Who was Akira Toriyama? The story of the legendary creator of Dragon Ball

Japanese manga creator Akira Toriyama, known for popular titles such as Dragon Ball and Dr Slump, has died at 68. Here's the story of the "difficult" and legendary artist who transcended borders.

Akira Toriyama, the creator of Japan's hugely popular and influential Dragon Ball comics and anime cartoons, has died aged 68. Credit: AFP

Akira Toriyama was already famous to comic fans in the early 1980s with Dr Slump but he won manga immortality with the global sensation and Japanese success story that is Dragon Ball.

But as his creation and his fame exploded when his creation won over kids the world over, Toriyama, who has died in Japan aged 68, shunned the limelight and preferred to focus on drawing.

The shock death of Toriyama prompted an outpouring of disbelief from fans across the world on Friday who mourned the mangaka extraordinaire in all different languages.

According to social media monitoring firm Visibrain, 2.5 million messages paying tribute to his demise were posted on X, formerly Twitter, in just six hours, or 267 postings per second.

The life of Akira Toriyama

"Dragon Ball is like a miracle, given how it helped someone like me who has a twisted, difficult personality do a decent job and get accepted by society," Toriyama said in a rare interview in 2013.

"I don't like socialising, so much so that I have more animals than friends," he said.

Born in Japan's Aichi prefecture in 1955, Toriyama studied design at an industrial high school, according to Animage Plus, part of the anime magazine Animage.

Akira Toriyama plays a game with his son in Kiyosu Town, Aichi Prefecture in 1988. Credit: Atsushi Onodera/AFP

According to media reports, he liked manga at school but only started to draw comics for a living in his 20s, after three years working at an advertising agency in the city of Nagoya.

Toriyama debuted in 1978 with Wonder Island but then came the humorous Dr Slump about a little girl with glasses, Arale Norimaki, who is actually a robot with superpowers. The series became a hit.

A visitor looks at an Japanese artist Akira Toriyama's Dr Slump comic book. Source: AFP / Pau Barrena

This gave Toriyama the confidence to conjure up - reportedly inspired by kung-fu hero Jackie Chan and a 16th-century Chinese literary classic Journey to the West - Dragon Ball.

Initially published in 1984 in Japan's Shonen Jump, a magazine beloved by Japanese boys, it told the adventures of a monkey-tailed boy called Son Goku through multiple fantastical universes.

Over more than 500 chapters, the hero with spiky black hair and trained by a turtle-sage defeats scary and otherworldly enemies in his quest to find seven mystical dragon balls.

Akira Toriyama Dragon Ball Z graphic portrait seen during a festival in Barcelona. Source: LightRocket / SOPA Images

Dragon Ball Z took it to new heights, running from 1989 to 1996, with planet-destroying fights and displays of formidable strength as well as the appearance of the alien warrior Saiyan race.

Translated all over the world, Dragon Ball spawned countless anime cartoons, films, video games, trading cards and collectible figurines that made it an immense money-spinner.

Secret behind Toriyama's success

Toriyama encapsulated the secret of his prodigious output in the 2013 interview with Japan's Asahi Shimbun daily in one key discipline: meeting deadlines.

"This is because I had previously worked as a designer in a small advertising agency and had seen and experienced first-hand how much trouble people can get into if deadlines are missed, even slightly," he said.

Toriyama was the author of the hugely popular and influential titles Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z. Credit: AFP

But he admitted it was hard: "Manga requires me to draw a lot of the same images. I tend to get bored easily, so this was fun but mostly tough. I wished many times it would end sooner."

"I just hope that readers will have a fun time reading my works," he said.

Toriyama said the scale of his success had taken him by surprise.

"When I was drawing the series, all I ever wanted to achieve was to please boys in Japan."

How Dragon Ball transcended borders

Beloved for its genre-defining artwork, universal enjoyability and stateless characters, Toriyama's Dragon Ball set the standard for Japan's globally renowned manga graphic novel industry.

First serialised in 1984, Dragon Ball is one of the best-selling manga franchises of all time.

It features a boy named Son Goku who collects magical balls containing dragons to help him and his allies in a fight to protect the Earth from evil enemies.

Goku of Dragon Ball ballon battles the high wind to fly down Central Park West past apartments during the 93rd Annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Credit: Corbis via Getty Images

Part comedy, part absurdist adventure, the series fused martial arts action with a story influenced by the classic Chinese tale Journey to the West.

It is deemed a paragon of the "shonen (boys)" genre that has over the years defined Japan's manga and anime industry and helped propel it into global popularity.

Although other shonen blockbusters like One Piece and Naruto are similarly awash with adrenaline-inducing battles and swashbuckling heroes, Dragon Ball cemented its position as the genre standard, experts say.

Manga Comic books by Akira Toriyama in Tokyo. Credit: Fuminori Ogane/AFP

"Naruto and One Piece are also popular overseas, but Dragon Ball stands out in terms of the number of countries that have aired the animation," Kazuma Yoshimura, a manga studies professor at Kyoto Seika University, said.

The comics have sold more than 260 million copies in Japan and worldwide, according to publisher Shueisha.

What also set Dragon Ball apart is Toriyama's meticulously detailed art, Yoshimura said.

"He's someone who did the job of mangaka, illustrator and graphic designer," the professor said, citing characters and landscapes so richly depicted that they easily survived transformations into 3D mediums like toy figurines.

"Readers cannot simply take their eyes off," Yoshimura said of the mangaka's art.

"I think he was indeed a rare talent."

A tourist wearing a T-shirt of Dragon Ball has his photographs taken with a statue of Dragon Ball character Son Goku in Tokyo. Source: AFP / Yuichi Yamazaki

Dubbed in different languages, the show over the years became a global sensation, capturing children's hearts with its madcap battles won by the small hero as his power grows.

Encapsulated in the juggernaut is "the culmination of what entertainment should be like," anime specialist journalist Tadashi Sudo said.

"Toriyama knew exactly what everybody wants to read - adventure and the growth of characters," he said.

Aside from painstaking art, part of its appeal for a global audience, he said, likely stemmed from the "statelessness" of characters that struck a perfect balance between exoticness and relatability.

"It's not like the series was obviously set in one particular region of the earth, such as Japan or the United States," Sudo said.

A dragon ball action figure during a fair in Turin. Source: LightRocket / Pacific Press

But with a whiff of Asian-ness derived from the "Journey to the West" and pop Western styles, the show can at the same time feel familiar to a broad audience, the expert said.

"So in a sense, the series was a melting point of cultures, and I think that's one of the reasons why it's loved so widely around the world."

Fans paid tribute with art posted under the statement on X, including of Son Goku ascending to the sky with angel wings and a halo.

"Thank you for making my childhood awesome," one wrote.