Raising a Smile: The work of Satoshi Kitamura
Satoshi Kitamura is a Japanese author and illustrator who has been creating books for over four decades. Here he talks to Jake Hope about his work, his unique style and the inspiration behind his stories and images.
E VERY line in
Satoshi Kitamura’s illustrations is
energetic, expressive and filled with
emotion. His style is at once distinct and fresh. Born in Tokyo in 1956, Satoshi was an avid reader of comics as a child and has always been attracted to visual designs. Out of this interest, stems a real eye for visual play which characterises much of his work. Satoshi wrote and illustrated his first story at the age of nineteen and showed this to a number of publishers without initial success. Around this time, he began working as a commercial illustrator in magazines and advertising. Life changed for Satoshi when he was 23-years-old. Having always held the ambition to go abroad and experience more of the world, Satoshi left his job and travelled to the UK where he settled in London. He spent a lot of time pounding the streets of the city, getting to know more about its different parts.
Inspired by boredom
“One day while bored lying in my bed, I came up with an idea for a story. I wrote it down and drew some illustrations and sent it to 10 publishers. Most of them told me they were interested and invited me to their offices.”
The story, sadly, was not published, but Satoshi met Klaus Flugge, the founder of Andersen Press. Klaus was so impressed by Satoshi’s style that he gave him the text for Angry Arthur by Hiawyn Oram, which became his first published book in 1982 and which was awarded the Mother Goose Award and the Japanese Picture Book Award. A real classic, it tells the story of titular Arthur who becomes incredibly angry when his mum won’t allow him to stay up to watch a western on television!
The skill of the illustrations is in providing a child’s eye perspective on the world and the disproportionate intensity of the rage that Arthur feels. It is brilliantly captured in both text
“He got so angry that his anger became a stormcloud exploding thunder and lightning and hailstones”
And in Satoshi’s illustration – a jumble of objects tossed hither and thither and lightning lines brilliantly bisecting the illustration whilst matching the lips on Arthur himself. The whole world becomes tainted by Arthur’s anger with storms, floods and typhoons.
Satoshi considers himself lucky to have worked on Hiawyn Oram’s text as his first book, saying: “Angry Arthur is one of the greatest picturebook texts. I learnt so much from illustrating Hiawyn’s writing.”
Jake Hope (@Jake_Hope) is a freelance development and children’s book consultant, and the current chair of CILIP’s Youth Libraries Group (YLG) and CILIP Carnegie Kate Greenaway Awards Working Party. He is also the author of Seeing Sense Visual literacy as a tool for libraries, learning and reader development.
www.jakehope.org.
The pair would collaborate again
on In the Attic a brilliant exploration of the limitless expanses of a child’s imagination, beginning when a boy is bored with his toys and climbs into a seemingly empty attic. It is a treatise on seeing and close observation, with a family of mice, a spider’s web and then the opening of a window to other worlds as his imagination literally and metaphorically takes flight. The book is filled with characteristic visual detail, whimsy and humour.
Collaboration
Satoshi has collaborated with a huge array of talented poets including John Agard with whom he created The Young Inferno an impressive urban reimagining of Dante’s Inferno telling
Spring-Summer 2021
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