Akira Toriyama was already famous to comic fans in the early 1980s with “Dr. Slump” but he won manga immortality with the global sensation and Japanese success story that is “Dragon Ball”.
But as his creation and his fame exploded when his creation won over kids the world over, Toriyama, who has died in Japan aged 68, shunned the limelight and preferred to focus on drawing.
“‘Dragon Ball’ is like a miracle, given how it helped someone like me who has a twisted, difficult personality do a decent job and get accepted by society,” Toriyama said in a rare interview in 2013.
“I don’t like socialising, so much so that I have more animals than friends,” he said.
Born in Japan’s Aichi prefecture in 1955, Toriyama studied design at an industrial high school, according to Animage Plus, part of the anime magazine Animage.
According to media reports, he liked manga at school but only started to draw comics for a living in his 20s, after three years working at an advertising agency in the city of Nagoya.
Toriyama debuted in 1978 with “Wonder Island” but then came the humorous “Dr. Slump” about a little girl with glasses, Arale Norimaki, who is actually a robot with superpowers. The series became a hit.
This gave Toriyama the confidence to conjure up — reportedly inspired by kung-fu hero Jackie Chan and a 16th-century Chinese literary classic “Journey to the West” — “Dragon Ball”.
Initially published in 1984 in Japan’s Shonen Jump, a magazine beloved by Japanese boys, it told the adventures of a monkey-tailed boy called Son Goku through multiple fantastical universes.
Over more than 500 chapters, the hero with spiky black hair and trained by a turtle-sage defeats scary and otherworldly enemies in his quest to find seven mystical dragon balls.
“Dragon Ball Z” took it to new heights, running from 1989 to 1996, with planet-destroying fights and displays of formidable strength as well as the appearance of the alien warrior “Saiyan” race.
Translated all over the world, “Dragon Ball” spawned countless anime cartoons, films, video games, trading cards and collectible figurines that made it an immense money-spinner.
Toriyama encapsulated the secret of his prodigious output in the 2013 interview with Japan’s Asahi Shimbun daily in one key discipline: meeting deadlines.
“This is because I had previously worked as a designer in a small advertising agency and had seen and experienced first-hand how much trouble people can get into if deadlines are missed, even slightly,” he said.
But he admitted it was hard: “Manga requires me to draw a lot of the same images. I tend to get bored easily, so this was fun but mostly tough. I wished many times it would end sooner.”
“I just hope that readers will have a fun time reading my works,” he said.
Toriyama said the scale of his success had taken him by surprise.
“When I was drawing the series, all I ever wanted to achieve was to please boys in Japan.”
nf-stu/aha
