Akira Toriyama

The Artist Who Didn't Want to Work

Akira Toriyama was born in Nagoya in 1955 and never had the makings of a martyr to the pen. His entry into the world of manga was an accident driven by financial need and the desire to buy a motorcycle. In 1978, he published Wonder Island in Weekly Shonen Jump magazine, but the audience almost unanimously ignored his debut.

He didn't give up, because he needed the money. So he refined a clean style based on industrial design and Western caricature. In 1980, he launched Dr. Slump, and the story of the robot Arale Norimaki sold more than 35 million copies in Japan alone. The mix of scatological humor and retro technology changed how comedy was perceived in the islands.

Then came the assignment that would change everything.

In 1984, he began publishing Dragon Ball as a parody of classic Chinese literature. But the tone soon changed. Pressure from editors and reader demand turned a quest adventure into a showcase of martial arts and energy blasts. Toriyama hated drawing complex backgrounds, so he destroyed the battle settings to buy himself time before deadlines.

The Architecture of Unintended Success

His influence extended to film and video games without him ever seeking the spotlight. In 1986, he designed the characters and monsters for Dragon Quest. His artwork defined the look of Japanese role-playing games for the following four decades. Toriyama didn't draw conventional warriors; instead, he created figures with clear volumes and expressive faces that worked well even with very few pixels.

In 1995, he decided to put an end to Goku's adventures. He was exhausted by the weekly publishing schedule and the pressure to create increasingly powerful enemies (an escalation he himself considered absurd). In the following years, he retreated into short stories and personal projects, far from the media spotlight.

The industry constantly demanded more from him.

In 2013, he actively returned to film production with Dragon Ball Z: Battle of the Gods. He did so partly out of dissatisfaction with the live-action American adaptation released a few years earlier. He wanted to regain creative control over his most famous work and set new foundations for the TV sequels that would follow.

The Legacy of a Private Man

Toriyama always preferred to live in his home prefecture, far from the whirlwind of Tokyo. His lifestyle was simple, and his greatest pride was his collection of model cars and planes. In 2023, he became deeply involved in the film adaptation of Sand Land, a short manga that he always considered one of his most personally rounded works.

On March 1, 2024, he died of an acute subdural hematoma. He was 68 years old and left several projects in pre-production, including the series Dragon Ball Daima. His studio, Bird Studio, confirmed that the author was still sketching drawings just a few days before he was admitted to the hospital.

The funeral was held in the strictest family privacy.

Official sales figures for his works exceed 260 million copies worldwide. After his death, the Japanese government and several international institutions issued condolence statements that he would surely have received with extreme shyness. The post office in his city had to handle thousands of sympathy letters arriving from every continent in the weeks following the funeral.