Tsumugi developed a specific style within the visual and narrative grammar of shōjo manga to convey the emotional depth of her characters.
The story revolves around a highschool girl with family issues who falls in love with a juvenile delinquent who is part of a motorcycle gang.
Her next series Mabataki mo Sezu [ja] ("Without Blinking") was her longest; it ran from 1987 until 1990 and depicts the love story between two high school students in a small town.
[5] She became friends with fellow Bessatsu Margaret contributors Fusako Kuramochi, Chiaki Hijiri [ja] and Kaoru Tada while working for the magazine.
However, she released a picture book compiled of watercolor panels from previous manga of hers in 2014[2] and supervised the script of the 2014 live-action film adaptation of Hot Road.
Themes like mental health and grief appear in Kanashimi no Machi ("Town of Sorrow),[5] the short story "Yokohama, 14-sai, Yūko" deals with a 14-year-old having an abortion.
[9] Thorn sees Tsumugi's focus on marginalized youth as an example of the development of shōjo manga in the 1980s, which at this point had lost some of its innocence when depicting relationships and identity.
[10] Tsumugi also conveys emotion through the placement of speech bubbles, the empty space around them and experimental page layouts with dissolving or overflowing panels.
[13] Rachel Thorn calls her use of light, white space and fluid page layouts "unprecedented" in shōjo manga.
[14] Critic Eiji Ōtsuka considers Tsumugi's experimentation with form in her work in the second half of the 1980s as the peak of a visual trend in shōjo manga that was established by the Year 24 Group in the 1970s.
[8] Midori Kusaka credits her with bringing "reality" into shōjo manga by focusing on themes like abortion in "Yokohama, 14-sai, Yūko" and everyday life of ordinary high school students in the countryside in Mabataki mo Sezu, as opposed to the idealized storytelling of romance in shōjo manga before her (e.g. the idealization of boys love).