The creator of one of postwar Japan's most cherished childhood artifacts is getting a gallery reevaluation. "Kiichi Tsutaya Solo Exhibition: From the Soda Collection" opens October 24 at NANZUKA in Shibuya and runs through November 28, presenting 34 paintings by Kiichi Tsutaya (1914–2005) that have never been shown publicly.

Tsutaya was born in 1914 into a paper wholesaler's family in Tsukiji, Tokyo. Influenced by the lyrical painters Takabatake Kasho and Yamakawa Shuho, he studied nihonga at the Kawabata Art School before beginning to produce coloring books in 1940 under the pen name Fujiwo. From 1947, his "Kiichi's Coloring Books," sold at corner candy stores, became a sensation in an entertainment-starved postwar Japan. His girls, with rounded faces, oversized eyes, bodies compressed to about three heads tall, and crisp outlines, established a visual formula distinct from traditional bijinga lyric painting and left a deep imprint on the country's girls' culture.

The coloring-book boom faded in the 1960s as television, manga, and anime rose, but revivals followed: goods at Bunka-ya Zakka-ten in 1974, an exhibition at Shiseido The Ginza in 1978. The art-historical reassessment arrived in 2002, when Takashi Murakami included Tsutaya in "Coloriage," his coloring-book exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in Paris.

The NANZUKA show draws on works Tsutaya produced intensively from around 1985 in his "One Hundred Metamorphoses of Little Girls" series, rendered in traditional Japanese painting techniques with mineral pigments on silk, including gold-leaf folding screens. Collector Daisuke Soda acquired them through regular visits to the artist's studio and preserved them carefully; now, for the first time, these late, little-known paintings step out of a private collection and into public view.