The Picturebooks of Ryoji Arai: A World Shared with Children

This new work by Ryoji Arai not only captures themes he has been exploring for all the years of his long career but also explores a new frontier in the familiar. “I,” the protagonist, has a clear reason to go to the destination on the back of a horse. In his previous works, protagonists’ reasons for going to “the far away place” (one of the recurring key themes appearing in Arai’s work) were often vague, and even when their reasons were clear, they rarely actually reached their destination at the end. In this work, however, both the journey’s purpose and destination are clear. In previous works, protagonists have walked, run, or ridden the bus; here, for the first time, a horse is the mode of transportation. I want to examine how Arai’s worldview has been explored and revised in this picture book by examining several excerpted pages from the work.