)[1]: 92 Following the devastation of Tokyo, including its publishing industry, in the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, Matsumoto decided to try his fortunes overseas, and managed to obtain free passage to Shanghai.

[1]: 124–125  Matsumoto first ventured into manga in Shōjo Gahō, creating a series of illustrated narratives featuring a lively Chinese girl named Poku-chan, which was irregularly published between November 1930 and March 1934.

[12] Matsumoto could draw in a wide range of styles, from the realistic to the near-abstract, but all of his work was distinguished by clean, almost geometrical lines and a strictly Modern sensibility.

Printed as an over-sized pamphlet with a sturdy cardboard cover, and included as a premium in the April issue of Shōjo no tomo, The Mysterious Clover was a variation on The Scarlet Pimpernel and Zorro.

[16] The Mysterious Clover had been neglected for decades by manga scholars until it was displayed at a 2006 exhibition at the Yayoi Art Museum, where it caught the eye of Fusanosuke Natsume, who then wrote about it on his blog and in a newspaper column.

[2] Matsumoto's most famous work is his manga Kurukuru Kurumi-chan (くるくるクルミちゃん),[e][1]: 24  which was serialized in Shōjo no tomo from January 1938 until December 1940.

Featuring the daily antics of a little girl named Kurumi (クルミ, meaning "walnut"), each episode was a self-contained story, usually running 4 pages and 22 panels.

Although he continued to do illustration work in a variety of styles, his focus shifted to the kind of hyper-stylized, wryly adorable character epitomized by the later Kurumi-chan.

Inc." were perhaps the mostly widely consumed and recognized, and it has been suggested that the company changed its name to Combi (コンビ) in 1961,[24] which comes from the English "combination" and is used in Japanese to mean "duo") in response to the popularity of the infant duo, "Haamu" (ハーム) and "Monii" (モニー), created by Matsumoto and featured on a wide array of the company's products.

[1]: 68–69 In 1971, now in his late 60s, Matsumoto built an atelier, "Chijunbō" (稚筍房, "Young Bamboo Shoot Studio") in Kamishiraiwa (上白岩on the Izu Peninsula, where he turned his creative talents from the modern and cosmopolitan to the traditional and provincial.

Using the bamboo that was so plentiful in the area, he designed a variety of toys and objects that could easily be reproduced by the local farmers to sell as souvenirs.

[1]: 120  Although these works seem strikingly at odds with Matsumoto's cosmopolitan image, he in fact had always had an eye for the traditional, and was particularly fond of collecting carefully selected Japanese and Korean pottery and furniture.

Modern or traditional, Western or Eastern, the common thread that runs through Matsumoto's aesthetic sense, and his work, is an appreciation of that which is refined, simple, elegant, and unpretentious.

Furthermore, although doctors said he had lost his sight, Matsumoto would open his eyes, and, as if looking in a mirror, would straighten the hairs of his mustache with his fingers as he had habitually done for years.