By Yoshihiro Tatsumi, translated by Yuji Oniki (Drawn & Quarterly)
ISBN: 978-1-77046-074-4
Since the 1950s, compulsive manga storyteller Yoshihiro Tatsumi has worked at the edges of the colossal Japanese comics industry, toiling for whoever would hire him, whilst producing an absolutely vast canon of deeply personal, agonisingly honest and blisteringly incisive cartoon critiques, dissections, queries and homages to the Human Condition as endured by the lowest of the low in a beaten nation and culture which utterly and ferociously and ruthlessly re-invented itself during his lifetime.
Tatsumi was born in 1935 and after surviving the war and reconstruction of Japan devoted most of his life to mastering – most would say inventing – a new form of comics storytelling, now known universally as Gekiga or “Dramatic Pictures†– as opposed to the flashy and fanciful escapist entertainment of Manga – which translates as “Irresponsible or Foolish Pictures†and was targeted specifically at children in the years immediately following the cessation of hostilities.
If he couldn’t find a sympathetic Editor, Tatsumi often self-published his darkly beguiling wares in DÅjinshi or “Vanity projects†where his often open-ended, morally ambiguous, subtly subversive underground comics literature gradually grew to prominence as those funnybook-consuming kids grew up in a socially-repressed, culturally-occupied country and began to rebel. Topmost amongst their key concerns were Cold War politics, the Vietnam war, ubiquitous inequality and iniquitous distribution of wealth and opportunity, so the teen upstarts sought out material that addressed their maturing sensibilities and found it in the works of Tatsumi and a growing band of serious cartoonists…
Since reading comics beyond childhood was seen as an act of rebellion – like digging Rock ‘n’ Roll a decade earlier in the USA and Britain – these kids became known as the “Manga Generation†and their growing influence allowed comics creators to grow beyond the commercial limits of their industry and tackle adult stories and themes in what rapidly became a bone fide art form. Even the “God of Comics†Osamu Tezuka eventually found his mature author’s voice in Gekiga…
Tatsumi uses his art as a symbolic tool, with an instantly recognisable repertory company of characters pressed into service over and again as archetypes and human abstracts of certain unchanging societal aspects and responses. Moreover he has a mesmerising ability to portray situations with no clean and clear-cut resolution: the tension and sublime efficacy revolves around carrying the reader to the moment of ultimate emotional crisis and leaving you suspended there…
Narrative themes of sexual frustration, falls from grace and security, loss of heritage and pride, human obsolescence, claustrophobia and dislocation, obsession, provincialism, impotence, loneliness, poverty and desperate acts of protest are perpetually explored by a succession of anonymous bar girls, powerless men, ineffectual loners and grasping spouses, wheedling, ungrateful family dependents and ethically intransigent protagonists through recurring motifs such as illness, forced retirement, crippled labourers, sexual inadequacy in ramshackle dwellings, endless dirty alleyways, tawdry bars and sewers too often obstructed by discarded foetuses and even dead babies…
After decades of virtual obscurity both at home and abroad, Tatsumi was “discovered†by the West (despite a bootlegged English-language edition in 1987 and occasional reprints in France and Spain) and in 2005 Canadian publisher Drawn & Quarterly began compiling collections of his vast output in hardback editions which re-presented a selection of material on a year-by-year basis.
Now the on-going annual project is at last available in deluxe monochrome softcover editions, their appeal greatly enhanced by the fact that Tatsumi’s monolithic cartoon autobiography A Drifting Life turned him into a domestic and global comics superstar, winning a brace of Eisner Awards, Japan’s Osamu Tezuka Cultural Prize as well as the regards sur le monde Award at the Angoulême International Comics Festival between 2009-2012.
This initial outing gathers seminal pieces created in the turbulent year 1969 and also includes an introduction by series editor/designer Tomine and a concluding ‘Q & A with Yoshihiro Tatsumi’.
The trawl through the hearts of darkness begins with ‘Piranha’ as an apathetic factory worker, sick and tired of his wife’s brazen philandering, deliberately maims himself at work for the workman’s compensation pay-out. Even relatively well-off and with his wife now attentive and loving he is not content, so he starts collecting Piranha fish. When she returns to her old habits, he looks at his fish and has an idea…
‘Projectionist’ tells of a another disillusioned labourer whose job is to travel the country screening blue films for executives keen to get secretaries “in the mood†and provide cinematic bonuses for company clients, whilst ‘Black Smoke’ details the existence of an incinerator operator who can’t satisfy his wife, or father children. Meanwhile his days are filled with chucking dead newborns from the local Women’s hospital into those fierce cleansing flames…
‘The Burden’ relates the inevitable fate of a placard carrier advertising a massage parlour. Why can he get on with prostitutes of the street but not his wife, constantly carping about her unwanted pregnancy? Why is murder the only rational option?
In ‘Test Tube’ an over-worked sperm donor allows his latest “inspiration†to get too close with catastrophic results, whilst the ‘Pimp’ who permits his wife to continue her profession so that they can buy a bar together finds the situation increasingly intolerable and ‘The Push Man’ who crams commuters onto the city’s hyper-crowded trains finally experiences a little too much enforced and unwelcome closeness of his own…
Whilst daily unclogging the city’s mains, a harassed young man no longer reacts to the horror of what the people above discard: baskets, boxes, babies… even when the deceased detritus in the ‘Sewer’ is his own, but the ‘Telescope’, which brings a crippled man too close to an aging exhibitionist who needs to be seen conquering young women, leads only to recrimination and self-destruction…
In a place where every one is trying to survive and make a little progress, one couple have reached a necessary accommodation that allows the wife to prosper just so long as her trouble husband remains ‘The Killer’, whilst for the strait-laced mechanic who discovers his TV ideal has loose knickers and a whorish heart after a ‘Traffic Accident’, life is no longer worth living.
‘Make-Up’ is the only solace of a poor salary-man living with a cheap cocktail waitress. In her clothes and with her face he can truly be himself, even if the lonely and lovelorn telephone sanitizer of ‘Disinfection’ cannot bring himself to connect with the many women of easy affection he meets in his job, and well-meaning nondescript auto-parts worker Matsuda who struggles long and hard, seeking the best way to get rid of his wife and help the young girl resisting their nasty boss’s urgings to abort the embarrassing baby he’s fathered in ‘Who Are You?’
When Mr. Fukuda is badly injured in ‘Bedridden’ he entrusts young Tanno with his greatest secret: locked in his house is a sex slave, trained and shaped from birth to please men. He will pay the apprentice anything and everything to keep her fit and fed until he can get out of hospital. Big mistake…
This initial outing ends with a superbly outré examination of life wherein Shoji returns to his rat-infested apartment and frumpy, horny woman. As she cleans herself up the pensive post-coital drifter ponders all those wasted sperm – each one a potential Napoleon or ‘My Hitler’, until a scream alerts him to the fact that one determined rodent has taken up residence.
Despite all his efforts the rat, pregnant and determined stay put, avoids every attempt to remove or kill it. With his strident companion moved out and back in the bar where she works, the contemplative Shoji discovers a new appreciation of the valiant mother and her progeny…
Like Adrian Tomine, Editor of the English-language series, I first discovered Mr. Tatsumi’s astounding works in the aforementioned album sized – and it transpires, wholly unauthorised – Catalan Communications edition at the end of the 1980s, and was blown away by the seductive and wholly entrancing simplicity of his storytelling and bleak, humanist subject matter.
Now that I know just when these stark, wry, bittersweet vignettes, episodes and stories of cultural and social realism were first drawn, it seems as if a lone voice in Japanese comics had independently and synchronistically joined the revolution of Cin̩ma v̩rit̩ and the Kitchen Sink Dramas of playwrights and directors like John Osborne, Tony Richardson and Lindsay Anderson Рnot to mention Ken Loach and Joe Orton Рwhich gripped the West in the 1960s and which have shaped the critical and creative faculties of so many artists and creators ever since.
Tatsumi, like Robert Crumb and Harvey Pekar, worked for decades in relative isolation producing compelling, bold, beguiling, sordid, intimate, wryly humorous, heartbreaking and utterly uncompromising strips dealing with uncomfortable realities, social alienation, excoriating self-examination and the nastiest and most honest arenas of human experience. They can in fact be seen as brother auteurs and indeed inventors of the “literary†or alternative field of graphic narrative which, whilst largely sidelined for most of their working lives, has finally emerged as the most important and widely accepted avenue of the comics medium.
These are stories no serious exponent or fan of comics can afford to miss and this series of collections is the best way yet to enjoy a hidden master’s dedication and brilliance.
Art and stories © 1969, 2012 Yoshihiro Tatsumi. Introduction © 2005, 2012 Adrian Tomine. This edition © 2012 Drawn & Quarterly. All rights reserved.