A manga artist from Kyoto is winning praise for her delicate drawings of Goa’s stately mansions

In 1990, when Japanese manga artist Akeru Barros Pereira visited her husband’s ancestral village of Cansaulim in Goa, she was captivated by everything she saw.

“I’d walk around the quiet village with my baby on my back,” she said “I had a camera and was fascinated by the village scenes – especially the houses around.”

She was so charmed by stately Goan houses, she took pictures of them even as the family drove to the airport to return to Japan.

A few years later, when their children had finished high school, her husband, Joao Barros Pereira, a university professor in Kyoto, encouraged her to start drawing again.

In the 1970s and ’80s, as an undergraduate at Nara University, Barros Pereira had drawn 13 books of manga – the distinctive Japanese style of comics and graphic novels. She had published them under the pen name Toto Akeru.

She had stopped when their first child was born. But now, with more time on her hands, Akeru Barros Pereira decided to get going again.

“I remembered those pictures taken all those years ago, and based on those pictures, I began drawing Goan houses,” she said.

Using colour pencils, water colours and fountain pen, sitting in an apartment in Kyoto, Barros Pereira began to make her drawings...

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