He was a public figure in Japan, known for wearing red-and-white-striped shirts and doing his signature "Gwash" hand gesture.

[3] He was inspired to start drawing manga by reading Osamu Tezuka's Shin Takarajima in fifth grade.

[7] In 1974 he won the 20th Shogakukan Manga Award for his series The Drifting Classroom about a school including its schoolchildren and teachers being teleported into an alternate post-apocalyptic universe.

[9] In 2018 he was awarded the Prize for Inheritance at the Angoulême International Comics Festival for the French translation of My Name Is Shingo.

He was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer, but did not undergo surgery, remaining in hospice care from September.

Manga artist and critic Sakumi Yoshino explains that his horror manga is related to religion in Japan, as monsters and demons are not considered completely evil, and Umezu wants readers to sometimes also feel compassion for the monsters in his works.

Umezu initially focused on this topic as he found that relationships between mothers and children in shōjo manga in the early 1960s were portrayed only as caring, never as scary.

His manga Reptilia depicts an intense conflict between a schoolgirl and her sick mother, who turns out to be a snake woman when she visits her in hospital.

[6] The children of the deserted school in The Drifting Classroom are immediately betrayed by their teachers and need to fight for their survival.

Junji Ito, Toru Yamazaki and Minetarō Mochizuki cite him as one of their biggest influences[16][10][17] and Kanako Inuki got her career start in a magazine compiled by him.

"[6] Umezu regularly received complaint letters from parents in the beginning of his career due to his horror visuals and also editors of magazines would ask him to scale down the violence in his imagery.

"[4] He was critical of watering down horror elements: "Old Japanese folk stories and fairy tales could be unflinchingly brutal.

It stars Mitsuki Takahata and Mugi Kadowaki as the lead characters and is directed and choreographed by Philippe Decouflé.