There’s many dog shit in your house

This book was made for the project: Arts & Crafts.
Having been born in 1970, I think I'm a member of the last Japanese generation to suffer from what we call a "complex toward the foreign" (gaikoku konpurekkusu) - which for me manifested as a fascination with paperbacks from a young age. From their size. to their look and feel to their occasional illustrations, to me, they were just incredibly cool. I always felt that if I had the chance I'd like to create one myself, and such an opportunity finally did present itself. Of course, I don't have the ability to master novel-writing, so my small contribution was in illustrating the work. Call its whimsy or just me infusing myself into the work, but in creating this book, I wanted to push traditional printing to the limits of manageable thickness. Japan's manga comic books are wonderfully fat, tele-phone directory-sized productions. Perhaps that is what I was trying to convey? Jam packed with content and afford-ably priced. It's true of all publishers in the genre, be they major or indie - you can't help but be impressed. And it takes that kind of inspiration, something that really moves me to try to communicate it, to get me excited enough to begin to work. It's nice that there are some people who get some enjoyment from my doodles and scribb-lings (l'm always grateful for that), but here I wanted to see if I could take advantage of that power that goes into manga-making. The work I made just prior to this one, incidentally, was an ad infinitum collection of monochrome drawings. There's probably an element of recognizing that this was the best | had in me, but for whatever reason, this is my favorite work I've done.
- Kuniko Nagasaki


AAC Hitsuji Design Apartment
2006
Tokyo, Japan
numbered 530/1000