At a glance
- Kenichi Kiriki 桐木憲一
- Born 1976, Yamaguchi, Japan — based in Tokyo
- Debut 1991, Weekly Shonen Jump (Shueisha)
- 78th Hop Step Award; runner-up, 36th Akatsuka Award
- Published in French, Italian, Korean
- Two live-action film adaptations (2013, 2018)
- Reviewed in Le Monde, ActuaBD, BoDoï
- Cultural ambassador of Hagi City
- Languages: JP / EN materials, FR in preparation
The story runs from Tokiwa-so
to the ateliers of Paris.
Kenichi Kiriki debuted in Weekly Shonen Jump in 1991 at age fifteen, winning the magazine's Hop Step Award — and the following year, the runner-up prize of the Akatsuka Award, named for the legendary Fujio Akatsuka. Years later the connection became literal: Kiriki worked from a room in Shiunso, the surviving apartment near the fabled Tokiwa-so where Akatsuka himself once drew, and mentored the next generation of manga artists there.
His breakthrough as an author came with Tokyo Shutter Girl (2010–2013), a lyrical series about a high-school photographer walking the hidden corners of Tokyo. It became a live-action film in 2013, was published in France as La Photographe — praised in Le Monde — and was followed by Kanazawa Shutter Girl, filmed in 2018. Both series share one conviction: that the most valuable thing an artist can do is look carefully at what everyone else walks past.
That conviction now drives the Painter Series — graphic novels on Degas, Lautrec, and the people they painted — created for the French bande dessinée market. Alongside his own work, Kiriki has spent a decade inside Japan's digital manga and Webtoon industry as an editor, editor-in-chief and studio director.
He is currently at work on a new historical series with a major French publisher.