Yoshihiro Tatsumi – författare

The award-winning memoir translated by Taro Nettleton with a new design by Adrian Tomine. In this memoir that won two Eisner Awards, the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize, a prize at the Festival de la BD d'Angouleme, and was adapted into a feature film that debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, legendary manga-ka Yoshihiro Tatsumi uses his life long obsession with comics as a framework to tell his life story incisively and unflinchingly. He deftly weaves a complex story that encompasses Japanese culture and history, family dynamics, first love, the intricacies of the manga industry, and most importantly, what it means to be an artist. Alternately humorous, enlightening, and haunting, A Drifting Life is the masterful summation of a fascinating life and a historic career. Over sixty years ago, Yoshihiro Tatsumi expanded the horizons of comics storytelling by using the visual language of manga to tell gritty, dark, literary stories about the private lives of everyday people, a genre he coined 'gekiga' in order to differentiate his comics from mainstream manga. His comics appeared in the legendary Japanese comics magazine GARO, and he became the first of his GARO peers to have his work published in English in the graphic novel era. A Drifting Life is Tatsumi s most ambitious, personal, and heart-felt work and considered to be one of the defining autobiographical works of the comics medium.

From the mangaka who told his life story in A Drifting Life, and gave you Abandon the Old in Tokyo and The Push Man and Other Stories, comes this collection of gekiga of the 1970s which have never before been translated into English. Personally selected for publication exclusively by Landmark Books by Tatsumi, the stories strip away the gloss of the Japanese Economic Miracle to reveal the stresses, desires and angst of the millions of young people who flocked to the cities where life was not what it was promised to be.Compared to Tatsumi's earlier stories, this collection paints a much more pessimistic world. The stories run on a different beat. The banality of modern life and its values bleed through.Yoshihiro Tatsumi plumbs the depths of the lost Japanese youth of the 1970s. Today, 'youth' of every age group appreciates Yoshihiro Tatsumi. They are attracted to him because they connect with the struggles and the darkness of modern life which he portrays.

Abandon the Old in Tokyo continues to delve into the urban underbelly of 1960s Tokyo, exposing not only the seedy dealings of the Japanese everyman but Yoshihiro Tatsumi's maturation as a storyteller. Many of the stories deal with the economic hardships of the time and the strained relationships between men and women, but do so by means of dark allegorical twists and turns. A young sewer cleaner's girlfriend has a miscarriage and leaves him when he proves incapable of finding higher-paying work. When a factory worker loses his hand on the job, the parallels between him and his pet monkey prove startling and significant.