What inspired Bleach?

Asked which manga he read when young that inspired him to become a manga artist, Kubo named one title first, in a Shonen Jump Alpha interview published by Viz Media: 'GeGeGe no Kitaro by Shigeru Mizuki was my earliest influence. It was the first manga whose characters I ever tried to sketch. I really liked his yokai design, and his art has a unique flavor. My art style is so simple compared to Mizuki Sensei's work, which is very detailed. But I feel that there is some influence from him in terms of my character design. Even to this day, seeing Mizuki Sensei's art makes me very excited.' A series about a boy mediating between humans and spirits begins, by its author's account, with a childhood spent copying Japan's most famous spirit manga.

Kubo has described the series itself as starting from a picture, not a plot: he wanted to draw a shinigami wearing a kimono. That single design wish, per the production record, formed the basis for the Soul Reapers' look and for the conception of Rukia Kuchiki, and an early version of the concept had the Soul Reapers using guns under the working title "Snipe" before swords replaced them and the title became Bleach. The black kimono uniform that defines the series' visual identity is therefore not a costume choice made for a story. It is the seed the story grew from.

For the fighting, Kubo has cited Masami Kurumada's Saint Seiya, a series he enjoyed in his youth, as an influence on Bleach's focus on weaponry and combat, and Saint Seiya's use of Greek mythology as an influence on Bleach's own borrowings from mythology and the afterlife. The pattern across all three stated influences is consistent: a spirit world from Mizuki, a uniform from a design wish, and named weapons and mythic structure from Kurumada. Each is a visual or structural inheritance, which is what a characters first, design first artist would be expected to carry.

The most retold inspiration story about Bleach says that Akira Toriyama read Kubo's rejected first pitch and wrote him a letter of encouragement that kept him going. It appears on the series' English reference pages and has been repeated by major outlets. It is not printed above, for a documented reason: an investigation of the claim found that the anecdote is not a quote from Kubo, that no Japanese interview in which Kubo or Toriyama tells it has ever been produced, and that the story traces back to a single English language fan site from the early 2000s that gives no source at all. Kubo's admiration for Toriyama is real and on record. The letter, on the record available, is not. Inspiration pages in this Library run on the author's word, and his word is not behind that one.