Now Read This!

By Yoshihiro Tatsumi, translated by Yuji Oniki (Drawn & Quarterly)
ISBN: 978-1-77046-078-2

Since the 1950s, compulsive storyteller and inventor of the mature and socially relevant Gekiga comics-form Yoshihiro Tatsumi worked at the fringes of the Japanese manga industry as it grew from a despised sub-art form to an unstoppable global colossus of the entertainment media.

Freelancing for whoever would take a chance on him, whilst producing bargain-basement Manga lending shop Kashihon (story-books purpose-made for comics lending libraries), and even self-publishing – as Dōjinshi or “Vanity projects” – his uniquely personal graphic explorations of the world as he saw it, Tatsumi slowly gained prominence amongst other artists and a small dedicated cognoscente.

Eventually his dedication to tales of deeply personal, agonisingly intimate and slyly accusatory cartoon reportage filtered into and became the mainstream and in recent years Tatsumi has received the accolades and acclaim he long deserved as, at last, society caught up with him…

After decades at the periphery of comics consciousness, Tatsumi was “discovered” by the West at the dawn of the new millennium (despite a bootlegged English-language edition in 1987 and occasional European reprints) and in 2005 Drawn & Quarterly began releasing collections of his vast output in hardback editions which re-presented a taste of material culled from specific years.

Now the fruits of that on-going annual project are at last available in deluxe monochrome softcover editions, their appeal greatly benefited by the fact that in 2009 Tatsumi’s monolithic cartoon autobiography A Drifting Life turned him into a domestic and world superstar, garnering 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.

Following an introduction from author, historian, translator and pundit Frederik L. Schodt, this third volume presents works from the period 1971-1972 when Tatsumi settled into an unqualified burst of inspired creativity and produced some of his most memorable pieces: dissections, queries and tributes to the Human Condition as experienced by the lowest of the low in a beaten but re-emergent nation-culture which was ferociously and ruthlessly re-inventing itself all around him

The panoply of disturbing, beguiling, sordid, intimate, heartbreaking, trenchantly wry and utterly uncompromising strips dealing with uncomfortable realities, inescapable situations, punishing alienations, excoriating self-loathing and the bleakest, emptiest corners and crannies of human experience begins in ‘Hell’ – a tale which recalls the bombing of Hiroshima and the headiest days of the passionately anti-H-Bomb movement in 1967. A former Japanese Army photographer recalls a shot he took in the aftermath: a silhouette burned into a wall of a loving son massaging his weary mother’s shoulders. In 1951 he had sold the photo to a news agency and the shot became a potent symbol of the “No More Hisoshimas” movement, rocketing the photographer to world-wide prominence.

Now in the shadow of a newly dedicated monument a stunning revelation threatens to undo all the good that photo has done…

At the end of his working life Saburo Hanayama was sidelined by all the younger workers: all except kind Ms. Okawa whose kindly solicitousness rekindled crude urgings in the former soldier and elderly executive. With his wife and daughter already planning how to spend his retirement pension, Saburo rebels and blows it all on wine, women and song, but even when he achieves the impossible hidden dream with the ineffable Ms. Okawa, he is plagued by impotence and guilt and is still ‘Just a Man’…

In ‘Sky Burial’ disaffected slacker Nogawa isn’t even shaken up when the mummified body of his neighbour is discovered, a victim of neglect, undiscovered for months until the smell became too overpowering.

After all, his life is a mess too and he keeps seeing vultures in the sky above the bustling streets… As his surviving neighbours all move out following the death, Nogawa stays, abandoning himself to the birds and vermin eager to colonise the vacant building…

When he retired, a nondescript businessman deeded all his possessions to his family and went to live in the woods, obsessed with a bizarre ‘Rash’ that afflicted his body. However, when a young girl attempts suicide he saves her and gains new interest in the world. How tragic that his notions and hers are so different…

Businessman Kazuya returns to the old neighbourhood and recalls a bizarre friendship with a ‘Woman in the Mirror’. Once he and Ikeuchi were great friends, but when he accidentally discovered his pal’s need to dress as a girl, a great fire changed both their lives forever…

When ‘Night Falls Again’ a desperately lonely man haunts the strip joints and bars of Osaka, despising himself, missing his rural home and bombarded by images of sex for sale. Driven to the edge he at long last buys a ticket…

Two bar girls clean up after the night’s toil, but Akemi is preoccupied. It’s time to visit her husband in prison, even if he is a changed, brutalised man and doesn’t believe she has kept herself for him all these years. When he threatens to become her pimp once released, she takes extreme action in ‘Life is so Sad’…

Tatsumi experimented with wash tones rather than the usual line, brush and mechanical tone screens for his tale of a foot fetishist driven to outlandish steps just so he could keep hearing heels go ‘Click Click Click’, and this compelling collection concludes with the eponymous minor masterpiece which was until recently the artist’s most (in)famous tale.

The semi-autobiographical ‘Good-Bye’ describes the declining relationship between prostitute Mariko or “Mary” – who courts social ignominy by going with the American GI Joe’s – and her dissolute father; once a proud soldier of Japan’s beaten army, reduced to cadging cash and favours from her.

Her dreams of escape to America are shattered one day and in her turmoil she pushes her father too far and he commits an act there’s no coming back from…

Tatsumi uses art as a symbolic weapon, using 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 an astounding ability to present 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…

Tatsumi, like Robert Crumb and Harvey Pekar, largely set his own agenda, producing work which first and foremost interested himself, toiling for decades in relative isolation producing compelling, explicit, groundbreaking stories which were the foundation of today’s “literary” or alternative field of graphic narrative: a form which whilst mostly sidelined and marginalised for most of their working lives has at last emerged as the most important and widely accepted avenue of the comics medium.

These are stories no true lover of comics can afford to miss and this series of collections is a must-have for every adult reader’s bookshelf.

Art and stories © 19771, 1972, 2012 Yoshihiro Tatsumi. Introduction © 2008, 2012 Frederik L. Schodt. This edition © 2012 Drawn & Quarterly. All rights reserved.

By Yoshihiro Tatsumi, translated by Yuji Oniki (Drawn & Quarterly)
ISBN: 978-1-77046-077-5

Yoshihiro Tatsumi was born in Osaka in 1935 and grew up in the Tennōji Ku district. By the time World War II began Osaka was the undisputed industrial, commercial and almost-evangelically capitalist trading-centre of the nation: a place of great wealth, fervent modernisation and nigh-universal literacy as well as vast slums, massive unemployment and crushing poverty. Osaka was the first Japanese city to introduce a welfare program for relief for the poor, modelled after the British system that began in the early 20^th century…

One of 24 political wards, Tennōji Ku was named for the ancient Buddhist shrine Shitennō-ji (Temple of the Four Heavenly Kings) and growing up there, Tatsumi must have been constantly exposed to the glorious past, tantalising future and ever-present frustrated desperation of the poor suffering the daily iniquities of the class system.

Growing up during the nightly American bombing raids Tatsumi was obsessed by books and cartooning and devoted his life to the budding comics industry in all its forms.

His earliest successes were all-new, large graphic novels for the uniquely Japanese Kashihon or Manga lending shops (story-books purpose-made to be borrowed and returned for a pittance, rather than bought outright: cost and remuneration were necessarily low and turnover quite high) before moving into the fringes of manga magazine sales.

By 1969 Tatsumi ran a small publishing house for these tomes but the lending shops were dying out…

Since the mid fifties the author had been struggling with a new kind of manga, one that was more than simply childish entertainment, and in 1957 coined the term Gekiga or “Dramatic Pictures” to describe the adult, mature-themed, downbeat and decidedly bleak material he was crafting.

His restless pictorial questioning of affairs of the state and the state of affairs in the furiously reconstructing modern nation, as well as humanity’s breakdown in a disillusioned new Japan subjected to incessant and unceasingly building internal pressures didn’t find much popular success, but fellow manga artists slowing began to create their own serious narratives as the drive towards post-war modernism began to founder and more and more citizens began to question not just the methods but the goal itself…

After decades of virtual obscurity both at home and abroad Tatsumi was “discovered” by the West 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.

After an introduction from modern manga superstar Koji Suzuki (creator of The Ring, Dark Water, Birthday and other shocking blockbusters) this second collection gathers longer works from the year 1970 and begins with the deeply disturbing ‘Occupied’ as a lonely and unsuccessful creator of children’s comics experiences digestive troubles. Forced to use public toilets he discovers a different sort of drawing and is inexorably drawn into a world where the cubicles offer an utterly different kind of relief…

‘Abandon the Old in Tokyo’ finds diligent Kenichi slowly crumbling under the pressure of his ailing intolerant mother’s constant carping demands. It’s no help that his girlfriend wants to see “his” place and eventually the weary prevaricator does something about the situation…

‘The Washer’ spends his life cleaning windows and watching powerful businessmen force themselves on young office secretaries. Things turn decidedly difficult however when the girl behind the gleaming glass is his own daughter, whilst a down-trodden factory worker’s grim, grey life only comes alive when he returns home to his hovel and his ‘Beloved Monkey’. Tragically it’s all spoiled when he lets a girl into his heart…

When old Mr. Yamanuki‘s company goes under, he cannot accept his life’s work is done and some debts have to remain ‘Unpaid’. Why and how then, does he derive such comfort and solace from that thing he does with the Collie at the Dog Appreciation Club?

‘The Hole’ sees a hiker taken prisoner by a woman hideously deformed during botched cosmetic surgery, but when the man’s divorced wife comes to his rescue, his smug arrogance seals his own fate, after which ‘Forked Road’ examines two childhood friends and the different paths their first experiences of sex made for them…

The eerily intimate episodes end with ‘Eel’ as a young sewer-cleaner sees too many parallels between the fish caught in the rake and bucket and his own existence. Some days having a disgusting, dead-end job and a callous bar-girl wife who’s delighted when she miscarries your baby doesn’t seem that different to swimming the wrong way in rubbish and excrement until you die…

Stories of sexual frustration, human obsolescence, dislocation, impotence, loneliness, poverty or the futile and vainglorious acts of rekindled pride are again depicted through rat-run mazes populated by a succession of hookers, powerless men, disaffected women, ineffectual lovers and grasping dependents and via recurring motifs of illness, retirement, injury and inadequacy in ramshackle dwellings, grimy streets, tawdry bars and sewers obstructed by things of no further value: pots, pans, people…

Concluding with another extensive ‘Q & A with Yoshihiro Tatsumi’ this second breathtaking compendium further illustrates why no serious devotee of graphic narratives can afford to miss the masterful literary skill of one of the world’s great masters of the comic arts.

Art and stories © 1970, 2012 Yoshihiro Tatsumi. Introduction © 2009, 2012 Koji Suzuki. This edition © 2012 Drawn & Quarterly. All rights reserved.

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 Dōjinshi 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.