The Picturebooks of Ryoji Arai: A World Shared with Children

Abstract

The Picturebooks of Ryoji Arai: A World Shared with Children Yukiko Hiromatsu (bio) Translated by Deborah Iwabuchi In 2005, Ryoji Arai was the first Japanese to win the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (ALMA). Following Maurice Sendak, he was the second illustrator in the world to be so honored. This is what the judges had to say about him: [A]n illustrator with a style all of his own: bold, mischievous, and unpredictable. His picture books glow with warmth, playful good humor, and an audacious spontaneity that appeals to children and adults alike. In adventure after adventure, color flows through his hands in an almost musical way. As a medium for conveying stories to children, his art is at once genuine and truly poetic, encouraging children to paint and to tell their own stories. ("Ryôji Arai") Ryoji Arai was born in 1956 in Japan’s Yamagata Prefecture. As a child, his brothers got him interested in manga and illustrations, and he loved Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz. He majored in design at Nihon University College of Art. As a student, he was introduced to the world of picturebooks when his girlfriend gave him one of the Miffy books by Dick Bruna. It was not until much later, though, that he actually began creating and publishing his own. Indeed, he was somewhat of a late bloomer in the field, with his first picturebook published in 1990. The title was Melody, and it was a simply bound book in a limited edition of 500 copies. Since then, he has published more than sixty picturebooks of his own and illustrated more than two hundred other children’s books. The ALMA in 2005 came at just about midpoint in his career. Click for larger view View full resolution He is not the type of artist whose work goes through transformations, and he can be defined as one who “continues singing the same song.” Today, thirty years after his publication debut, he is still consistent in his attitude toward both his theme and his readers. His expression, however, is like a spiral staircase that looks at ideas from different angles, changes its approach, and further evolves. He has clearly done his best work in the fifteen years since the ALMA. Innovation Perched on the Classics Long before his first book was published in 1990, Arai was a popular [End Page 72] illustrator among young people, appearing in a variety of printed media. As early as the 1970s, when he was a teenage art student, Arai was drawn to picturebooks. That particular decade saw a boom in the genre in Japan, and Arai went to bookstores to find good picturebooks from all over the world. The work that got him started on his path was Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown (1910–1952). He felt that Brown’s work embodied the essence of picturebooks. For a full decade before he was published, Arai operated under the radar, passionately absorbing the work of prominent Japanese book illustrators, including Shinta Cho (1927–2005) and Seizo Tashima (1940–), the latter of whom was short-listed for the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2020. Click for larger view View full resolution Arai finally appeared on the scene in 1990, just as the Japanese picturebook boom began to wane and needed a breath of fresh air. For the first ten years following, however, there were some adults in the Japanese reading movement who claimed that Ryoji Arai’s picture books were not for children. When grown-ups declare anything as inappropriate for young readers, it is usually because they can’t explain it to children. The truth was that, as the ALMA critique said, Arai’s illustrations were “bold, mischievous, and unpredictable.” They were, and still are, as free and unconstrained as children, full of extemporaneity. The stories, however, originate in text that is intellectually conceived. As a youth, Arai studied the classics, and the plots of his stories do not follow a typical path, with the joy of unfolding plot and continuity kept to a minimum. Each book has the standard thirty-two pages, but in each one he pursues new possibilities in expression and makes new discoveries. One...