
Toru Shinohara
Writing
Biography
Shinohara Tooru was born in Niihama, Ehime. After graduating from high school on March 1955, he started working at a factory in Osaka making car parts but quit after only ten months. He studied manga via a mail-offered course and wrote to various manga magazines. In 1958 came his first commercially printed work Fukumenhakushi (覆面博士) and he began his career as a manga artist. He is best known for Nippon Keibaden that detailed the history of Japan's horse racing industry and its horses. He is also known for beautiful amazon-like heroines who are never daunted by the hardship they endure. Since 1970, he has written a series of works titled Sasori, lit. scorpion, which is the name for a female inmate and heroine. Director Shunya Ito started a series of ten films starring Meiko Kaji based on the manga. However, Ito withdrew from the project after three, and Kaji four films. Many of his works have been turned into movies since 1972.
Known For

When a valuable suitcase is stolen, the mob, petty criminals, and a beautiful agent from the Elite Zero division are pulled into a battle to settle the score.
Zero Woman 2

In this installment of the Zero Woman series, Rei, the number-one assassin of the Tokyo Police Department's secret Zero Division, has been assigned to take out a notorious gangster responsible for dozens of murders. At the same time, she must protect the gangster's mistress from the hitmen who want to keep her from telling the police what she knows. At first, both women are upset about the arrangement, but they eventually come to appreciate each other.
Zero Woman: Dangerous Game

A famous businessman's links with organized crime are looked into by the Zero Division of the Tokyo Police, with the investigation being headed by a highly trained, extremely violent and very beautiful female officer. When not having shoot-outs with the crime syndicate thugs trying to kill her, she spends most of her time in her apartment, wearing lingerie and taking showers. A sub-plot involves the businessman's S&M-obsessed daughter.
Zero Woman: Final Mission

A mysterious female spy is recruited to infiltrate the Japanese underworld and gather evidence for a clandestine secretive branch of the Tokyo Police Department.
Zero Woman R

A special agent of the Tokyo Police has been given the assignment of assassinating a group of crime bosses. Soon afterwards, she encounters the hitman the crime bosses have sent to kill her. After talking together, they discover that they are equally reluctant to carry out their assignments. They are pushed onward by their respective bosses, however, until they must both decide where their loyalties truly lie.
Zero Woman: Assassin Lovers

Agent Zero is a cop that uses her own methods for dealing with criminals. After she unlawfully kills a rapist in a violent fashion, she is sent to prison and stripped of her badge. But very soon after, a rich politician's daughter is kidnapped by a ruthless gang. Agent Zero is let out of prison with the mission of going undercover to find the politician's daughter and return her safely. Using her deadly red handcuffs, she disposes of the criminals one by one.
Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs

Nami Matsushima, prisoner #701 is sent to a Woman's Prison for attempted murder. Nami is brought into Number 2 community cell, where suicides and unnatural deaths occurred one after another. In the punishment cell, Nami begins to look back in her past. After dealing with her horrible experiences, Nami seeks to escape from prison. Who will survive?
Female Prisoner No. 701 Scorpion: Gaiden

After being used and betrayed by the detective she had fallen in love with, young Matsu is sent to a female prison full of sadistic guards and disobedient prisoners.
Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41

After being cruelly set up and deceived by Sugimi, a detective in cahoots with the mob with whom she was whole-heartedly in love, Matsushima’s desire for revenge knows no bounds.
Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion

Following her successful prison break, Scorpion begins this third episode in the series hiding out in a brothel. Her prostitute friend tries to keep her identity secret, but the brothel's madam discovers that Scorpion is the ex-girlfriend of the vice officer who killed her lover.
Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable

On her 18th birthday, Nami witnesses the brutal murder of her parents by a man with a burn on his hand. She is then falsely accused of the crime and sent to jail. Sworn to vengeance, Nami battles corrupt officials and cruel inmates to escape prison, only to search through the underbelly of Japanese society to find the man with a burn on his hand, ‘stinging’ anyone in her way.
Sasori

Rei, the deadly but reluctant assassin for the Zero Division of the Tokyo Police Department, befriends a young man after she sees him cruising a gay bar looking for johns. After he gets beaten up by a group of street thugs, she takes him in to live with her. When a series of vicious murders takes place, she begins to suspect that the killer may actually be her friend taking revenge on everyone who has abused him. Will she uphold her duty to the police, or protect her only friend?
Zero Woman: The Accused

The Metropolitan Police Department '0'section, known as an organization in the police department that investigates a closed case. Well-trained detective in the '0' section, Rei, is looking for her memory that was lost during the training, while also investigating a human traffic which young woman being a victim. One day, classified killer virus was seized by rising terrorists. To investigate this case, public safety sent Sarah Kodama who specializes in molecular biology and computer, to work with Rei but Rei refuses to work with Sarah. Sarah was curious about mysterious Rei, so she starts to collect Rei's information and goes to see Rei's former boss, Asami. However, the man who appeared in front of Sarah was an assassinator who contemplates destruction of '0' section. What happens to Sarah...!? What is in Rei's lost memories!?
Zero Woman 2005

Special female detective Hanyu Asuka, codenamed 348 (Sashiba), receives a secret mission from the police commissioner to solve the blackmail case involving a genius Famicom designer. As Asuka continues her investigation, she discovers that Hayami, a gangster, is the culprit. However, after a gunfight, Hayami escapes, and a few days later, policewomen are killed one after another, as if in retaliation for Asuka...
Codename 348 Female Detective Sashiba

A ruthless pack of thugs force mild-mannered, caught-in-the-middle-of-something-bigger Nami to murder her fiance's sister, decidedly ruining her pending marriage and landing the poor girl in the most brutal women's prison ever seen. Inside the hellblocks, she decides to stop being a victim at all costs, and ends up becoming stronger and even more vicious than the craziest inmates in the pen. She eventually escapes in a most unusual way, gets valuable fight training from a mysterious mountain man and returns to the streets in order to make the thugs who ruined her life pay.
Sasori

Nami Matsushima, a former doctor, is put in prison for murdering one of the men who raped and killed her sister. Now, faced with violent and lecherous prison gangs, an aggressively amorous warden, and with a friend on death row, Nami must steel herself for a ten year stay in one of Japan's toughest women's prisons.
Scorpion: Double Venom

Mika Hino is a sharp-shooting investigator that belongs to the infamous "Gator Branch.” When an executive board member of a trading company is accused of being involved in a bribery, Mika is assigned to keep watch over him. A few nights later her target is found dead outside of his 30 floor office building. With an apparent suicide note as evidence, local police conclude the case as a suicide. Mika’s assignment may have ended in failure, but her mission has just begun...
Super Gun Lady: Police Branch 82

Nami is once again on the run from the law but is saved by an old classmate who works at a strip club. Through a subsequent conversation they discover they both have a score to settle with a particular crooked cop. However, Nami has doubts about ever trusting a man.
Female Prisoner Scorpion: #701's Grudge Song

A woman with no past or identity, Rei is a gorgeous undercover agent for the Zero Department, a deadly shadow division of the police force. But her skillshave made her a threat and this sleek, sexy assassin has been marked for death by a rival organization. It will take this deadly seductress every ounce of her cunning to survive!
Zero Woman: The Hunted

Nami Matsushima is used as a spy by her first real boyfriend, a police detective named Sugimi, to investigate a drug smuggling ring. However, her role is discovered and she is raped by several drug dealers. It emerges that Sugimi was simply using Matsushima as a pretext to obtain a bribe from the Yakuza. Seeking revenge, Matsushima makes a failed attempt to stab Sugimi on the steps of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police headquarters. She is sentenced to do hard time in a women's prison, where she is given the number 701.