Furuya Usamaru's path to manga was unusual. He studied sculpture and abstract three-dimensional figures in art school, and afterwards even became involved with butoh dance. For a while he worked as a high school art teacher. He made his debut as a manga artist with the ground-breaking four-panel "gag" strip Palepoli, which was serialized in the legendary avant-garde comics magazine Garo in 1994. Since then he has gone on to publish in major weekly magazines in Japan, such as Young Sunday (where Short Cuts was first serialized). In English, his work has appeared in PULP: The Manga Magazine and Secret Comics Japan.

A message to American readers from Furuya Usamaru: "I've heard that 80% of America is made up of anthropocentric and passionate Christians who deny the theory of evolution. Could this be a misconception on my part? I think it probably is. I think there are a great many misconceptions between Americans and Japanese. If only we could overcome these through manga."

His self portrait is of a crabby (?) rabbit, which is a gag on the first kanji of his given name "兎", which means "rabbit".