organization and monster emergencies of *Kaiju No. 8*, that series draws much of its story from the pair’s attempts to understand and travel with one another.

The reach of *Kaiju No. 8* extended beyond its original Shonen Jump+ chapters. VIZ Media publishes the manga in English. An animated adaptation produced by Production I.G premiered in 2024, with Studio Khara responsible for kaiju designs. The adaptation brought Kafka’s transformation, Mina’s command of the Third Division, and the series’ numbered-monster concept to television audiences.

Matsumoto’s best-known work is distinctive for making an aspiring recruit older than the usual teenage action-manga lead and for starting his journey in the unglamorous business of removing kaiju remains. That combination of Kafka’s stalled ambition, cleanup work, and dangerous new identity is central to the story Matsumoto created.