Hiroshi Osada Author

Hiroshi Osada debuted as a poet with This Journey. In 2000, his first collaboration with Ryōji Arai, A Forest Picture Book, earned the Kōdansha Publishing Culture Award for Children’s Literature.

Ryōji Arai was born in Yamagata, Japan, in 1956. He has an illustrative style all of his own: bold, mischievous and unpredictable. Arai studied art at Nippon University. His art is at once genuine and truly poetic, encouraging children to paint and to tell their own stories. He took the Japanese picture-book world by storm in the 1990s. Since then, he has one multiple awards, including the international Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2005.

David Boyd is Assistant Professor of Japanese at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His translations have appeared in Monkey Business International, Granta, and Words Without Borders, among other publications.