Mibu Natsuki - Tetsudou Musume Illustrations

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Mibu Natsuki’s art book Tetsudou Musume Illustrations came out during the end of March, beginning of April period. Tetsudou Musume Illustrations is paperback, A4-size, and 128 pages. Japan’s railway girls in uniform has spawned a TV drama, manga, video games and figurines.

These uniforms are all very real and based off of uniforms worn throughout the train stations in Japan. This also accounts for the fact that some of the outfits worn aren’t terribly interesting. Then again every day work clothes seldom are.

All of the railway girls have had a figure made after them. They’re the small kind of gashapon figures that retail for around ￥525 to ￥630. In each section, after the character illustrations, there is a photograph of all the girls as figures. There have been nine series of six Tetsudou Musume figures each. So there are 54 solo character illustrations (one per figure) in the art book.

Each of the character pages includes profile information. You can read about the railway girls’ name, age, blood type and the train line you can spot her on. Most of the uniforms are pretty standard and believable, but some look like something out of a different era. It would be both weird and awesome to see someone dressed like that attending a train station!

The character profile illustrations make up the majority of Mibu Natsuki Illustrations Tetsudou Musume. In the back is an “Other Works” section. It includes more finished illustrations by Mibu Natsuki and other artists who drew for Tetsudou Musume.

It might surprise you to know that the illustrations above are not by Mibu Natsuki. These are by Sion, the artist commissioned for the Tetsudou Musume Nintendo DS game. The section includes Sora Kitahara’s illustrations for the Tetsudou Musume Song Collection covers.

Even Matsuda98, the artist for the Tetsudou Musume manga, has illustrations, though only two pages. But there is also a short manga at the back that is exclusive to the art book.

The art book finishes with rough sketches. When I bought Mibu Natsuki Illustrations Tetsudou Musume, I didn’t really expect a lot of art work in the book. But I just didn’t realize how much there really is for Tetsudou Musume. This really ended up being quite a good purchase!