Ryū Mizunagi is a Japanese manga artist and illustrator, born on March 23 in Aichi Prefecture. The creator is confirmed to be male, though some Western publications have occasionally referred to him with female pronouns. Mizunagi began his professional career in 2004, when his one-shot manga Witch Craft Works won an honorable mention in Kodansha’s Afternoon Four Seasons Award under the pen name Kurohitsuji Ruurei. He later adopted additional pen names, including Mizunagi Ruurei, before settling on Ryū Mizunagi around 2010.

Mizunagi is best known as the author and illustrator of the manga series Witch Craft Works. The series began serialization in Kodansha’s Good! Afternoon magazine in March 2010 and concluded in February 2022, with its chapters collected into 17 tankōbon volumes. The story follows a high school boy named Honoka Takamiya and his powerful classmate Ayaka Kagari, a witch who secretly protects him. The series received an anime television adaptation produced by J.C.Staff, which aired in Japan from January to March 2014. Mizunagi is credited as the original creator for the anime. A follow-up series, Witch Craft Works Extra, began serialization in Good! Afternoon in 2022.

Beyond his signature work, Mizunagi authored the short series Kill Wizard, which ran as a short-term serialization in Weekly Shōnen Magazine in 2006 and was collected into a single volume. In 2015, he launched another ongoing series titled Ivory Dark in Kodansha’s Magazine R. He also contributed a short story titled The Witch’s Lover to the Cigarette Anthology in 2013.

Little is publicly known about Mizunagi’s personal artistic identity or recurring thematic preoccupations beyond the content of his published works. His major industry significance stems from the success of Witch Craft Works, which achieved both a complete serialization run and an anime adaptation by a major studio, as well as English-language publication by Vertical Comics in North America.