Back in 1980 Satoshi Kitamura was living in Tokyo and working as an illustrator in advertising. He gave it up to learn English in London, got an idea for a picture book and has been here ever since.
While hawking his book around various publishers, he met Klaus Flugge of Andersen Press, and though that first idea came to naught, Flugge was impressed enough to give Kitamura the job of illustrating Hiawyn Oram’s Angry Arthur the following year. It won him the Mother Goose award for the most exciting new children’s book illustrator.
Kitamura developed his style while still at school and never went on to have formal artistic training. Though he drew cartoons of his teachers and enjoyed comics, he also had an early interest in fine art, going with his brother to galleries from around the age of 10. ‘The first big exhibition I went to was Pierre Bonnard in Tokyo. My brother interested me because he was very artistic. In fact, he is an artist.’
‘Although I draw in a cartoonish style in picture books, I’m also interested in just drawing from nature. I’ve started doing life drawing fairly recently, regularly, and I quite enjoy it. Sometimes I draw people on the underground or in museums, drawing the backs of people who are looking at paintings in the National Gallery.
People stand still for only five seconds, but that’s long enough. It’s also very very good training. I think my drawing has changed a little bit since I started doing it. I find it’s much easier to draw. Drawing people’s postures has become easier. I feel a little more confident.
Kitamura’s distinctive, slightly uneven line is drawn with a glass pen, which originated on the Venetian island of Murano, but which Kitamura obtains more cheaply in Japan.
‘It’s a strange-shaped thing, but I use it as any other dip pen. Usually you get a very fine line. It’s very fragile and it breaks easily. I always knew about this glass pen, and one day I just bought some, and I used one and it broke and the nib became shorter. I found that I could still write and draw with it. Then I got these irregular lines.’
He primarily uses watercolour and thicker, flatter gouache - materials that are often used in picture books - but from them he mixes colours he has made his own, in particular a glorious, rich blue that has become almost a signature of his work.
He insists that he is doing nothing unusual – ‘it’s just a mixture of indigo and ultramarine and mauve or violet’ – but admits that readers do identify it with his paintings. ‘People seem to have some sense of the blue, although it’s not always exactly the same.
I think I try to recreate the kind of blue in a twilight sky, because that’s the kind of blue that I really like. I try to make that same colour, of that especially fine day in the winter in the evenings when the sky becomes that kind of bright blue.
Kitamura’s artistic inspiration comes from European fine artists, comics and illustration, and also Japanese art, though he is more influenced there in terms of approach rather than by any particular artists.
‘There is probably something Japanese in the way that I do a composition. I find that in Japanese art and some Chinese art the composition is slightly different and so is the perspective. I don’t like geometric or so-called accurate photographic perspective very much.
'I really like the more Japanese kind of way of composing a picture. When you look at children’s pictures, they draw whatever they are interested in and they don’t think about the perspective. In fact, that is sometimes quite an accurate way to draw psychologically. I like that way of drawing. So I am influenced in that respect. But I am also very much influenced by the Impressionists or Surrealists or Cubists.’
The importance of individual creativity and the power of the imagination are themes that run through his own books as well as those he illustrates for others, from Pablo the Artist and Igor, the Bird Who Couldn’t Sing to Colin McNaughton’s Once Upon an Ordinary School Day and Kitamura’s forthcoming Millie’s Marvellous Hat.
Even in those books with a different theme or with none at all, such as the ABC From Acorn to Zoo, musical instruments can be found dotted amongst the illustrations.
I’m very influenced by music, and I like musical instruments,’ says Kitamura. ‘My approach to illustrating music is spontaneous. Music and painting come from the same source. They are just different aspects of the same thing.
His visual depiction of abstract concepts like music and art demonstrate a respect for his readership regardless of their age. ‘Picture books in this country are aimed at very small children, unlike in some European countries or Japan, where they are read more widely in terms of age. I try to make a book so it can be understood by a four-year-old in terms of language or logic, but I don’t have any upper age limit.’
Indeed, some of the items in From Acorn to Zoo, such as the musical instrument, the ocarina, sent even adults scurrying to the dictionary.
Though he keeps a sketchbook and draws every day, he is not led entirely by the visuals or a character when creating a new book; instead, story and image usually come together. An image will always lead to a word or a phrase, and, he says, for him a story needs to have two or three central ideas in order to work.
‘With Me and My Cat? I remember three central ideas. At one time I had a cat, and the cat was looking at me. And I thought that I must look like a tall building from the cat’s point of view, so I started to think how the cat would see the room. Another thing was the Beatles song "She Came in Through the Bathroom Window". I thought, who came through the bathroom window? And I thought, a witch came through the window.
'The third thing was the title. My American publisher was a good friend of mine and he showed me these photos he had taken in Venice of buildings and canals, but for some strange reason he kept saying "This is me and my cat" for every picture. I was puzzled. I thought maybe this was some American strange phrase. So those three things together became a story.’
His interest in the peculiarities of language led him to write a monthly column about it for a bilingual Japanese newspaper. ‘They asked me to write something about English or England, so I write about English words or phrases. I’ve picked out idioms of late: words like “pelican crossing”, “zebra crossing” or “oyster card”. There are all these animals in London transport. “Cab” is short for cabriolet, which is a goat.’
Not surprisingly, his enjoyment of the English language extends to his liking for the British sense of humour, which he finds one of the most appealing things about the country.
‘I think I probably discovered that the English sense of humour is just like mine! But also I like the American sense of humour. I love New Yorker cartoons, like Saul Steinberg’s or William Steig’s.
'Of course, the English and American senses of humour are different, but both are very good. And although the sense of humour is different in different countries, there are some things that work anywhere.’ Indeed, his own humour is successful in Britain, Europe, America and Japan.
It was his fondness for British idioms that was the initial inspiration for Millie’s Marvellous Hat. ‘I really love the English phrase “putting on a thinking cap”. I thought of Millie’s Thinking Hat or Millie’s Thinking Cap as a provisional title.
But then it developed in a different way and I decided not to stick to that idiom. But that was the beginning. Then I wanted a big, old-fashioned English shop. So I thought of a hat shop, and then it developed from there.
Millie’s Marvellous Hat is set in a London with a magical visual appeal that reflects Kitamura’s affection for the city’s architecture and parks. A young girl spies a colourful hat in the window of a posh shop, but when she tries to buy it she discovers that her purse is empty. The proprietor’s ingenuity, though, enables Millie to have every hat she’s ever dreamed of, and everyone around her to have their own special hat too.
Kitamura enjoyed working on Millie’s Marvellous Hat so much that he is already working on a follow-up to the book, which, along with Me and My Cat? is his personal favourite.
‘I am working on a sequel - sort of,’ he says. ‘It has the same main character and also the man in the shop. This is the first time I’ve done that. I’m very happy with this book: it’s all about the imagination.’
