#jiro taniguchi

The Summit of the Gods, 2021. - loved working on these shots ♥
I left this production earlier than I should have, confinement made it very difficult for me. I wish I would have stayed longer.
Have a beautiful 2022

Grief over the loss of a loved one is common in your stories. Do you intend for it to be a tribute to someone who vanished from your life too soon?
It’s completely natural I speak of death because everyone, at some point or other, has to face it. It isn’t that I’ve lived through any traumatic experience that I want to rid myself of through my stories, but rather that I think death is necessarily present in human life, whether it’s the death of one’s parents, of one’s loved ones, or of one himself. I consider death part of life, speaking of one brings me to speak of the other. Personally, up to now my only contact with death was that of the animals raised. I remember that, in addition to sorrow, I felt it was an injustice that they died, however old they were. I couldn’t understand it, I wondered why living things had to die. But later, little by little, I was filled with calm - because the human mind (and maybe also that of animals) has the marvelous ability to forget. Living is what’s important, making use of the precious time allotted to us. I think that death teaches how to live, and that the capacity to forget is a most important element in this whole process.

— Taniguchi Jiro, interviewed by Stéphane and Muriel Barbery