He wrote stories in notebooks from childhood — though he almost never finished one. Partway through, another story would come into view, and he would leap across to that one instead, again and again. Unfinished notebooks piled up on the bedroom floor, and the family called the pile “NomNom’s mountain”.

As a teenager he ran a high fever and was laid up for a week. In that time he wrote one notebook from beginning to end. Reading it back after the fever broke, there were scenes he could not believe he had written. Who wrote them is still not clear.

He always resisted the idea that a story needs an ending. But in the form of manga you can pause inside the frame of a panel. The hand turning the page gets to choose between the ending and the next instalment. That may be why he writes manga now.

The drawings on the walls of the house were Ajana’s, made when she was small. Once drawn, they were never erased. The family did not erase them either. Layer went over layer until nobody could remember what colour the wall had originally been. The name Clovel comes from the clover blooming — that is, drawn — on that wall.

She has a second name: Fukurō-cham, the owl. The family started using it at some point, because pictures drawn in the middle of the night come out as though a different person had drawn them. In the owl periods the line is a little grainier, and the figures’ eyes are more often open. Ajana says there is no clear border between the two names.

She says she likes drawing people, but more precisely she draws the moment a person is there. Someone looking at someone. Someone holding something. Someone glancing up at the sky. She stops that single instant with a line — and the instant it is stopped, that person begins to think something. That is where a manga panel starts.

From early childhood he was told he saw colour differently. When someone said the sky was blue, he was seeing blue in several gradations at once and could not tell which one was meant. When the family said “that blue”, it was like a game of picking one out of ten.

At some point in his teens he began recording each day’s sunset in coloured pencil. A year of sunsets became a notebook, and turning the pages moves the seasons. The same sky, seen at the same hour from the same place, is not the same on any two days. Among 365 sunsets there was not one identical colour.

He took on the colour because he knew there are things that words and lines cannot carry. Even a single “sadness” comes in a blue-tinged and a red-tinged version. Telling those apart with line alone is hard. With colour, a red half a millimetre different is different weather.

Drawing a background, he settles the air first. What colour is the air in this place? Is it humid, or dry? Once that is fixed, the buildings and the people all have coordinates inside that air.

When someone in the family says something, she writes it on a card and puts it in a drawer — cards of “things I found interesting”. There are years of them, filed not by subject but by the season in which the thing was said. Something said in spring goes in the spring drawer; something said in winter, the winter drawer. Asked why, she doesn’t answer.

She once reordered the household bookshelf not by genre but by emotional waveform: books where the crest of anger runs high, books where sadness runs long, books that turn bright without warning. The family was baffled at first, and then began saying “actually, that book does sit better there”.

Editing is the least conspicuous job in the house. But when a story isn’t working, it is usually because “who wants what” has not lined up. Arranging the order and the timing so that NomNom wants to write, so that Ajana wants to draw, so that Sugar Day Fox wants to put the colour down — that is the ant’s work. Plain, slow, and certain.

The name “All” carries the sense of standing not as a separate individual but where the state of the whole family can be watched. The joy, and the ant, belong to everyone.