Every Color of Light by Hiroshi Osada and Ryoji Arai

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

Ryôji Arai has an illustrative style all of his own. He took the Japanese picture-book world by storm in the 1990s with his debut picture book, Melody. Since then, he has won many awards, including the international Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2005, the highest international award in children’s literature. Hiroshi Osada debuted as a poet with This Journey. In 2000, his first collaboration with Ryōji Arai, A Forest Picture Book, earned the Kōdansha Publishing Culture Award for Children’s Literature.