Jun 19, 2014

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Haruki Murakami Stickers

Haruki Murakami’s new novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage will be published in the UK this August.

Our Creative Director had the following to say about designing the cover:

This was one of those rare books where the initial idea for the cover seemed so right. The pieces fell into place and it was as if it was just meant to be. I had a strong cover idea based on the idea of a linked group around a series of different-coloured circles, representing the five main characters and close childhood friends Mr Red, Mr Blue, Miss White, Miss Black and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki.

I cut out the five circles and played with the position of each of them as physical elements away from the confines of a computer. I experimented with overlapping the circles to represent the interactions within the close friendships of the main characters. Gradually the design came together in a congruent and meaningful form.

I then transferred this to photoshop, where I could refine the colour interactions within the intersections of each of the overlapping circles. This process all happened very quickly and an elegant abstract design fell into place. However, there is a second part to the design.

Tsukuru’s name means to make or build and this was a gift, a completely perfect match for an idea to include adult stickers for the book buyer to decorate the novel. My young son’s delight in using stickers everywhere had started me thinking. I had of course seen stickers used as part of the concept on Royal Mail stamps, on CDs and of course in children’s books, but I didn’t think they had been incorporated into adult fiction.

I commissioned five Japanese illustrators. (Researching led me to a wealth of new and inspiring illustrators, some of whose work I wasn’t familiar with.) All had read Murakami’s work and so they were keen to be involved. They brought a uniquely Japanese style and a knowledge of Japanese detail to the project – for instance the station’s train and train ticket, depicted by illustrator Mio Matsumoto, are all accurate.

Each was given a character, and therefore a colour. They were asked to read the novel with their allotted character in mind, to create images that could be used as stickers and that were coloured in a way that was biased towards their character’s colour.

Each illustrator was to be chosen to balance styles of illustration within the group. I also had to believe their style could work successfully as a sticker.

Mio Matsumoto graduated from the Royal College of Art and is currently living and working in Tokyo. I had previously commissioned Mio, knew her work and that she would be ideal for a linear, colourless representation of Tsukuru’s themes. Mio tried to make the elements visual, cool and simple. My drawing style here is very sharp and clean…Tsukuru is colour-less. But I thought he is influenced by the others so, based on the strong drawing line, I wanted to add all the other colours in his related objects.’

Shinko Okuhara was born in Miyagi, Japan and now lives and works in Tokyo. Her painterly work was new to me and it was the most surprising of all five in its successful transformation into stickers. Her work is very bright and loose, so I was shocked when she asked to work on the character Miss Black. ‘I liked the character so I was happy to take this opportunity. I tried to draw compact to create a sticker. I worked with the colour by considering how to express the difference between the image of her full name “Eri Kurono” and her nickname “black” and her character. It was hard to describe the image of “black” in colours.’

My third commission was Fumio Obata. He was born in Tokyo and came to Britain in 1991. He studied at the Glasgow School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. He worked in animation for some years before deciding to concentrate on comic books and illustration. His Just So Happens (2014) had recently been published by Jonathan Cape. He feels lucky that he got the colour, Blue, that he wanted. Did designing a sticker change the way he worked?  It was more of the subject matter that forced me to change my style rather than the form of outcome. I chose certain objects to illustrate from the text because of their noise, for instance Elvis Presley’s “Viva Las Vegas” was an inspiration for the first image I did. The tune was used as a background noise for a cellphone call in the story. It made my work easier for the rest of the images as I started using my watercolour washes imagining the sound surrounding the characters.’

Ryu Itadani, was born in Osaka, Japan and currently lives and works in Berlin. His unique illustration style was a perfect match for Red. While working with Ryu, I asked him how he felt about his given character. ‘Mr Red has a strong personality, the strong lines and colours represent his character. To be honest, I did not like Mr Red when I first read the book, but I was beginning to like him a little by drawing his things. I was not too sure about the way he thinks and treats the people taking his seminar. In all my images I carefully chose other colours to highlight red, so (hopefully) viewers can imagine that the images have something to do with red.’

Natsko Seki was the last illustrator to be commissioned. She was born in Japan and now lives and works in London. Her meticulous collages are achieved by both her drawings and her own photographs. I gave her the character of Miss White. ‘Using mainly white was a little different from my usual practice, as I normally use a lot of colours. But I enjoyed using different tones and shades of white. Now I think that white is a strong colour and works well in my illustration. Some of the objects I chose to illustrate were immediate as they are necessary items to show White such as the piano, Liszt score, Yamaha building, piano lesson. I had to read the relevant lines many times to make sure the rest of them were right objects. All the items had to be beautiful as she was, and show fragility and sensitivity.  White was a good colour to show death. Some of the items were chosen as they are related to her mysterious death.’

Creating the actual stickers wasn’t straightforward. We had to work to the sheet size the printing machines used. Simon Rhodes (Senior Production Manager) and I worked closely and discussed the various different methods of attaching the stickers.

Simon Rhodes: ‘In terms of the production the first thing we had to figure out was how we integrated the stickers within the physical book. Initially we explored lots of alternatives which included pockets on the endpapers, sections of the book being cut away and stickers being bound in to the book in various ways. In the end we decided that it was important that the book felt like a complete object whether the stickers were removed or not so we opted to attach them to the front endpaper with some more very large laminated stickers echoing the repeated theme of the design.

'Transparency was important - we wanted the stickers to be able to interact with the graphic elements beneath rather than to sit clumsily on top. As a consequence we spent a lot of time working on which areas of the stickers were transparent and which were opaque; the sticker printing process was extended and adapted to allow us to under print large thick areas of white within the images.’

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