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Guri to Gura Children's Book Author Rieko Nakagawa Dies at 89

The official X (formerly Twitter) account of Japanese publisher Fukuinkan Shoten announced on Thursday that author Rieko Nakagawa has died. NHK News Web reported that Nakagawa died on October 14. She was 89.

Nakagawa was born in Sapporo city in Hokkaido on September 29, 1935. She is the older sister of the late picture book illustrator Yuriko Yamawaki.

Nakagawa wrote the lyrics to the songs in Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli's My Neighbor Totoro anime film.

Nakagawa launched her debut work and self-published book No-No Nursery School (Iya Iya En), which her sister Yamawaki illustrated, in 1962.

The sisters launched the children's book series Guri and Gura (Guri to Gura) (image right) about two field mouse twins and other forest cretures in 1963. The perennial best-selling series has 21.5 million copies in circulation and translations in several languages including English.

The sisters published the Sora Iro no Tane (The Sky-Blue Seed) children's book in 1964. Studio Ghibli and Nippon Television Network then turned the story into three television anime shorts, which aired in Japan in 1992. The sisters' picture books also inspired the Ghibli Museum's anime shorts "The Whale Hunt" in 2001 and "Treasure Hunting" in 2011. Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki directed or developed all three anime projects.

Nakagawa and Yamawaki received the Kikuchi Kan Prize for Japanese literature in 2013.

Sources: NHK News Web, Fukuinkan Shoten's X/Twitter account via Hachima Kikō