Shohei Manabe is a Japanese manga artist known for creating gritty stories that explore the underworld of Japanese society. Born in Chigasaki, Kanagawa prefecture, he decided to pursue a career as a mangaka after reading Doraemon during elementary school. After winning a contest in the 1990s and working part-time as a graphic designer, his first major published work was the one-shot Smuggler in 2000, which follows an illegal transporter of dead bodies who becomes entangled with yakuza and triad killers. The story was later adapted into a live-action film in 2011. He followed this with the four-volume dystopian cyberpunk series Dead End, serialized from 2001 to 2002, which features a world where mutated humans are used as weapons.

Manabe is best known for his landmark series Ushijima the Loan Shark, which was serialized in Shogakukan's Weekly Big Comic Spirits from May 2004 to March 2019 and collected into 46 volumes. The series offers a detailed and realistic depiction of a yamikin, or loan shark, named Kaoru Ushijima, and the desperate clients who fall into his orbit. The work became a major success, inspiring a live-action television drama that ran for three seasons totaling 27 episodes, as well as four live-action films released between 2012 and 2016. The popularity of Ushijima the Loan Shark also led to several spin-off manga, including works focusing on supporting characters and their stories, such as Yamikin Ushijima-kun Gaiden: Namerikawa-gumi Yakuza Meshi, which centers on the meals of the yakuza group that appears in the main series. For his work on Ushijima the Loan Shark, Manabe received the 56th Shogakukan Manga Award for general manga in 2010, and the series was also nominated for the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize in 2008 and 2010. In 2020, the series earned a Social Impact Award at the Japan Media Arts Festival. Following the conclusion of his major series, Manabe launched a new work, Kujō no Taizai, which began serialization in October 2020.