- The Guardian, Saturday 8 November 2008
It's now over a quarter of a century since Angry Arthur was first published and, apart from a red telephone box, a rogue cigarette ad and a Routemaster bus, it hasn't really aged at all.
The story starts in a family house in London. It's brimming with toys, games and home comforts, but when Arthur is told to switch off the TV he throws a volcanic tantrum. Parental reproaches cause further eruptions; soon the house is in ruins, a hurricane destroys the neighbourhood and a tidal wave submerges the whole city. Arthur clings angrily to the wreckage, his mouth set in a jagged grimace as he is tossed about on waves of fury and frustration. The powerful economy of Hiawyn Oram's text is brilliantly interpreted by Satoshi Kitamura's mischievously detailed illustrations. Even at the start of his career, the Japanese-born illustrator was blithely able to combine imaginative extravagance with comic simplicity.
Astonishingly, this was the first book Kitamura had ever illustrated. He instinctively found the balance between words and pictures. Did he work closely with the author? "No, I didn't know her well at that point, but we were clearly on the same wavelength, and I was very happy that her text gave me the freedom to find my own way through the story — I like to 'read between the lines '. It's the same with poetry — it's in that space between the lines that I find things to illustrate."
In the Attic (1984), also by Oram, again gets right inside a child's mind, but in a gentler way. Inspired by the ladder on a toy fire engine, a small boy climbs out of everyday life and into the realms of fantasy. Magical, surreal spreads show the child opening windows on to the world of his imagination. With a quiet sense of private enchantment, and glorious visual wit, it's a collaboration in which artist and author together create something greater than the sum of its parts. The story comes gently down to earth, leaving the reader visually enriched with the knowledge of an inner world.
Kitamura had no training as an illustrator, or indeed any formal art training. Born in Tokyo in 1956, he drew constantly from an early age: "Like all Japanese children I drew all over the pavement — and on the road when there weren't so many cars. At school I drew caricatures of the teachers." Comics were a huge influence — both Japanese and western. And he was one of the last generation of Japanese children to experience Kamishibai, a street entertainment popular until the early 1960s.
"The Kamishibai man would arrive on a bike with a box on the back, and wooden clappers to attract attention. Children gathered round. Buying cheap sweets served as an admission fee — if you hadn't any money, you got shooed away, but you could watch the show anyway, from behind a telegraph pole. The box on the bike housed the entertainment — stories told with a series of hand-painted sliding pictures. Some would go on from day to day, keeping children in suspense and ensuring their return." In the TV age, says Kitamura, Kamishibai vanished from the streets, surviving in schools and nurseries in a more literary form. At his studio in north London, Kitamura shows me his purpose-built version of Kamishibai, with his own stories and pictures: "I use it for school visits," he says. "I'm not a good performer in front of an audience, and it's a good way to tell a story simply."
Another early inspiration was a primary school teacher who, in place of more conventional lessons, talked to his class for hours on end about interesting things he'd heard about or read. One story was about the German archeologist Heinrich Schliemann, who had dreamed as a child of excavating the remains of Troy and devoted his life to realising that ambition. This convinced Kitamura that if you have a dream, you should follow it. He dreamed of becoming an artist, and dropped out of school early.
His father suggested he train as a potter, so he dutifully cycled around Japan visiting master craftsmen in remote potteries. But the thought of a 10-year apprenticeship in the mountains was too much. He worked as a graphic artist on a magazine before moving to London and deciding to become a children's illustrator.
After hawking his work unsuccessfully round more than 20 publishers, he met Klaus Flugge of Andersen Press, who on an inspired hunch asked him to illustrate Angry Arthur. Flugge was astonished when Kitamura returned just a week later with a complete set of roughs. They were perfect.
He now has numerous books to his name, and usually writes his own texts. His stories have a gentle, idiosyncratic humour, inspired by just about everything , from butterflies to Beatles lyrics, domestic chaos, Renaissance paintings and jazz.
Ever since he began to learn English, he has been fascinated by our idiomatic expressions and writes a regular column in a Japanese newspaper explaining them for students of English. He reels them off in a conspiratorial tone — "the elephant in the room, the fly in the ointment, the bull in the china shop ..."
One of his finest books is Sheep in Wolves' Clothing (1995). Here the full range of Kitamura's skills are on display — crazy plot, thoughtful characters, luscious landscapes and crepuscular urban scenes bristling with architectural detail. Here and there the streets are lit with the glowing colours of lovingly drawn vintage cars — Jaguars, Bentleys, Morris Travellers. There are shady interiors with multiple viewpoints and cunning manipulation of perspective. Against the sophistication of the backgrounds, the characters (mostly sheep) are drawn in a simple, cartoony style, but the eloquence of their body language is far from simple, allowing a suspension of disbelief that makes it seem quite natural for a sheep to wriggle out of its fleece in order to have a swim.
Kitamura is a fine colourist, creating colours you can't always identify — pigments of the imagination, perhaps — which draw you back repeatedly to explore the complexity and finesse of these beautifully constructed compositions, where even the wildest slapstick activity fails to upset the serenity of the overall order. (It's in the composition, Kitamura thinks, that he's at his most Japanese.)
He draws with ink, but instead of a springy, steel nib he uses a Japanese glass pen, with tiny grooves to accommodate the ink . This creates a distinctive line that blobs now and then as it glides, giving an unmistakable character to everything he draws.
His latest book, The Young Inferno (Frances Lincoln), is a new departure — a streetwise version of Dante's 700-year-old original, retold for a young audience by the poet John Agard. Here, Kitamura's black and white drawings take on a new freedom and ferocity. As the teenage hoodie narrator makes his way down the gutter of the book and into the nine circles of hell, the line is more authoritative and emphatic than ever, excitingly varied in tone and texture, responding to every nuance of Agard's text.
There are intriguing portraits of hell's inhabitants, including political figures of our own time, and aside from all the apocalyptic goings-on, there's a good measure of wit and romance too — the Cheshire Cat has somehow stowed away on the boat that ferries dead souls across the Styx.
Even though we have a long, rich tradition of black and white line illustrations, they are not as prized as they should be. But Kitamura's arresting, thought-provoking drawings confirm him as one of our finest and most versatile illustrators.
