Mitsumasa Anno

Mitsumasa Anno has amazing imagination and artistic skill. I found Anno’s Mysterious Multiplying Jar by Masaichiro and Mitsumasa Anno at a library sale (text translation copyright 1983, original Japanese copyright 1982). The cover art is  beautiful. It shows a blue and white, two-handled, covered jar in the middle of a plain white background. On the first page: “This story is about one jar and what was inside it.” There’s only one line of text per each lovely, two-page spread. Anno’s illustrations explain the mathematical concept of factorials. The author notes on the final pages, “‘Factorial’ is a word that mathematicians use to describe a special kind of numerical relationship. The mathematical symbol for a factorial stands for the product of that number multiplied by the next smaller number, multiplied by the next smaller number, and so on all the way down to 1.” Confused? Anno illustrates this math brilliantly.

In Ways of Telling: Conversations on the Art of the Picture Book by Leonard S. Marcus (2002), Marcus asks, “What role does beauty play in children’s books?” Anno answers, “All beautiful things encourage a child’s sense of wonder… In my three Math Games books and several others, I have tried to show that mathematics is beautiful and not necessarily difficult—that math is primarily a way of thinking about things. . .There are many real-life illustrations of mathematical ideas in a child’s own world, and all one has to do it is point them out to the child and he will understand—without having to be taught.” 

Several of Anno’s books from my public library were all products of  genius. Anno’s Math Games (1987) had me wondering if I would have enjoyed math as a child if I’d had this book. Mitsumasa Anno in Shadowland (1988) affected me exactly like when a work of art expands my way of seeing.  Socrates and the Three Little Pigs  by Tsuyoshi Mori (1986) was a lateral leap from my WordPress post about wolves. 

 Mitsumasa Anno earned the Hans Christian Andersen Medal for illustration in 1984.  In  his hometown of Tswana, Japan, is a Mitsumasa Anno Museum, “a showcase for his  lifetime of art making.”