Barasui, also written as ばらスィー, is a Japanese manga artist born on January 29, 1980, in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture. Before achieving mainstream success, Barasui was active in the Japanese dojinshi (fan-made comics) scene and created works in the hentai and lolicon genres. Barasui is best known as the sole creator of the manga series Strawberry Marshmallow (Ichigo Mashimaro), a comedy slice-of-life story about four elementary school girls and their older sister figure. The manga began serialization in ASCII Media Works' Dengeki Daioh magazine in 2002, with the first compiled tankobon volume released on January 27, 2003. As of February 2023, nine volumes have been published. The series is noted for its tagline, Cute is justice, and for incorporating numerous musical references, including allusions to artists such as Radiohead, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Aphex Twin, with the title itself inspired by a single by Japanese rock artist Tamio Okuda. Strawberry Marshmallow was adapted into a twelve-episode anime television series that aired from July to October 2005, produced by studio Daume and directed by Takuya Satō. A PlayStation 2 visual novel game was also released in August 2005. The franchise continued with a three-episode original video animation (OVA) released from February to April 2007, followed by a two-episode OVA titled Strawberry Marshmallow Encore released in 2009. In the anime adaptation, the age of the eldest character, Nobue, was changed from sixteen to twenty years old compared to the original manga. Barasui's art style is characterized by characters drawn according to the child schema, with large heads, round stylized faces, large eyes, and detailed attention to clothing. The success of Strawberry Marshmallow has been recognized as providing a commercial template for subsequent cute-girls-doing-cute-things (often referred to as slice-of-life or moe) series, with its influence noted in the genre. The manga has been licensed for English publication in North America and Germany by Tokyopop, though those releases are now out of print, while French publisher Kurokawa continues to release the series under the title Les petites fraises.