Every Color of Light

A Publishers Weekly Best Picture Book of 2020
A Kirkus Best Book of 2020
A Shelf Awareness Best Children's Book of 2020
Best Illustrator Award, 2021 Northern Lights Book Awards


Poetic and sparse, a bedtime story told by the elements.


Gentle and lyrical, Every Color of Light is a bedtime story told by the elements.
Every Color of Light opens on a lush, green forest in the rain. Illustrated by the masterful Ryoji Arai, the calm is shattered when the wind picks up and lightning cuts the sky. Yet out of this turbulence, the day blooms bright, the flowers open, and raindrops roll and drip down to the forest floor. The sun sets. The moon rises, and in a pool of water we see its reflection. We go to sleep with the forest, sinking into the pool, into the calm reflection of the moon. Harmonizing our human experience to the natural world, Arai invites the reader to hold imaginative space for our oneness with the natural world.

Winner of Shelf Awareness Best Children's Book of 2020 2020 (United States) Winner of Kirkus Best Book of 2020 2020 (United States) Winner of Publishers Weekly Best Picture Book of 2020 2020 (United States) Winner of Best Illustrator Award 2021

“"The life-affirming splendor of the spectrum within and without is what Japanese poet and picture-book author Hiroshi Osada and artist Ryoji Arai celebrate in Every Color of Light: A Book about the Sky (public library), translated by David Boyd -- a tender serenade to the elements that unspools into a lullaby, inviting ecstatic wakefulness to the fulness of life, inviting a serene surrender to slumber..."Arai's almost synesthetic art -- radiating more than color, radiating sound, a kind of buzzing aliveness -- only amplifies this sense of consolation in the drama of the elements, this sense of change as a portal not to terror but to transcendent serenity." -Brain Pickings”

In a strong translation by Boyd, a Japanese team captures the magic of a summer rainstorm. Working in thick, dense strokes, Arai (What What What?) creates a lake surrounded by foliage whose colors range from spring green to spruce blue. Silver streaks show the first drops: “Look, it’s raining.” The rain falls harder (“Wetter/ And wetter”), and the greenery, the late poet Osada observes, changes: “The blues darken/ And so do the greens.” Wind whips, leaves fly, rain slashes sideways; bolts of lightning flash across the spreads amid sodden blossoms; and thunder follows, “Cracking/ Crashing.” After a few final flashes in the distance, the sky clears, and the storm is shown to have been ephemeral: “Look, no more rain.” The sun sets, dusk falls, the stars emerge (“Shining,/ They share their stories”). By employing landscapes in lieu of human or animal characters, Osada and Arai ask readers to look—really look—at the rain, the way the changing weather transforms the visible spectrum, and the magnificence of the night sky, phenomena all too often unseen in a hurry-up world. The result is a story that sharpens the senses and quiets the soul. -STARRED REVIEW, Publishers Weekly

Ryôji 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.

Age range 4+ Every Color of Light opens on a lush, green forest in the rain. Illustrated by the masterful Ryoji Arai, the calm is shattered when the wind picks up and lightning cuts the sky. Yet out of this turbulence, the day blooms bright, the flowers open, and raindrops roll and drip down to the forest floor. The sun sets. The moon rises, and in a pool of water we see its reflection. We go to sleep with the forest, sinking into the pool, into the calm reflection of the moon. Harmonising our human experience to the natural world, Arai invites the reader to hold imaginative space for our oneness with the natural world.

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