The Conception

Every chapter in Kuhaku has a header image. The concept behind those chapter title pages was to provide a clean, simple entry to each story. In a way, they were supposed to function like ginger in a sushi restaurant -- clearing your palate so you can appreciate the full flavor of the next type of fish.

They're meant to be abstract enough so that even discerning readers may not realize they're images until after seeing several. Then the interpretation becomes part of the experience of reading the book.

Here's a brief rundown on what we feel / think they represent:

• Groped: a beaten man
• TFFI, II and III: fleeting lovers in a park
• Father Hunters: a city watching two "groups" butt heads
• Kuhaku: an aerial of Shimotakaido
• Garbage: garbage against a pole
• Answers: a bartender deploying drunken advice to a bunch of foreigners drinking pints of Guinness (the bartender is on his 10th)
• Blind Alleys: a tormented face with poorly maintained hair
• San Man Down: a gallows with just a head (or perhaps a punching bag in a boxing gym just off Waseda Ave near Takadanobaba)

• Canned Coffee: a coffee can top
• Life with a Bilingual Dog: two dogs talking to each other
• A Very Happy Life: a mean train conductor shaped like an iron who clearly beats his wife (perhaps with an iron?)
• Lunch Break: a spicy Korean chi chi mu bento
• Work: an armless man in a Ku Klux Klan outfit running away from a basketball
• Tokudaiji Days: a beautiful waterfall/rolling countryside landscape
• Glossary: a close up from a Connect-4 board

The basic process went like so: read story forty times, hate the story, overcome this hate, try to find some feeling or image representative of the story, pull out (from underneath a stereo in a small room in Tokyo) inked cityscape drawing, search with a creative and loose set of eyes, cut the images out, mess with them a bit in illustrator, insert into chapter, repeat.

All of the images with the exception of the two chapters featuring color were found "within" the landscapes of Tokyo city backgrounds. That is to say, these were images, or bits of images pulled from larger sprawling drawings of Tokyo. To read more about where these cityscapes came from check out the cover production page.

We started off with an inked cityscape like you see above, then searched for bits that were interesting or seemed to have distinct forms in it. The highlighted chunk above is one such area. As you can see below, we used this area for a number of the header images: the running man for Work, the lovers in a park for That Floating Feeling, a man smashed on the ground by a woman in a dress for Groped and, of course, one of our favorites, the stark and iconographic gallows with a hanging head for San Man Down.