Yoshiharu Tsuge – författare

A manga icon s most perplexing, transgressive, and astounding work of horror and surrealism. By the mid-1970s, Tsuge Yoshiharu was a man changed by circumstance something his work from 1975 to 1981 boldly reveals. After settling into married life with fellow artist Fujiwara Maki (author of Eisner-winning My Picture Diary), Tsuge would return to the narrative formulas that he knew best: tall tales exchanged between fellow travelers, macabre parables tinged with magical realism, and the enduring comedy of the domestic everyday in a Japan rebuilding itself in the decades following the Second World War. And yet the confusion and mental illness simmering beneath the surface of his more surreal works come to a rolling boil, reaching an unsettling and horrific crescendo in a series of nightmarish delusions. He Rolled Me Up Like A Grilled Squid captures a mid-career author taking stock of his anxieties and suspicions while connecting the dots between his seemingly monotonous present and his complicated past. Confrontations between both periods in his life are explored through the lens of his deteriorating mental state, expressed directly through experiments with different visual styles collected in this volume. Translated by prolific art and comics historian Ryan Holmberg, He Rolled Me Up Like A Grilled Squid is a remarkable catalog of creative experiments alongside a veteran storyteller s most compelling observations about people at their most human.

An alt-manga legend strikes out on his own, creating some of his most revealing and personal works. Oba Electroplating Factory is a startlingly bleak but nonetheless captivating portrait of mid-century Japan in its most unglamorous iteration. Glimpses of the artist reflecting upon his life, his work, and his contemporaries pepper the narrative landscape: a wife teases her husband about a former fling on a trip to the hot springs, a young cartoonist is aghast at the cavalier conduct of his supposed betters, and imperfect men must grapple with the discomfort of their own honesty. Tsuge s stories are studies in staging nature, working to evoke stillness and movement in such a way that renders his chosen setting a character all on its own. Following the breakthrough success of Nejishiki, Yoshiharu Tsuge forges a path for autofiction in manga and changes the cultural landscape of comics forever. Some of his most revealing and personal works were published between 1973 to 1974. As much as it is a testament to the author s predilection for addressing sensitive and mature themes in response to his culture, this volume also collects works from the only period in which Tsuge tries his hand at writing for a mainstream audience in earnest. This fourth volume in the complete works of a legendary manga-ka is an indispensable addition to the literary comics canon and shining example of world literature at its most human.

Nejishiki unveils the most iconic scenes from Yoshiharu Tsuge s highly respected body of work alongside his most beloved stories. A cornerstone of Japan s legendary 1960s counterculture that galvanized avant-garde manga and comics criticism, the title story follows an injured young man as he wanders through a village of strangers in search of emotional and physical release. Other stories in this collection follow a series of weary travelers who while away sultry nights and face menacing doppelgangers. Even banal activities like afternoon strolls uncover unsavory impulses. The emotionally and erotically charged imagery collected in this third volume remains as shocking and vivid today as it did upon its debut fifty years ago. Tsuge s stories push boundaries, abruptly crossing the threshold of conventional storytelling. Unassuming protagonists venture further into eerie symbolism against a shadowy, perceptibly dreamlike landscape easily mistaken for the real world. The angst that pervades postwar Japanese society threatens to devour his characters and their pastoral sensibilities as each protagonist s wanderlust turns surreal.