The official website for Kodansha 's Bessatsu Friend magazine announced on Friday that manga creator Ai Morinaga passed away early in the morning on Friday, August 2 due to her worsening health.

Morinaga was born in Okayama Prefecture, and she made her professional debut with "11-nenme no Megami" in 1993. She then drew a manga adaptation of Naoto Kine 's Junkers Come Here novel in 1994. (The novel also inspired an anime film in the same year.) She serialized her original series Yamada Taro Monogatari in Kadokawa 's Asuka magazine from 1995 to 2000, and the manga inspired both a Taiwanese and a Japanese live-action series. Many of her later series — including Your & My Secret , My Heavenly Hockey Club , Duck Prince , The Gorgeous Life of Strawberry Chan , and The Super Cool Life of Strawberry Chan — received English releases from various publishers.

Her last manga serialization was Kirara no Hoshi (Twinkling Star), which launched in Bessatsu Friend in 2010, and ended in 2015. She since then published other one-shot manga anthologies.