Work Text:
Two Artists, Two Muses
June 6, 2025
Most people invested in arts and culture have probably heard the names Itadori Yuuji and Fushiguro Megumi, but probably never in the same sentence. It might even come as a shock to learn that the famous filmmaker and renowned author are married.
I felt that same shock when a coworker of mine randomly mentioned it a few months ago. What was that like? The union of two of the strongest creative minds working in their contemporary fields?
An email with some questions to the married couple graciously turned into an invitation to their home for an even longer, more in-depth interview.
It’s nerve-wracking, showing up to the house of two of your favorite creators. Even when I knock on the door, it feels unreal.
They greet me at the same time, holding the door open for me.
Their house is near the high school where they met, within walking distance in fact.
“In high school, the house was abandoned and we would talk for hours on the back porch. So when it went up for sale, we saw the perfect chance to make it a home,” Itadori says, smiling widely as he gives him a short tour.
The house itself is a hodge-podge of items. The living room might as well be a library, every bit of wall space is filled with shelves brimming with books. Some of them look ready to collapse under the weight. There’s more down the hallway. Each shelf is individually labelled with the genre. Chaotic, but organized chaos.
Even the kitchen has signs that the couple spend most of their time on their work. There’s a few scattered books and a reference guide to camera settings including examples from famous films on the kitchen table. There’s a lot of cookbooks, all handwritten on the counter.
“Some are the recipes I learned from my family,” Itadori says, before holding up a cookbook that’s just a small notebook a schoolkid would use. “This one Megumi’s sister made for us. She’s probably the best cook I know honestly.”
The office is shared between Itadori Yuuji and Fushiguro Megumi. It’s the biggest room in the house and it was originally supposed to be the master bedroom, but they both agreed they needed the working space more.
“We didn’t need that much room for a bedroom, but we definitely did for work,” Itadori told me, laughing while he opened the door to the office.
Half of the room is stacks and stacks of books, notebooks, and random papers. A desk with a laptop. It’s left open to a writing document, blank at the moment. Above it on the wall is a bulletin board covered in sticky notes.
There is a single orange sticky note with the words Chirema Shadow Garden written in large, bold handwriting.
“For a new story,” Is all Fushiguro says about it even after I asked a couple of times throughout my visit. “I haven’t shared anything publicly about it yet, but it’s a work in progress.”
Across from Fushiguro’s desk is another working space. Itadori’s things are far more chaotic, but none of it is the same. On one desk is a laptop, covered in stickers and taped up with orange duct tape on one side. There’s a folding table with several cameras, lens, and lighting equipment. Then there’s a small TV surrounded in stacks of DVDs with a collection that could belong in a museum.
“I’ve been collecting them since I was a kid,” Itadori says, picking up a director’s cut of Human Earthworm—his favorite since high school. “My grandpa and older brother really got me into films. My brother would always be watching something and I’d pretend to be asleep so I could watch the films that were too ‘serious’ for me. My brother always believed it.”
In the center of the room is a small two person table, just a side table really. But to Itadori and Fushiguro it’s so much more than that.
I asked them about the unusual setup.
“This is where we take breaks from working on our art,” Fushiguro explains to me, sitting down with a cup of black coffee that Itadori made for him. “Or we work on it together. We share whatever progress we have made or haven’t made.”
I ask how they work on it together since they work in different disciplines.
“Whenever I’m stuck, I always talk to Megumi. He just understands what I’m trying to do, but he’s also not afraid to challenge me if I’m stuck in what I had planned.” Itadori says this all with so much earnestly while he walked me through their back and forth process of creating.
Explaining. Then talking about whatever they’ve made. It’s a back and forth that can take hours as Fushiguro explains. “But that’s what makes it worth it.”
It’s hard to believe that some of the most impactful contemporary films and novels were created in the very same room I’m being shown.
The award winning collection of short stories Ten Shadows was written at this desk at the same time that record breaking independent film Divergent Fist was being edited right across the room.
“Of course, we didn’t know that what we were working on at the same would end up how it did,” Itadori says, as he shows me his fold-out table with sketchy thumbnails for all the scenes in Divergent Fist . “I had no idea that it would mean so much to that many people.”
Fushiguro says, “To us, it was just our everyday work.”
He explained that the idea for Ten Shadows happened by accident. At the time, he had been working on an entirely different project that’s still a work in progress when he started doing daily writing exercises to practice pushing his writing skills. “I started doing them to take a break and somehow it became interconnected stories.”
The sense of creation and culture continues throughout the whole house, all of it basically an unplanned shrine to their incredible bodies of work. Just walking into the storage room, I feel like a crazed fan seeing Itadori’s early designs for Tiger of the West casually sitting on a shelf covered in dust or seeing the physically handwritten version of Fushiguro’s Unequal novel from high school basically forgotten underneath a grocery list.
In the hall closet, Itadori shows me how there’s a whole shelf where he keeps props from his film sets. Just to name a few, he has the prosthetic hand for the Two-Faced Demon , the school uniform worn by the main character in Divergent Fist including the red hoodie, the exact copy of the script that he wrote all of his directing notes on for Divergent Fist .
There is a ripped up black notebook, seemingly used for scrap paper tucked away. I almost didn’t think anything of it until Fushiguo picked it up and said, “This was the first handwritten version of Demon Dogs .”
The iconic, thought-provoking series of short stories about morality, what it means to be a good person, handwritten by Fushiguro in a notebook originally used for grocery lists. I felt like I should have been wearing museum gloves just touching the notebook.
The shelf above it is entirely dedicated to the various awards that Itadori and Fushiguro have amassed over the years. I counted over fifty on that shelf alone.
I had to ask a stereotypical interview question while I was there, “Why did you become an artist?”
Itadori doesn’t hesitate to answer the question, it’s like he already had an answer in his mind before I asked. “Megumi, of course.” He says this like it’s to be expected, like there’s no other answer.
I direct the mini-recorder towards Fushiguro to capture his response. He takes a moment longer to answer. “I would’ve always been a writer, but without Yuuji I wouldn’t have been a good one. Nothing I would have written would have been meaningful.”
They say it so casually. But to me, this sounds more romantic than any romance film that I’ve ever seen. Maybe it’s the natural, honest way they say that makes it all the more so.
And of course, I had to ask, “So, how did you two meet?”
“During our first year of high school,” Fushiguro had started to say, but Itadori corrected, “Technically, we met before that.”
Fifteen years ago, two fifteen year-olds met at a hospital. Itadori was visiting his grandpa, Itadori Wasuke, who was staying long-term in the hospital for cancer. Normally, he only was able to visit after school was over, but on one particular day before he began high school, his middle school happened to close early because of a gas leak issue. So, he happened to be at the hospital during the afternoon.
It happened to be the same afternoon that Fushiguro Megumi skipped class to visit his sister, Fushiguro Tsumiki, in the hospital who had been on life support for a coma for over a year at that time. Normally, he would only visit with his guardians, but it just happened that one day he pretended to go to school to spend it with his sister.
It was this day that the two happened to meet.
“It was unusual to see another kid in the hospital, especially not with an adult,” Itadori explained. “So I remember staring at him in the waiting room and thinking the way he was sitting alone in the lighting would have made a good movie scene.”
It’s what inspired the opening scene to Itadori’s short film, Lonely Without You .
Fushiguro and Itadori ended up in the waiting room at the same time while they waited for a nurse.
“I like to joke it was fate,” Itadori says, smiling politely but he was only looking at Fushiguro as he said it. “But honestly, it was just all coincidence.”
Except that, the nurse never showed up to take them from the waiting room. The two fifteen year-olds ended up first talking to each other to figure out why it was taking so long and they had no idea that a single conversation with a stranger would alter their lives how it did.
“It was like we had known each other our whole lives,” Itadori tells me, with a nostalgic expression.
“I asked my guardians if I could switch high schools,” Fushiguro says, looking embarrassed to admit it even years later. “Because I told Yuuji that we were going to the same high school and I didn’t want to not see him again.”
If they were awake, they were talking to each other. Either in-person over the phone. It got to the point that Fushiguro’s guardians asked him why his phone bill was suddenly so much higher.
“The arts were a form of escape,” Fushiguro says, “Film for Yuuji and writing and books for me.”
But soon, conversations with each other became more important than escapism through media.
And inspiration too.
“Somehow, our conversations about reading or watching things became conversations about writing or directing something new.” Fushiguro describes it as, “Then and even now, we push each other. Creativity and as people.”
Even when I spoke to them individually, this idea continued.
“I wouldn’t be the filmmaker I am now if I never met Megumi,” Itadori says, sitting on top of one of his folding tables in the work room. “Almost everyone I knew at the time thought I should be an athlete and get a scholarship on that.”
But Itadori, even at fifteen years-old, knew that wasn’t what he wanted. Even when he was pressured by his school and advisors for university, he kept pushing the idea of attending a film school. It didn’t go over well.
In the end, he wasn’t able to attend film school how he planned. But it didn’t matter, their meeting set them forward on a path to creation, together.
As I walk through the house with the film crew, taking photos to include in my article, I pause to observe a simple scene between them.
They sit at the table in the middle of the office, talking quietly to each other. I can’t hear what they’re saying, but I don’t need to. There might as well not be anyone else in the world to them, solely focused on each other. The table is so small that their knees are touching, but it doesn’t seem to bother them.
These are two of the leading voices in arts and culture, and none of it would have mattered if they weren’t together. It begs the question; what is the point of the arts if it is never shared with someone who cares?